Deadlock (45 page)

Hutch froze.

“Drop the bow,” Page said. “You're fast with it, but not faster than my trigger finger.”

He watched the bow and arrow fall out of Hutch's hand. They clattered on the tile steps and tumbled down. Hutch turned to face him. He said, “Listen, it doesn't have to end this way. I know you want me off your back.”

Page said, “Oh, I want much more than that, now.” He began backing away from the cantina, through the resort. “Join me, won't you? I just want to get my . . .” He leaned over to a table where he had balanced his cigar on the edge. He puffed on it, getting a heady billow of smoke. He plucked it from between his lips and held it up. “This is how sure I was I had you. My victory smoke.”

Page's finger stiffened over his machine gun's trigger as Hutch descended the stairs. If Hutch so much as blinked wrong, he'd end it here and now. His muscles and joints were beginning to feel the day's exertions. He had better things to do than continue chasing this guy.

Hutch walked closer. He said, “You're not going to tell me how smart you are before shooting me, are you? I've seen that movie.”

Page nodded. He pulled in more smoke, blew it out. “Me too. I just want to give you one chance, a very
brief
chance, to save your children.”

Hutch's eyes narrowed.

“There are many ways to win a game,” Page said. “I'll let you choose how I win. I shoot you, then run through the building, lobbing hand grenades into the places I can't see. Just for good measure, I'll chain the doors and set the place on fire before I leave. Or . . .”

Another puff—this thing was
fantastic
, despite having not been toasted correctly.

“Or you call everybody out. I shoot only you and the woman.”

Hutch scowled at him skeptically. “Not the kids?”

“Call me gracious. Besides, thanks to you, I'm short a few soldiers. From what I've seen, these kids would fit right into my program. Just call them, Hutch. I know you will. Same way I knew where you would be heading.” He shook his head. “Predictable.” He smiled and drew in a big breath of smoke.

The shot rang out behind him. His cigar tilted out of his fingers. Hutch was moving for his bow.

Page pulled the trigger—or tried to. His hand wasn't working. The gun slipped loose and fell to the floor. He turned to see the woman, not ten feet away, holding a pistol in her shaking hands. He dropped to his knees, keeping his body upright; at least he could do that. Tasted something. Cedar, coffee, blood. He felt the air escaping from his lungs. He looked down to see blood oozing from a hole in his shirt. It bubbled, and smoke came out. He watched it form a perfect ring and drift away. He glared at it until all the color was gone from his vision.

He heard the woman say, “Did you predict that?”

Everything . . . smoky . . . gray . . . black . . .

Page fell backward. His feet and lower legs were tucked under him. He appeared to be staring at the smoke drifting from his nose, mouth, and incredibly, from the hole in his chest Laura had made.

“I thought you were going to just push the gun into his back, tell him to drop it,” Hutch said.

“Did you hear what he wanted to do with our children?” she said. She dropped the pistol. “Do you think we would have ever been rid of him? He would have found a way . . .” She dropped the gun and lowered her face into her palms.

Hutch pulled off his jacket. He unstrapped the ballistic vest he had retrieved from the floor beside the lagoon. Wearing it had made walking into Page's ambush a little less frightening, but only a little. He let it drop away. He stepped forward and kicked Page's gun over the edge, where it splashed into the lagoon below. He patted down the body, finding a big knife and a pistol in an ankle holster. These went into the water as well. He stepped over Page and went to Laura. He wrapped her in his arms. “Shhh.”

Logan's face appeared from around the stonelike structure that was Black Bart's Hideaway. Hutch gave him a thumbs-up. He came running out, Macie and Dillon right on his heels.

“Look,” he said, turning Laura to see the children coming around the lagoon. “You did it for them.”

She let out a shaky laugh, and knelt to receive their hugs.

SEVENTY-FOUR

TWO WEEKS LATER

“Can you live with having killed a man?” Hutch asked.

He was standing next to a bench, one foot propped up on it. Laura sat on the bench. They watched Logan, Macie, and Dillon playing in a park. Logan searched a wooden fort, looking for Dillon, who had slipped away and was watching from the branches of a nearby tree. Hutch marveled at how the boy's stillness and positioning made him nearly invisible, even in a defoliated cottonwood. Macie had watched Dillon ascend, and now she stood at the top of the fort's big green slide, waving at him. Whenever she sensed Logan turning her way, she stopped and whistled a lighthearted tune.

The air was nippy, but the sun was bright. The small park adjoined St. Anthony's Hospital, and every so often Hutch would look over at an ambulance waiting in a driveway.

Laura squinted up at him. She said, “I guess most people struggle with having to take a life.” She tilted her face toward the sun, mulling over his question. “I'm not most people.”

He touched a scab on his left eyebrow. His fingers moved up a bit to another scab on his forehead. One of the lacerations he had sustained in Jim's Mustang. The other in the taxi when the Honda had blown up. He didn't know which was which. He resisted the temptation to scratch the healing bullet wound on his calf. For a few days after the “Casa Bonita Shoot-out,” as the media called it, he'd often found himself quietly enumerating his many injuries. Macie had noticed and would start counting with him.

Logan would show the burns from the ropes around his wrists, the spot on his head where the soldier had yanked out a clump of hair, and the bruise on his cheek where he'd been punched.

Laura remained quiet about the bullet-grazed shoulder and her various bangs and cuts. Dillon and Macie had emerged unscathed, though Macie always pointed to the scraped knee she'd suffered crawling under the car at the RapidPark lot.

Hutch eyed Laura now. She was smiling up at him. He said, “No regrets then?”

“About shooting him?” she said. “When I was sneaking up behind him, I thought about how we would all be dead if he'd had his way. I thought of poor Logan, kidnapped, terrified. I even thought of Dr. Nichols's family, though I didn't know them.”

Hutch said, “Never mind that he had me in his machine gun's sights and was ready to pull the trigger.”

She waved her hand dismissively and tossed her head back. She said, “I know somewhere inside I should hurt for having taken a human life.” She shook her head. “But I don't.” She pulled in a breath. Fog, like smoke, billowed out of her nose. “I do have nightmares, though.”

Hutch's eyes widened. “About shooting him?”

“About
not
shooting him. I play the nice girl and say, ‘Put it down or I'll shoot.' He ends up killing both of us and turns the kids into perfect little killing machines.”

Hutch glanced over at the children. He said, “You think it's that easy, turning good people bad?”

“I think that's what he was doing,” she said. “We make choices, sure, but who can withstand the mind games Page was getting into?”

“Julian.” Hutch shook his head at the thought of the boy. “That kid wallowed in blackness, but he stayed pure. He did what was right. More than once.”

“Outis had just started on him,” Laura said.

“You're a nihilist,” Hutch said.

“Me? No, I love life. That's why I don't mind defending it.” She looked over at the playground. “Especially when it's theirs.”

Hutch was glad she included Macie and Logan in the Don't-Mess-with-Mama-Bear deal. He'd felt protective of Dillon since he'd first met him, and it seemed only right that it had come full circle. He straightened and crossed his arms over his chest. He watched the kids play, especially the little brown-haired kid who'd just leaped ten feet to the ground.

“What about Dillon?” he said. “He shot that soldier.”

“He's more together about it than I am,” Laura said. She squinted up at him. She blocked the sun with her hand. “Remember, he'd seen people like that murder his dad. He wasn't about to let it happen to his mom. He's a tough kid.”

She watched him watching them. She said, “What is it?”

He shook his head.

“No, what?” She put her hand on his knee.

“Maybe I'm a slow learner. . . .” He smiled and took her hand in his. “But I want to do it right this time. I want to be in their lives while they want me to be, you know?”

He saw that she was right with him. Slowly he said, “I feel that way about you and Dillon too. I can't believe you're going back, now that your depositions are finished.”

He felt his face flush under her gaze. He looked away.

“What are you saying, Hutch?”

He looked up at the sky, back to her. “Maybe you could . . . find a reason to stay?”

“Maybe I could.”

He smiled. “Hey,” he said, gesturing with his head.

An attendant had pushed a wheelchair through a back door and was rolling it toward the ambulance. A uniformed police officer and a man in a suit strolled alongside. Sitting in the chair, his leg in a cast straight in front of him, Michael spotted them. His hand rose a few inches off his lap. He gave a tentative wave.

“Come on,” Hutch said. As they walked, Laura clasped her hand around his.

The cop saw them coming and nodded. He'd been stationed outside Michael's room most of the times they'd come to visit. He spoke to the other man, who nodded.

They reached Michael at the rear of the ambulance. The attendant opened the doors.

Hutch squeezed Michael's shoulder. “How's it feel, going home?”

Michael nodded. “They haven't set a venue for the trials yet, so they figured I can be in a cage near my parents as well as here.” He hitched a thumb at the man in the suit. “I have my own U.S. marshal.”

The guy tilted his head. Sunglasses prevented Hutch from seeing his eyes.

Laura crouched beside the wheelchair. She touched Michael's hair. “I hear your dad's going to be okay.”

That brought a smile to Michael's face. “Yeah, they finally got the slug out of his chest. This close to his heart.” He held up his thumb and forefinger, as though holding a pellet between them.

“He's going to be proud of you,” Hutch said, “breaking away from Outis like you did. Turning state's evidence.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Lot of good it will do, a conglomerate that big.”

“They've already had all of their licenses and contracts frozen,” Hutch said. “And the investigation's going to make it worse for them, not better.”

Michael lowered his head. “Too bad he's dead. Page, I mean. I would have liked to strap a helmet on his head and show him a thing or two.”

Laura said, “I think what you have in mind is pretty close to what's happening to him.”

“Let's go,” the marshal said. He waved his hand at the attendant, who began folding parts of the wheelchair so Michael could stand.

“Michael,” Hutch said. “I won't forget that you helped save Logan. I promised to help you any way I could, and I meant it. I'll be in touch, okay?”

Michael wrinkled his nose. “I'm pretty messed up,” he said.

“Who isn't?” Hutch said.

They watched him shift into the ambulance. The marshal joined him, and the vehicle pulled away. The cop strolled back toward the hospital.

Hutch and Laura returned to the park. The kids saw them and came running. The sun glinted off Logan's braces—his grillz. It lifted Hutch's heart to see the boy smiling.

They barreled into him, knocking him to the grass. All three of them began tickling him. His hands weren't fast enough to stop them from pushing their little fingers into his sides, neck, underarms.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “How about dinner and a movie?”

A chorus of whoops and cheers.

“First one to the car gets to pick the restaurant; second one, the movie. Go!”

Dillon and Macie scrambled to their feet. Laura laughed and followed.

Logan lay on Hutch's chest, his arm propping up his head.

“You're going to let them pick our food and entertainment?” Hutch said.

The boy nodded. “How long is this going to last?” he said.

“What?”

“You being cool. Spending time with us.”

“I hope a long, long time,” Hutch said. “I have to work, of course. But I'll try to keep it pretty much nine-to-five, okay?”

“No obsessions?”

Hutch mussed his hair. “You've been talking to Laura.” He smiled.

“My only obsessions will be the people I love.”

“No one's going to replace Brendan Page?”

Hutch turned to gaze at Logan from the corner of his eye. He squinted.

“Brendan
who
?”