Gatekeeper (25 page)

Unsurprisingly, that last comment proved the most effective. Ralph smiled broadly and settled back into his mildewy armchair. "You could say that. Sure you don't want to fool around?"

Sam was feeling hot, her heart was beating more rapidly than made sense. The drug was kicking in and making her nervous, even slightly paranoid. But she also had energy to spare all of a sudden, and a strong desire to get things done.

She stood up. "Sorry, Ralph. Not in the mood. And I gotta get crackin'. You in or not?"

"I'm not in or out. I want to think about it."

She opened the door and looked back at him. "Okay, but the clock's ticking."

"I got a question for you," he said unexpectedly "What happens if Torres and the others don't take kindly to this?"

"They've been dealt with. I told you."

He gave her an enigmatic look, his face washed by the anemic light slipping in through the open door. "I like you. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste my time. But Jimmy Hollowell thought the same thing. Maybe you should ask yourself what happened to him." 

Chapter 18

Sammie kept trying to concentrate. She knew she'd heard something important while talking with Ralph Meiner, but she couldn't get hold of it. Instead, she was distracted by everything she saw passing by the windows of her car—lights, trees, endless rows of buildings. Although slightly blurred and a little stuttery, as in an old silent movie, it all took on an intensity, a beauty, and a mysterious serenity that she'd never before noticed. She found herself unexpectedly walking across a broad stretch of park, out of the car, not remembering having left it, totally attuned to the smells and sensations around her. She felt happy, even euphoric, tingling with sensuality. She dropped to her knees and and placed her hands on the ground, curling her fingers through the grass as if it were a lover's hair, grinding her teeth with the passion, before finally stretching out to feel the resonance of the earth against her body. In an unexpected shift, however, that same sensation led her back in time to when, as a child, she'd press her ear against a wall to distinguish the muted murmurings on the other side. Now, as back then, she was confronted with messages she couldn't decipher—except that this time it was a dilemma she found pleasantly seductive, even sexually stimulating.

By the time the effects of the Ecstasy wore off, she was tired, dirty, disoriented, and let down. It was late and dark, and it took her half an hour to locate her car at the park's edge. As for the overall experience, she was caught between worrying about any long-range consequences and the strong, lingering memory of having tasted something unimaginably appealing. She realized with a shock that had she been on the drug the night before, when standing so close to Manuel in the basement, she wouldn't have hesitated entering his embrace—a thought that troubled her beyond anything else.

* * *

"I was stupid."

Joe reached out and took Gail's hand in his own. "You were trying to make amends for something you shouldn't have felt guilty about in the first place. It still doesn't mean it wasn't worth the attempt."

"She took me for a patsy, and she was right. I played right into it."

"I'm glad you didn't shoot her boyfriend," he said, half as an aside.

Gail thought about that for a couple of beats. "I didn't even see him. All I saw was the other guy's face."

The other guy—to Joe's knowledge, she hadn't spoken her rapist's actual name in years.

"But you stayed in control. You did what you thought was right, realized you were being had, and you corrected the situation. Take that for what it is, Gail. You were not stupid."

She smiled thinly. They were in her living room, her more pawnable possessions still gathered near the double doors where either Debbie and Nelson had piled them up or the cops had placed them after cataloging and removing them from Nelson's rust bucket of a van.

"You say the nicest things," she said with irony. "I just wish it made me feel better."

"How's Laurie doing?" he asked.

"The same. I called Rachel a while ago." She'd been staring at the floor but now fixed him with a direct look. "Joe, I'm sorry I shut you out."

"You had a lot on your mind."

She shook her head. "I'm not sure I did. I think I had only one thing on my mind—to turn back the clock somehow. You know, the funny thing is that I never much liked Laurie. The little time I spent with her, all she did was complain about her life, which for my money was pampered and privileged and overindulged. And yet she whined about how bored she was and how terrible her parents were. I didn't know what she was doing in Brattleboro because I took no interest. I had a Post-it note on my computer—'call Laurie.' I saw it every day until I finally threw it out. Never called her once."

"You think anything would've changed if you had?" he asked gently.

He gave her credit. Someone else might have flared at that. Gail merely nodded acceptingly. "Probably not. I still wouldn't have liked her. And she never saw me as anything other than her mother's sister, anyhow."

"That may not be true," he countered. "She ever say that?"

"No," she admitted. "We never had that long a conversation."

Joe sensed they were past the worst of Gail's self-recrimination, certainly far enough for him to ask, "So why did you go after Debbie so hard, if Laurie meant that little?"

He'd overplayed his hand a bit. She looked at him sharply. "We didn't have much in common—but I still loved her. Love her."

But he didn't back down. The question floated between them.

"All right," she conceded. "I've been feeling out of sorts lately. Not sure that what I'm doing is what I really want out of life. It's thrown me off and made me doubt a lot of things—my job, my goals, even the two of us sometimes."

"Oh?"

Her hand remained in his but lay there unmoving. "Well, not that much, but still . . . Somehow, seeing Laurie in the hospital kind of pulled the rug out from under me. It wasn't just that I felt guilty. It was also the waste of it all—the stupidity. I mean, what the hell is going on? It's crazy. Laurie from the lap of luxury; Debbie from a home not fit for a dog. And they end up in the same jam. Nobody's doing enough, Joe. This war on drugs is a total crock."

He kept silent. They didn't discuss politics much. Too many potential land mines. But he had his own reasons for agreeing with what she'd said. Virtually every drug cop he knew only worked the assignment for the juice or the promotion potential connected to it—not because any of them believed it would actually make a difference. Being a drug cop was a feather in one's professional cap, a chance to get out of the spit and polish, and allowed for an occasional stretching of the rules unavailable elsewhere on the job.

He was considering how to respond when she continued on her own. "Of all the therapists and counselors I know who deal with this, there are some things they all seem to agree about. One is that this whole thing about kids getting into trouble because they're bored is baloney. Kids have more available to them than ever before. So, I have some serious doubts about skateboard parks and more rec centers being the solution. And another thing is that with a huge percentage of young substance abusers, there's always a parental figure who sets the course—teenage drinkers and druggers are the children of drinkers and druggers. The numbers are like a neon sign. Getting more cops on the road and building more prison cells is not going to do one damn thing about that."

Gunther nodded sympathetically. Again, he didn't disagree with her. He'd seen the stats himself. But he was as shy about cutting back on law enforcement as he was about turning the country into a military state. Joe tended to the middle ground on topics like this, which generally meant he kept his mouth shut—a habit he'd learned after being hammered from both sides in the past, and something he shared with a great many police officers.

"We need to go deeper," she was saying as if he were no longer in the room. "We need for our leaders to stop going for the headline and the next vote and take responsibility for the future—to start acting not for themselves, but for future generations. Right now they all talk that line, but they do jack shit to back it up—all this 'three strikes and you're out' crap isn't doing fuck-all."

He laughed gently at that. "It was a perfect election speech till that last line. Is that where you're headed?"

She blinked and focused on him. "It's crossed my mind," she admitted slowly.

"For what office?"

She got up and walked to the double doors to gaze out upon the moonlit lawn, its canvas of lush green grass and verdant trees rendered a deep blue-gray in the lunar glow. Without actually seeing them, she watched the feeble flickerings of a few lightning bugs pirouetting in the near-darkness.

"I haven't decided yet, but I think it's time."

He rolled that over in his mind. She was an ambitious woman, and one used to success. He had no doubt she'd follow through on this. What he was less sure about was how it might affect them. But he took a more roundabout way to broach the subject.

"Gail, this thing with Debbie. I mean, I understand what you just said. To be honest, it's kind of surprised me you haven't run for office before—except for the selectboard, of course—so you know I wish you the best. But I just want to make sure that what happened here"—he waved his hand toward the pile of possessions by the door—"isn't left behind in the process. This was serious. You were hit pretty hard. And it had nothing to do with the fate of your youth or the merits of 'three strikes and you're out.'"

She turned back from the night and faced him, her expression cast in shadow from the lamplight directly beside her. "I'm not so sure," she answered quietly, thoughtfully. "After I was raped, I didn't know what might happen to me. Intellectually, I knew what to expect, and I had you and my friends and my family backing me up. I had things to occupy my brain—going back to law school, becoming a prosecutor for a while, then the lobbying job. On the outside, I knew I was doing okay—even better than okay. The paranoia lessened, my uneasiness being around men."

She moved to a straight-back chair by the wall and sat on its edge, her hands in her lap. "But on the inside—deep inside—I still had that fear, you know? Not just that some man might try again, but a larger fear about what I had left to deal with. You know what they say about the foundation of the Brooklyn Bridge?"

"No," he answered.

"That while the original plan was to dig deep enough to put the footings on granite bedrock, deep underwater, they could never reach it, so they finally gave up. The whole bridge sits on sand—all these years later."

"And you're feeling the same way?"

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. "I don't know anymore. I did when I was dealing with Debbie and fighting with my sister—I wondered if I was losing it all over again. But in the end—when that little twerp started waving that knife around in front of me—I suddenly found a chance to test myself. And when I shoved that gun up his nose and knocked him on his ass, all I felt was determination. It was like a rebirth in a flash of light. I know you try to stick to the realities you can hold in your hand, Joe, but this was almost that real to me. There was an element to it of being given a second chance."

"Is that why you let Debbie go before you called 911?"

She rose and crossed over to sit next to him on the couch again. "I know. Probably still makes me look like a patsy to you."

"Maybe a little," he answered truthfully.

"But she wasn't the one responsible anymore. She may have even cooked up the idea to rip me off, but he was the ghost I needed to defeat. Involving her felt like missing the point. I'll deal with her later if I feel like it, or maybe he'll rat her out and I'll have to admit what I did, but that's a trade-off I can live with. Does any of that make sense?"

"Sure it does," he said supportively and kissed her. But in the back of his mind, he still wondered where it might lead.

* * *

Sam pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, still feeling the aftereffects of the drug Ralph Meiner had given her. More lucid now, she actually had no idea if it had been Ecstasy or something else, since her experience in that line had been purely academic until now. The real source of interest to her, however, was how enjoyable it had been. All her professional life, she'd viewed dopers as weak-minded losers, hell-bent on escaping reality. She was not disposed to change this view, of course, but she was surprised at herself for not having realized that part of a drug's attraction might be the pleasure it offered. It was a revelation so simple, she felt stupid even thinking of it.

The saving grace was that this discovery carried no yearning for a second exposure. Sam's nature was nothing if not self-denying, at least when it came to pleasant indulgences, and she was already looking back at this epiphany with a stern distaste.

She sat in the car and watched the house for a while, seeing shadows playing across the drawn shades as Manuel conducted business with Peter Bullis's crew of slowly escalating CIs and undercover cops, all posing as word-of-mouth, walk-in customers.

It was an odd moment for her, especially given what she'd just gone through. Sitting in this car, those memories still as fresh as the dried sweat on her skin, and thinking of Manuel doing business under a battery of hidden cameras, she felt a lack of definition—half crook and half cop—and couldn't help but link it to her life as a whole. Because for Sam, almost everything about her felt in limbo. She was no longer a kid, but still couldn't compare to an adult like her mentor, Joe Gunther. She was no longer a municipal cop, but part of an elite unit that still had to negotiate its way into almost every investigation. And she wasn't single, in the sense of being alone, but was involved with a maniac and now felt drawn to a criminal.

The whole package made her feel as if where she'd come from was long gone, and where she was headed was out of reach.