What Time Devours (10 page)

There you go,
he thought
. Think about the Cubs. Don’t think about the pain. Don’t think about your lungs
.
Imagine you’re at Wrigley . . .

He wasn’t so much breathing now as panting, thin, rasping inhales and exhales. Each one brought a shudder of pain through his chest. They were getting worse. He reached the door and peered into the darkened hallway, pushing the futile pistol ahead of him as if it might help.

There was no sign of his attacker.

That was the good news. The bad news was that it was another five yards into the kitchen and at least that to the phone, which was wall mounted. He could barely crawl. There was no way he would be able to stand and lift the receiver.

Zambrano’s on the mound,
he thought.
Derrek Lee is healthy and Mark DeRosa is on fire . . . There’s still hope
.

He thought of Kumi and the do-over he had started to build of their lives. After all those years apart, they might finally give it all another try, and nothing in the past decade had seemed as good as this one frail truth. He started to crawl. The pain was getting worse. He wouldn’t make it.

He managed a yard, then another. As he reached the door, his strength gave out and he crumpled hard where the wood met the cool tile of the kitchen floor. He was starting to shiver, and the desire to stay where he was, sleep it off like some nasty hangover, was back.

Just lie back,
he thought
. Unwind. A little sleep can’t do you any harm.

He climbed back into his crawl as if he were forcing his way through a hundred push-ups. His shoulder shrieked and his arm buckled, but he forced it to stay steady. There wasn’t much light coming in from the window—the window where he had seen the dead face of Daniella Blackstone imploring him to let her in—but he was sure the skin of his hands was turning blue.

Not good
, he thought.

And the phone was still a thousand miles away, floating beyond any possible reach. His eyes were watering, though whether that was physical or emotional, he couldn’t say. He lurched another couple of feet and then collapsed at the foot of the fridge. He rolled painfully onto his back, sucking in the air, feeling the room beginning to swim.

Only another moment or two now,
he thought.

Unconsciousness was coming to greet him like a smothering embrace. He beat it back with his mind, as if swatting away crows, and squinted down the side of the fridge.

There was a broom, one of those old-fashioned long-handled affairs with a head of plaited grass, just like the one his parents had had.

He reached for it, first with his imagination, then with his left hand. He couldn’t reach, and had to shift inch by inch, hunching his back up and to the right like a dying sidewinder. He stretched out his hand again, but he was still inches short.

He squirmed and stretched again, and this time his splayed fingers caught the coarse bristles of the broom and brought it crashing down on top of him. The handle hit the tile like the popping of a champagne cork.

Bracing the tip of the handle with his lifeless right hand, he used his left to poke the brush head up to the counter. He shoved it hard, stabbing it upward like a spear. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. He yelled, and thrust it again.

This time he heard the clatter of the phone as it fell to the tiled floor. He flailed his left hand, grabbed it, and pushed the talk button. With what little concentration he could still muster he squeezed blindly at the keypad, mouthing as he did so, “Nine. One. One.”

He mashed the receiver to his head and listened, his eyes clamped shut. When he heard a voice, he managed “Twelve forty-seven Sycamore,” before slipping into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER 18

“I hate to say I told you so,” said Polinski, considering the hospital room approvingly.

“No, you don’t,” said Thomas. His chest was strapped and it was hard to speak.

“You’re right, I don’t,” she said, shrugging. “Was it Escolme?”

Thomas shook his head, felt a shot of pain in his shoulder, and said, “No.”

“You sure?” said the policewoman. “You said he was wearing night vision goggles.”

“I guess not,” Thomas conceded. He lifted his head from the pillow cautiously. “I don’t think it was him. It was dark for a lot of the time and then . . .”

He shrunk away from the memory. Polinski nodded, her thin lips pursed.

“Was it the same guy who attacked you outside the night before?”

“Couldn’t say,” said Thomas. “I’d say no, but that’s a guess.”

“Based on what?”

“The shoes,” he said. “The guy who came the previous night—assuming it was a guy—was wearing shoes that made a little ringing noise when he walked. This other guy didn’t.”

“Could have changed them.”

“Yes, but the two attacks felt different. One came with these noisy shoes and ran away as soon as he heard me—till I jumped on him and got my clock cleaned, that is. The other came with all this stealth gear and a gun. Either it was a different person or he came with a very different agenda.”

“He was white?”

“I think so,” said Thomas.

“Could you say anything about his height, build?”

Thomas began to shake his head again and caught himself before the pain kicked in.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Medium, I guess. Not heavyset, probably athletic, maybe six foot or just under, but I couldn’t be sure. A little smaller than me but at least as strong.”

He had been confined to the Evanston hospital for two days. For the first he had been unconscious and had had surgery to remove the fragments of the .38-caliber bullet that had fractured his collarbone and then bounced around inside. They had drained his lungs of blood with a chest tube that was still in place and put him on a cocktail of IV fluids. The knife wound in his arm had been stitched and bandaged. Throughout, they had kept his recovery room under guard, as if he might still be a target. Or a suspect. Thomas wasn’t sure which.

“So you believe me now?” he said to Polinski. “About Escolme? The Drake? The Shakespeare play?”

She smiled, a tiny quivering of one corner of her mouth.

“You know that Meat Loaf song,” she said. “ ‘Two out of Three Ain’t Bad’?”

“Not really a Meat Loaf fan,” said Thomas. “Which two?”

“Let’s just say it will be a while before I start quoting Shakespeare in a homicide report,” she said.

Thomas grinned.

She cocked her head to one side.

“You think that’s what he was looking for, don’t you?” she said. “That lost play.”

“It’s the only thing that would connect two attacks at the same address in as many nights,” said Thomas. “I just don’t know why anyone thinks I have it. Unless they think Escolme gave it to me, then faked the theft.”

“He faked other things,” said Polinski. “But if it wasn’t him crawling around your house with his night vision goggles and his personal armory, then he’s attracted the attention of some people who won’t be too happy when they find out that this priceless book . . .”

“Play,” Thomas corrected.

“
Play
,” Polinski repeated, “is lost or—more likely—never existed.”

Thomas sighed.

“When can I go home?” he said.

“Not my department. But I’d think they’d want to keep you in another couple of days.”

“Could someone contact the principal at Evanston Township? There are papers I could be grading.”

“Your classes have already been reassigned,” said Polinski.

“I’m perfectly capable of grading a few . . .”

“Relax,” said Polinski. “You restaged the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in your living room and you got shot. Even a workaholic like you should realize that’s grounds for taking a break.”

“Till when?”

“Fall,” she answered, smiling.

“Fall?” Thomas bellowed, sitting up in spite of his strapped shoulder, so that the word turned into a pained groan.

“The semester’s virtually over.” Polinski shrugged.

“It’s my damn job!” said Thomas. “I’ve been with those kids all year . . .”

“Get over yourself,” the cop said, standing. “Other teachers can get them through final exams.”

She was right, of course, but the truth still smarted, and Thomas lay back down grumbling. He wondered if his students would miss him. They liked him, most of them. Part of it was that he had acquired a certain notoriety—something that would be fed by getting shot—and part of it was that he cared about his subject in ways that sometimes made them care too. Whether that made him good at his job, he couldn’t say. Getting excited about a plot development in a Dickens novel or a phrase in Shakespeare had little to do with their SAT scores, after all.

“I’m Thomas Knight,”
he said on the first day of class,
“and I love books.”

It was supposed to be a bit of a joke, a familiar parody of AA meetings and twelve-step programs. He hoped that—by the end of his course—some of them would catch something of his enthusiasm. Thomas was just hopeful, old-fashioned, or naïve enough—he wasn’t sure which—to think that mattered.

They had sent get-well cards through the principal, but it was hard to tell if they missed him. Thomas was surprised to find that he wanted them to.

That’s maudlin
, he thought,
and vain
.

“Just so you know,” said Polinski, “we’ve been watching your house since the shooting.”

“And?”

“Nothing. A couple of security companies came to scope the place out, give you an estimate. You’ll find the paperwork waiting for you when you get home. Still,” she added, “putting an alarm in now . . . Seems a bit like locking the barn door after the horse has . . .”

“Been shot?” Thomas completed for her. “Yes.”

She laughed.

“Will you, you know, continue to watch the house after I go home?” Thomas asked, trying to sound like he didn’t really care.

“For a few days at least, yes.”

He nodded. She turned to leave.

“Did I hit him?” he said. “The intruder. I fired twice.”

She gave him an odd look.

“Are you hoping you did?” she said.

The question, and the seriousness in her eyes, gave him pause. In the silence she just shook her head.

“You’re going to have some work to do when you get home,” she said. “We took a couple of nine-millimeter slugs out of the wall.”

“Great.”

“No gun, by the way,” she added.

“What?”

“You said there were two guns, the one he shot you with and the one you redecorated the hallway with. We looked but we found neither.”

“It should have been right there where I left it before I crawled into the kitchen. I could show you the spot . . .”

“It’s not there,” she said, and she looked serious again. “We figure he came back for it, probably before the ambulance arrived.”

“While I was lying there unconscious?”

“Seems so.”

The thought was strangely unsettling. Had the guy thought he was dead? If not, why had he left him alive?

“Bye, Thomas,” said Polinski. “Try not to get into trouble.”

Thomas considered the hospital room.

“Fat chance,” he said.

CHAPTER 19

After she had gone, Thomas lay lost in thought for fifteen minutes. He had forgotten to mention to her the note he had left for Escolme. He wished he hadn’t written it. It had been a momentary petulance, followed up on because he had felt manipulated and deceived. The funny thing was that even though the shooting made it doubly clear just how much trouble Escolme had put him in, it also suggested that unless his former student was the villain Polinski suspected him to be, then the kid—Thomas still thought of him in those terms—was probably in real danger. And if Blackstone’s killer hadn’t known Escolme’s name before, there was a reasonable chance that Thomas’s pissy little note had changed that.

He reached painfully for the phone and made a series of calls that eventually connected him with the concierge at the Drake. He gave a false name, said he was attached to the Evanston Police Department and was just checking something that had already been clarified.

“Shoot,” said the concierge.

“I can’t read my own writing,” said Thomas. “Was Miss Daniella Blackstone staying in room 304 or 307?”

“In 304. Never had a chance to check out. Not till she—you know—
checked out
.”

“Thanks,” said Thomas. “That’s what I figured.”

He was about to hang up when another idea came to him.

“You couldn’t connect me to the room of Randall Dagenhart, could you?” he asked.

There was a pause, and then the concierge said, “Mr. Dagenhart already checked out.”

“What about Miss Julia . . .” He searched for the last name. “McBride.”

“Hold on.”

The phone rang three times before a woman’s voice answered. She sounded rushed, and for a moment Thomas wasn’t sure it was her.

“This is Thomas Knight,” he said. “We met in the bar at the Drake.”

“The recovering academic,” she said, instantly composed. “I remember. I’m impressed.”

“Why’s that?”

“I didn’t think I’d been obvious enough to encourage your call.”

Thomas found himself blushing.

“Oh,” he said. “Right. Well, I just wondered if I could ask you a question.”

“And it’s not going to be whether I’d like wine with dinner,” she said, amused by his embarrassment. “Ah well. What’s on your mind, Mr. Knight?”

“This lost Shakespeare play,” he said, composing himself and adjusting his posture, trying to find a position that hurt less when he spoke. “
Love’s Labour’s Won
. You said it would be a big deal if it was found, but you didn’t say whether you thought that likely.”