Third Degree

Danny obeyed.

  Shouts of anger and confusion reverberated through the darkness, but the whispering gunman dragged Danny across the room with total assurance. Danny stumbled on something, but his captor held him erect. Night-vision goggles? he wondered. His shoulder brushed a doorjamb as tactical lights arced through the room, and then he passed into cooler air.

  “Move to the right.” A knee drove into his back. “Hurry!”

  Danny saw light ahead. He thought of crying out, but the gunman read his mind. “Make a sound, I’ll blow your brains all over the hall.”

  It was Warren, Danny realized. Of course it was. Who else could it be? But where were they going? Why didn’t Shields just pull the trigger and be done with it?

  “Toward the light!” Warren urged, running him up the hall now.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ve got a date with destiny, you lying piece of shit.”

  • • •

  Grant knew he’d waited too long to pull the circuit breaker. But how could his dad expect him to wait in the pantry while everything was happening somewhere else? He’d waited as long as he could stand it, and then—just after he’d sneaked out to find his father—the whole back of the house had blown up. By the time he got back to the pantry, men were yelling and screaming all over the house. But Grant still did what his dad had told him to do and sent blue sparks flying from beneath his hands.

  Now he was running through the dark, making for his father’s study. In the great room he collided with something hard—something that shouldn’t have been there. Two strong hands seized his upper arms, and a face like something out of a video game appeared before him, a black-goggled grasshopper’s face lit by the beam of a spotlight shining through the great room windows.

  “Get that kid out of here!” someone shouted.

  Grant was hauled off his feet, carried out through the garage, and set down in the driveway. It was still raining. The shouts of panicked grown-ups ricocheted through the night. The masked figure looked down at him for a moment, then raced back inside the house. Desperate to learn what had happened to his parents, Grant ran around to the front yard, the last place he’d heard Mr. Danny’s chopper.

  The big helicopter straddled the front sidewalk like a futuristic bird that had somehow landed in the present by mistake. Its rotors were still spinning. Grant moved toward it but kept close to the shrubbery so that no other deputies would see him.

  As he neared the chopper, he froze. His father and Mr. Danny were crossing the open space between the front door and the helicopter.

  “Dad!” Grant shouted. “Mr. Danny! Wait for me! Wait up!”

  When he reached the two men, Grant realized that his father hadn’t heard him. He grabbed his dad’s arm, then jerked back as an almost unrecognizable face whipped around and glared at him.

  “Grant?” exclaimed his father, as though he’d never expected to see his son again.

  “Get out of here, Grant!” said Mr. Danny. “Run!”

  “No way! I want to come with you guys!”

  “You can’t,” said his father. “You have to stay here, Son.”

  “I’m coming,” Grant insisted. “I’m not staying here by myself.”

  His father looked down at him with an expression Grant had never seen on his face before. It made Grant want to cry. Then his father yanked open the chopper door and said, “Get in the back, Son. Hurry. Harness yourself in.”

  Grant scrambled into the helicopter, a machine that hummed and shook as if it were more alive than he was. Mr. Danny and his father climbed into the front seats, and then Mr. Danny did something and the whining overhead got louder. Grant could feel the rotor blades trying to pull the ship off the ground. His father turned around to say something, but then the front door of the house opened and two of the black-suited men ran out. Both were waving guns, but Grant knew they wouldn’t run beneath the spinning blades. One of the men leveled his gun and aimed at the front of the helicopter. In the next instant Mr. Danny shouted something and the ship leaped into the air. As Grant tumbled out of his seat, he saw treetops sweep past the window, and then the moon, shining high and white through a break in the clouds. He only wished his mom were there to see it.

  • • •

  Danny had flown in crazy conditions before, but never with a gun jammed into his gut. The pistol wasn’t the same one Shields had aimed at Laurel; this one was a nickel-plated automatic. Trace Breen’s gun? he wondered. Or maybe Kyle Auster’s, if he had one. Shields kept the pistol where his son couldn’t see it, but the range was still point-blank. Close enough for the burning powder to set Danny’s shirt on fire as the bullet ripped through his abdomen from side to side.

  The chopper hurtled eastward at fifteen hundred feet, the house already far behind. Danny wondered what kind of response Sheriff Ellis was mounting to this new development. He’d started calling over the radio only seconds after they lifted off, but Shields had shut off everything but the interphone circuit.

  “Where are we going?” Danny asked, as casually as he could. “Havana?”

  “Upriver,” Warren said tersely. “Thirty miles. Vidalia, Louisiana. Take us up to two thousand feet.”

  Danny turned north and started ascending. Vidalia was a town of five thousand mostly working-class people who lived on the floodplain across the river from the great bluff at Natchez. “Why Vidalia?”

  Warren tilted his head backward. “We’re dropping Grant off at Laurel’s mother’s house.”

  “I see. So this trip’s just for you and me?”

  Warren didn’t answer.

  Danny had a lot of experience flying at night, but almost always with the aid of night-vision goggles, and in a much more powerful chopper. Flying the Bell 206 through mountains of storm clouds was a completely different thing. He wasn’t afraid, but he was concentrating hard enough that the gun against his side kept surprising him. Blue-white flashes of lightning illuminated the towering cloudscape, and he could hear Grant’s cries of awe despite the fact that the boy wasn’t wearing a headset.

  Danny couldn’t see much on the near-lightless land below, but the rivers and lakes he used as landmarks gleamed like black mirrors as the chopper raced over them. The Buffalo River, Lake Mary, the Homochitto River, and then the Mississippi, curving east toward Natchez.

  “Did I hear you say we’re going to Gram’s?” Grant yelled, moving forward and setting his chin on the tight seam between Danny’s and Warren’s shoulders.

  Warren concealed the gun beneath his bloody shirttail and slid the headset off of his right ear. “That’s right, Son.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Home.”

  Danny kept his face expressionless.

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. Those men weren’t there for her. You’ll see her soon. Get back into a seat and fasten your harness.”

  “What about you? Your shoulder’s bleeding bad.”

  “I’m fine,” Warren said, touching his shirt, which was now matted against his wounded shoulder.

  “Wow!” Grant cried. They had crossed over the bluff at Natchez, and the land fell precipitously away. Two hundred feet below the old city, the lights on a long string of barges winked up at them. “Cool,” the boy said. “They have two bridges here.”

  “Get into a harness, Son!”

  “Okay, okay.” Grant’s head vanished.

  “You don’t know Laurel’s okay,” Danny said softly. “You didn’t even check.”

  Warren grimaced. “Shut up.”

  “What?” asked Grant. “What are y’all saying up there?”

  “Nothing, Son. Look for landmarks down there. Can you see the riverboat casinos?”

  While Grant searched the broad black river, Warren said, “Laurel’s mother lives just off Carter Street, the main drag. Right behind the levee. Maybe you know that already.”

  “No.”

  Danny started descending after he passed over the two great bridges spanning the r
iver. There was only one brightly lit road in Vidalia, the highway leading westward across Louisiana. The section that ran through the town was called Carter Street. Danny found it easily, and soon he made out the grassy hump of the levee, running at right angles to the highway.

  “That’s it,” said Warren, pointing down at a small house with an older Lincoln Continental parked on the street in front of it.

  “Where do you want me to land?”

  “Street’s fine. There’s no traffic.”

  The neighbors began opening their doors and windows as the chopper dipped under two hundred feet. By the time it landed in the middle of their street, a crowd had gathered in the rain, thinking they were witnessing either a crash or an invasion.

  “I see Gram!” Grant shouted. “She’s standing on the porch!”

  “Jump out and run to her, Son.”

  Grant’s head reappeared above the junction of shoulders. “What about you?”

  Warren seemed unable to find his voice. Danny leaned forward and saw tears in the doctor’s eyes. “Major Danny and I have to help the police do something,” Shields croaked. “But Mom will be here soon.”

  “Are you sure? What’s wrong, Dad?”

  Warren covered his eyes with his left hand, but his right still gripped the gun. Danny wondered if Shields would really shoot him in front of the boy. On balance, Danny figured he would.

  “I’ve just got a headache,” Shields said. “I stayed awake too long. You need to go, Son. You take care of your mother, all right?”

  Grant stared at his father in confusion. “Till you get back, you mean?”

  “That’s right. Go on, now. We’re late already.”

  Grant turned to Danny, his eyes dark with foreboding. “Mr. Danny . . . ?”

  “Do what your father told you. It’ll be all right.”

  “Go!” Warren snapped.

  Grant seemed on the verge of tears. Danny’s heart went out to the boy, but then Grant fell back on his loyalty to the man he trusted above all others. He nodded to his father and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of Mom.” Then he climbed out of the chopper and ran toward a small, gray-haired woman standing on the porch of the little house with the Lincoln out front.

  “I’m sorry,” Warren said almost inaudibly.

  “You owe that boy every second you have on this earth,” Danny said. “I know you hate my guts, but you need to stop this suicide trip and get your family back together.”

  People in the crowd were venturing toward the helicopter. Shields stabbed the gun into Danny’s side. “Get us airborne.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Heaven. How does that sound?”

  “I don’t believe in it. And neither do you.”

  Shields’s eyes shone with something like madness. “Valhalla, then. Isn’t that where heroes go when they die?”

  “Only if they die in battle.”

  An ironic chuckle. “Well, then. That’s where we’re going.”

  Danny didn’t know if it was better to die on the ground or in the air. But one thing he did know: in the air, he had a chance to live, because he would have control of the aircraft. A passenger bent on both homicide and suicide complicated matters, but that was better than the bullet he would get for refusing to take off.

  He pulled up on the collective, touched the cyclic, and lifted the Bell over the streetlights, swinging gracefully back toward the bridges. There was no real advantage in flying over Natchez, but something was pulling him to the Mississippi side of the river.

  “Why don’t we call the sheriff and check on Laurel?” Danny suggested.

  Warren lifted the shiny pistol and pressed its barrel against Danny’s left temple. “Why don’t you shut up and fly.”

  “Tell me where.”

  “Just keep us over the river.”

  “How high?”

  “Two thousand feet’s fine.”

  Danny spiraled upward in a slow climb, wondering how long the gun would stay at his head. It didn’t leave him much maneuvering room. He’d already begun forming the rudiments of a plan. If he could roll the chopper and pull enough g’s, he might be able to open Shields’s harness and dump him out before the doctor shot him. But he couldn’t do that with a gun to his head.

  “Are you afraid to die, Major?”

  Shields had asked the question in a philosophical tone. Danny shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I should have died long before now.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  The gun barrel entered the shell of Danny’s left ear. “But are you afraid to die?”

  Danny thought about it. He felt a lot of things at this moment, but the least of his emotions was fear. “I’ll tell you what I think. It isn’t dying that’s hard. It’s living.”

  Shields’s jaws flexed angrily. “What are you trying to say? Are you saying I’m a coward?”

  “No. I’m saying life ain’t a bowl of fucking cherries. I’m saying you owe that little boy whatever time you can give him, no matter what shape you’re in. I think he’s tough enough to watch you die. It might not be pretty, but he’ll get over it. A hell of a lot easier than he’ll get over this shit.”

  Shields’s jaw was working so hard it looked as if he were trying to grind his teeth away. “You’ve got all the answers, don’t you? Or so my wife seems to think.”

  “I don’t have any answers!” Danny snapped, tired of Shields’s paranoia. “I’m just trying to get by, same as the next man. All I’m saying is, it’s living that takes courage. In my experience, the hero who charges the machine-gun nest is sometimes the guy who didn’t have anything to go home to. To me, the real hero is the guy who goes home to face whatever life hands him, no matter how tough it might be.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re a lucky son of a bitch. And life handed you my wife.”

  Danny put the Bell into a hover above the river. Far below, through sheets of rain, twinkling headlights moved steadily between Louisiana and Mississippi. “I’ve caught the short end a few times. You’ve been dealt a tough hand, I’ll grant you. But I’ve seen guys get a lot worse, with no time to set things right or even say good-bye to the people they loved. In muddy holes, on piles of sand, burned alive in a fucking Humvee. It’s like you said back at the house. It doesn’t make any sense. You want an answer, Warren? You’ve got two kids who love you. Two healthy kids who need everything you can give them, and who’ll give you everything they have in return. That means more than you know. Take it from me.”

  Shields lowered the gun back to Danny’s waist. “I killed a cop tonight,” he said in a guilt-ridden voice.

  “Well, I’d say he asked for it. He was a mean bastard who would have caught it one way or another down the road.”

  “They’d still jail me for it. Or execute me.” Shields began to laugh strangely. “If only I could live all the years it would take them to execute me after sentencing me to death! I’d take that deal, all right.”

  Danny wondered if he had any chance of getting back to the ground alive. As they hovered in the dark, he noticed that several cars had stopped along the northern span of the bridge. Then he saw red lights flashing at the Mississippi end.

  “Whose baby is Laurel carrying?” Warren asked with sudden intensity.

  Danny turned to him. In the cramped cockpit, their faces were as close as lovers’. “I don’t know.”

  “Christ! Can’t anybody just tell me the truth?”

  “I truly don’t know. But it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Shields closed his eyes. “Do you really think she’s dead?”

  For the first time, Danny sensed an opportunity to save himself. But despite Shields’s closed eyes, the gun still pressed into his left hip. If they had been flying without the doors—as Danny sometimes did—or if Shields had neglected to fasten his harness, a high-G maneuver might have set the stage for Danny to dump his hijacker out of the chopper. But that w
as useless speculation.

  Danny looked back at the flashing red lights. They were static now, at the center of the bridge. “I don’t know. All I do know is, Laurel was right. If you really love her, it doesn’t matter who the father is.”

  Shields’s eyes popped open. “How can you say that?”

  Danny shrugged. “Age, maybe? You’ll get there eventually.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  It was so easy to forget the man was dying. Danny wondered if Shields forgot it himself sometimes. For the first second or two after he woke up in the mornings, maybe. Danny had a paraplegic friend who’d experienced that. He said there was nothing worse than the crushing weight of remembering that he was paralyzed and couldn’t get out of bed. “I think love means giving up something,” Danny said. “Maybe the thing that means the most to you. Pride, maybe? That’s what she was talking about. That’s what they want us to do, you know? Only then do they truly believe you love them.”

  Some of the anger had drained out of Shields’s eyes. “You really love her, don’t you?”

  Danny didn’t answer. He’d already confessed once, and he saw no reason to do it again when repetition might buy him a bullet.

  Shields raised the gun to Danny’s temple again. “Say it, Major.”

  “I love her,” Danny admitted, suddenly aware that all his world-weary talk about death was bullshit. He’d found a woman he wanted to spend every day of his life with, and he had two kids of his own who needed him desperately—maybe even three. The thought that those children might come in harm’s way without their father there to protect them—that scared the hell out of him. It also gave him the resolve he needed to kill Warren Shields if he could.

  “You want to kill me, don’t you?” Shields said.

  Danny shook his head, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  Warren leaned against the left-side door on his side and lazily aimed the gun at Danny’s belly. “I wanted to love her,” he said, looking puzzled. “I just . . . I guess I knew her too well.”

  You didn’t know her at all.

  Warren raised the gun until its muzzle touched Danny’s cheek. “If you lived through this night, what would you do?”

  “Best I could.”