The Bullet (17 page)

We sat glaring at each other.

Martin flicked his gaze back and forth between us. A good thirty seconds passed. Then, under his breath, he muttered, “Nice Rosco Coltrane reference.”

“Butt out,” Tony growled.

“Sure. Seriously, though. Skillfully done.” Martin leaned back, drummed his fingers on a side table, whistling softly. I hadn't heard the tune in a long time, “Good Ol' Boys.”

It took another half minute, but Tony cracked. A smile began to play around his lips. “Enos,” he whispered, in what sounded like an outrageous Southern accent. “Enos?”

Martin's shoulders began to shake.

Tony, warming up now: “This is your superior officer, Sheriff Ros-
cohhhhhhh
P. Coltrane . . .”

Dad studied his sons in bewilderment. “What the hell are they talking about?”

“The Dukes of Hazzard,”
I ventured. “That TV show they used to love. Wasn't Roscoe the sidekick to, what's his name, Boss Hogg?”

“Breaker One, Breaker One,” Martin drawled. “I may be crazy, but I ain't dumb!”

I giggled. I couldn't help it. Even Dad started to smile. The detective looked as if he wanted to flee.

I had never loved my brothers so much in my life.

Thirty

A
decision was made that I should pack a bag and sleep at my parents' house tonight. I didn't resist. No way was I sleeping alone behind that broken bedroom door. My parents had a burglar alarm with motion detectors, and the beagle barked if a leaf so much as rustled in the yard. I would be safe.

Dad waited while I threw a toothbrush, makeup, and a change of clothes in a bag, then drove me up to Cleveland Park. Mom was standing on the front step. She folded me in her arms, kissed my hair, whispering, over and over,
Sweet baby girl
. She insisted that I follow her into the kitchen and take some soup. It was only nine in the morning, but I submitted. Hot lentil with lamb and cinnamon. Delicious.

I excused myself and climbed to my old room on the top floor. I stripped and stood beneath a scalding shower, until my skin bloomed pink and my fingertips shriveled white and wrinkly. The ache in my wrist eased a little. The adrenaline that had carried me these last several hours was depleted. I needed sleep.

Before I drew the curtains, I pulled out my phone and dialed Will. It went straight to voice mail. He might be with a patient, I mused. Or he might still be angry from our argument last night. Or punishing me for never answering my own phone.

The phone beeped, indicating it was recording.

“Hi. Call me.” I couldn't think what else to say, couldn't think where to begin an accounting of what had happened in the hours since we'd parted.

I fanned my still-dripping hair across the pillow, drew up the covers, and sank into dreamless sleep.

•   •   •

WHEN I WOKE,
the clock read four o'clock.

My phone showed three messages. The first was from Madame Aubuchon, a stiffly formal message inquiring as to my health and adding that she had changed her mind, she wanted her soup pot back. Next came messages from Beasley and from the surgeon Marshall Gellert. These were both short, stating only their names and asking me to call back at my earliest convenience.

I called Beasley first. Washington Metropolitan Police had already been in touch and filled him in on last night's drama, but he made me retell what had happened, in painful detail.

“I surely am sorry you had to go through that,” he said after I finished. “You're the last person on earth I would wish it on. And I'm sorry to make you relive it again right now. But I needed to hear the details firsthand from you, make sure nothing important got left out.”

“Of course.”

“I don't know—I'm being honest with you—I don't know whether what happened last night has anything to do with what happened back in '79. But say somebody does want to get his hands on that bullet. Coming after you, when you were home alone at night, would make sense.”

I shivered.

“Tonight you're staying with your parents, correct? They'll be with you the whole time? You're not going out?”

I glanced at my reflection in the mirror on the bedroom wall. My hair had dried in a weird cowlick while I slept, my eyes were ringed by dark circles, and I was wearing saggy sweatpants and a Duke basketball
T-shirt filched from an ex-boyfriend. “If you could see me, you'd know I'm not fit to be seen in public.”

“Good. If they haven't been already, local police will be in touch. They're arranging a cruiser to drive by your house throughout the night. But they can't watch you every second, so it's best if you stay inside and keep people around you.”

“You really think I'm in danger, then.”

“I think I would never forgive myself if anything else were to happen to you.” Beasley was quiet for a moment. “In better news, I can tell you that last night has lit a fire under people here. I've been pushing all week for your family's files. Kept getting told they couldn't find them. Then, lunchtime today? Not three hours after Washington MPD got on the horn asking about you? Two big, fat boxes appear on my desk. They must have finally sent somebody with a brain out to off-site storage.”

“What's in the boxes?”

“Stuff. I'm going through it. That's about all I can say at the moment.”

“Because you're not allowed to say or because you need time to—”

Beasley acted as if he hadn't heard me. “Your formal interview. I'd prefer to do it in person. But in the interest of time, let me see if I can schedule a slot in one of Washington MPD's interview rooms. We'll send a car for you.”

“Can't we just do it by phone?”

“No, we need it videotaped. Let's aim for first thing tomorrow.”

I chewed my lip, weighed what to say next, decided what the hell. “My brother wants to buy me a gun. For self-defense.”

“You know how to shoot?”

“No.” I didn't add that I've never handled a firearm in my life. “I'd have to get some instruction.”

Beasley made a doubtful noise. “You're talking a handgun, I assume. Takes a while to get comfortable with one, feel like you know what you're doing. My advice, my official advice, would be to leave the guns to the cops. Local police will do fine looking out for your security.”

“Hmm. You said that's your official advice. What about unofficially?”

He hesitated, then sighed. “Off the record . . . speaking as a ­father . . . I'd say something small, maybe a nine-millimeter Baby Glock, might not be a terrible idea.”

•   •   •

“I HEAR YOU'RE
agitating to move up the surgery by a few days.”

“Am I? Where did you hear that?”

Marshall Gellert and I had played phone tag the better part of the afternoon. He finally caught me as I was setting my mother's table for dinner.

“Oh,” he said, taken aback. “I thought—I assumed—I got a call at lunchtime from a police detective down in Georgia. Saying that bullet in your neck is relevant to an investigation, and they want to examine it sooner rather than later. He wouldn't give me details, but I assume that isn't news to you? I thought you must know he was calling.”

“I didn't, but I'd welcome getting the surgery over with.” So Beamer Beasley wasn't messing around. “When, then?”

“I'm closing in on next Monday. Instead of next Wednesday. Would that fit your schedule?”

What schedule? My current “schedule” consisted of hiding out at my parents' house, being force-fed lamb-and-lentil stew, and being ignored by my boyfriend. If that was what you could call Will Zartman.

“As it happens,” Gellert continued, “bumping it up is preferable from a medical point of view as well. Every day might be critical if the foreign object, meaning the bullet, really is shifting. Monday's the earliest I can get the hospital facilities booked at Sibley. And the cameraman is on board for then, too.”

“Did you say the
cameraman
?”

“Ah.” Gellert had the decency to sound embarrassed. “I did explain already, it's quite unusual that someone with your specific injury would survive—nay, thrive—into adulthood. A few of my peers started blog
ging about you last week, when the
Journal-Constitution
article went live. You haven't seen the posts?”

No, I had not.

“Everyone's hoping you'll consent to having the operation filmed. For teaching purposes. You're something of a celebrity in neurology circles.”

“I'm ‘something of a celebrity in neurology circles.' ” Into my head popped an unpleasant image, a circle of erasable-pen-wielding geeks, thick spectacles sliding down slickly pimpled noses, salivating to watch my neck being sliced open.

“For what it's worth, Dr. Zartman is in agreement. Both that we should film the surgery, and that we should proceed as soon as possible.”

My breath caught. “When did you speak with Dr. Zartman?”

“This morning. We conferred before I called you.”

So Will was alive and well and conferring about my surgical options. Just not taking my calls.

“I'll have my nurse follow up with you. She can explain the pre-op protocol. In a nutshell, we can give you Vicodin if you're in pain. But no food, no Advil, no other anti-inflammatories after six p.m. on Sunday. I'm writing you a prescription right now.”

“Thanks. And, um, did you ever find my chart? Did they find that guy who broke in?”

“Negative. Don't worry, we've reconstructed your chart. Everything's in order. And I can't figure out what that intruder business was all about. Guy didn't seem to take a damn thing.”

For several minutes after we hung up I sat still, imagining those impossibly blue eyes boring down on the clean, white prescription pad. Then his hands, the hyperactive fingers, darting across the paper, twirling, weaving like spiders. A lot about my present circumstances frightened me. But for some reason I felt safe in those hands.

Thirty-one

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2013

C
alling me the worst shot ever to pull a trigger at the Chantilly Rifle and Revolver Range is an exaggeration, but I was probably the worst shot they'd seen in a very long time.

The gun range was half an hour's drive straight west. You took the Key Bridge across the Potomac River into northern Virginia, got on I-66, and kept going. The building was ugly, its low-slung, yellow stucco facade set across a busy road from a strip mall. Plastic letters stuck to the glass doors spelled out
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
and
NO LOADED GUNS!
Inside it was clean and quiet. Guns of every shape and size were laid out in glass display cases. On the walls hung framed posters. One showed a middle-aged man aiming a pistol at the camera, beneath an invitation:
Stop by for a few SHOTS after work—bring your friends along for a different kind of happy hour!
Or, my personal favorite:
Anger management issues? Relationship problems? Try our therapeutic solution.
This was accompanied by a photo of a woman firing at a human silhouette. She had ignored the red target marked on the chest, but fifteen bullet holes were pierced clean through the crotch.

Learning to shoot was surprisingly cheap. Ten dollars per person, per lane, per hour. Paper targets cost a dollar, same again to rent the mandatory ear and eye protection. You could try out as many handguns as you wanted for $10. Hell, you could rent an AK-47 for $19 for the entire day.

Tony marched up to the counter, explained that I was a beginner and that I wanted to learn to use a handgun.

“Never handled firearms before?” asked the woman. A name tag identified her as Irene. Her skin was bad and her black hair hung in an unflattering bowl cut, but—from what I could see of her jeans behind the counter—she had a fantastic figure.

“Never,” I confirmed.

“You looking for a revolver or a semiautomatic?”

“What's the difference?”

She and Tony exchanged glances. “Why don't you try 'em both out, see what you like. Personally, I love me a revolver. Just as accurate, won't jam on you.” She took out a gun, spun it open to demonstrate it wasn't loaded, laid it on the counter. “Is this for carrying in your purse or keeping in your nightstand? Picking the right gun's all about trade-offs.”

I glanced down at my purse, a black Chanel clutch that I'd bought in Paris years ago. It had taken months to pay it off on my credit card, and it was barely big enough to fit my car keys and a lipstick. “Nightstand, I guess.”

“So you could go with a bigger gun. Less kickback.”

“Wouldn't a bigger gun have more kickback?”

“I knew you'd ask that.” She smiled sweetly. “Beginners always do. But think about it. You fire the same bullet from a big gun and a small one, the bigger one's gonna absorb more of the recoil. Basic physics. Let me get you two set up. I'm not busy, it's quiet as a church in here today.”

Irene strung a target halfway down the firing range. She showed me how to hold a gun, how to load it, how to aim. Easy. The target had a blue bull's-eye and a helpful Shooter Tutor. If your shots were going wide to the left, it told you to adjust your trigger finger. If they all went low, you were anticipating recoil. And so on. But the only thing consistent about my performance was that every shot missed, by a mile.

After my first ten attempts, Irene reeled in the target to a mere five yards away. “Doesn't need to be too far, don't worry. Let's be real, you
want a gun for personal protection, you're not gonna be shooting the guy from twenty-five yards, are you?”

The trouble may have been my utter lack of athletic ability, I don't deny it. I had demonstrated lamentable hand-eye coordination convincingly and humiliatingly in year after year of childhood sports events. But
you
try shooting left-handed when you're not. My dominant right hand dangled in its brace. At the start I had tried to wrap it around my left, for stability, but the kickback hurt too much, no matter which model gun we tried.

After half an hour, all three of us could tell it was a lost cause. I paid and tipped Irene. She handed over my Shooter Tutor as a souvenir.

In the parking lot, I crumpled it into a ball. “Well, that was embarrassing.”

“You did fine,” Tony said. “It's my fault. I should have taken into account how hard it would be to shoot with one arm in a brace.”

“You looked ready to disown me as your sister in there.”

“Only when you were asking genuinely idiotic questions, like whether there's a difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic.”

“Well, is there?”

“For chrissake.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” I said nastily, “you can disown me anytime you like. Since we're not actually related.”

He spun around. His face was purple. “Don't say that again. Ever.”

I jerked open the car door, threw myself inside, and slammed it shut. He stood frozen in the parking lot, watching me through the window the way you would watch a rabid possum.

We drove home in silence, Tony at the wheel, staring grimly out the windshield.

As we crossed the Key Bridge into Georgetown, I stretched my left hand to rest on his shoulder. He did not swat it away. That's as close to saying sorry as Tony and I tended to get.

•   •   •

AT LUNCHTIME BEAMER
Beasley telephoned. Again.

I was surprised to hear from him so soon. The formal interview had gone fine this morning. An unmarked police car had delivered me to and from the session. Both Beasley and Gerry Fleeman, the head of the Cold Case Squad, were on the video linkup asking questions; I'd thought I'd answered them satisfactorily.

But apparently, not until afterward did Beasley finish digging through the boxes. He had found evidence bullets. Several, fired from two different guns. They would have something to compare my bullet with after all.

“I thought you didn't have sample bullets,” I said, shocked. “The one that hit Boone, I thought the killer gouged it out of the doorframe—”

“These aren't from your crime scene. These are bullets collected as a precaution, for the purpose of comparison.”

“I don't follow.”

“Easiest way to match a bullet isn't against the gun that fired it. It's against another bullet. You compare like to like. You know what rifling is? It's the spiral grooves, on the inside of a gun barrel. Every rifle, every handgun, has rifling almost as unique as a fingerprint. Even ones made in the same batch, in the same factory. And the differences get more pronounced over time, as the gun gets cleaned and fired. So when you fire a gun, it leaves its signature on the projectile. We're talking tiny markings. Microscopic. But a good lab tech can spot them. With homicide cases, you always fire sample shots from a weapon recovered from a crime scene.”

I was still struggling to follow this. “The point remains that you didn't find a gun in my parents' house. Or a bullet.”

“True. We did have suspects, though. Remember? I told you about three separate men who we brought in for questioning, for one reason or another. Two of them owned guns. Nothing illegal about that. We didn't have cause to seize the firearms. But we did fire test bullets from them, into ballistic gelatin. Just in case. Just in case another bullet ever came along to match.”

I sucked in my breath. “You've been hoping all this time to get your hands on the bullet in my neck.”

“That's an ugly way of putting it.”

“But—but why didn't you tell me about the other bullets before?”

“I didn't know. I've worked homicide on and off for forty years. We're talking hundreds, maybe a thousand murders. Not making excuses, but that's a lot of evidence to keep straight in your head. And like I told you, back in '79 we were getting slammed by a new murder nearly every day here in Atlanta.” Beasley swallowed. “I was praying we'd had the sense to collect evidence bullets during your mama and daddy's investigation, but I wasn't sure. Couldn't remember. Nothing in the paperwork that I had kept indicated one way or the other.”

I sighed. “I suppose it's a miracle they weren't thrown away. That you were able to lay hands on them after so much time.”

“If you could see what passes for a filing system down here, you'd know that that's the truth.” He harrumphed. “Meanwhile, I gather your operation's been bumped up to Monday.”

“Yes, and I really wish you hadn't hassled my surgeon without checking with me first.”

“Ms. Cashion. It's my job to collect the evidence. And to do what I can to protect you. Trust me, it's in your interest to hurry up and get that bullet out. If I had my way, they'd be wheeling you into the OR this very minute.”