Extreme Denial

  “But we couldn’t stop worrying,” Hanson said. “We phoned the police.”

  “A damned good thing you did,” Decker said. “Thank you.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.” Decker’s body ached from tension. “I’m not sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s exactly the question I want to ask,” a voice intruded.

  Bewildered, Decker looked beyond the gate, toward where a man had appeared, approaching between headlights. He was tall, sinewy, wearing a leather cowboy hat, a denim shirt, faded blue jeans, and dusty cowboy boots. As Officer Sanchez shone his flashlight toward the man, Decker was able to tell that the man was Hispanic. He had a narrow, handsome face, brooding eyes, and dark hair that hung to his shoulders. He seemed to be in his middle thirties.

  “Luis.” The man nodded in greeting to Officer Sanchez.

  “Frederico.” Sanchez nodded back.

  The newcorner directed his attention toward Decker. “I’m Detective Sergeant Esperanza.” His Hispanic accent gave a rolling sound to the r’s.

  For a fleeting moment, Decker was reminded that esperanza was the Spanish word for “hope.”

  “I know this has been a terrible ordeal, Mr. ...?”

  “Decker. Stephen Decker.”

  “You must be frightened. You’re confused. You’re worried about your friend. Her name is ...?”

  “Beth Dwyer.”

  “Does she live here with you?”

  “No,” Decker said. “She’s my next-door neighbor.” Esperanza thought about it, seeming to make the logical conclusion. “Well, the sooner I can sort out what happened, the sooner you can visit your friend in the hospital. So if you bear with me while I ask you some questions ...”

  Abruptly the light above the front door, a motion detector, came on. Simultaneously the light in the vestibule came on, casting a glow through the open front door.

  Decker heard expressions of approval from the policemen checking the outside of the house.

  “Finally,” Esperanza said. “It looks like Public Service of New Mexico managed to find the problem with your electricity. Would you tell Officer Sanchez where the switches are for the outside lights?”

  Decker’s throat felt scratchy, as if he’d been inhaling dust. “Just inside the front door.”

  Sanchez put on a pair of latex gloves and entered the house. In a moment, lights gleamed along the courtyard wall and under the portal that led up to the front door. The next thing, Sanchez had turned on the lights in the living room, their welcome glow streaming through windows, illuminating the courtyard.

  “Excellent,” Esperanza said. The lights revealed that he had a 9-mm Beretta holstered on his belt. He looked even thinner than he had seemed in the limited illumination from the headlights and flashlights. He had the weathered face of an outdoorsman, his skin swarthy, with a grain like leather. He seemed about to ask a question when a policeman came over and gestured toward a man beyond the open gate, a workman who had Public Service of New Mexico stenciled on his coveralls. “Yes, I want to talk to him. Excuse me,” he told Decker, then headed toward the workman.

  The Hansons looked overwhelmed by all the activity. “Would you follow me, please?” an officer asked them. “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Anything we can do to help.”

  “Thank you,” Decker said again. “I owe you.” Esperanza passed them as he returned. “You’ll be more comfortable if we talk about this inside,” he told Decker. “Your feet must be cold.”

  “What? My feet?”

  “You’re not wearing any shoes.”

  Decker peered down at his bare feet on the courtyard’s bricks. “So much has been going on, I forgot.”

  “And you’ll want to put on some clothes instead of that overcoat.”

  “There was shooting in the bedroom.”

  Esperanza looked puzzled by the apparent change of topic. “And in the walk-in closet,” Decker said.

  “Yes?” Esperanza studied him.

  “Those are the only places where I keep clothes.”

  Now Esperanza understood. “That’s right. Until the lab crew finishes in the bedroom, I’m afraid you can’t touch anything in there.” Studying Decker harder, Esperanza gestured for them to go into the house.

  2

  “They cut off the electricity at the pole next to your house,” Esperanza said.

  He and Decker were sitting at the kitchen table while policemen, a forensics crew, and the medical examiner checked the bedroom and laundry room areas. There were flashes, police photographers taking pictures. Decker’s eardrums were still in pain, but the ringing had diminished. He was able to hear the harsh scrape of equipment being unpacked, a babble of voices, a man saying something about “a war zone.”

  “The pole’s thirty yards off the gravel road, behind some trees,” Esperanza said. “No streetlights. Widely separated houses. In the middle of the night, nobody would have seen a man climb the pole and cut the line. The same thing with the phone line. They cut it at the box at the side of the house.” Despite the overcoat Decker wore, the aftermath of adrenaline continued to make him shiver. He stared toward the living room, where investigators came in and out. Beth, he kept thinking. What was happening at the hospital? Was Beth all right?

  “The men who broke in had ID in their wallets,” Esperanza said. “We’ll check their background. Maybe that’ll tell us what this is all about. But... Mr. Decker, what do you think this is about?”

  Yes, that’s the question, isn’t it? Decker thought. What in God’s name is this about? Throughout the attack, he had been so busy controlling his surprise and protecting Beth that he hadn’t had time to analyze the implications. Who the hell were these men? Why had they broken in? Despite his bewilderment, he was certain about two things—the attack had something to do with his former life, and for reasons of national security, there was no way he could tell Esperanza anything about that former life.

  Decker made himself look mystified. “I assumed they were burglars.”

  “House burglars usually work alone or in pairs,” Esperanza said. “Sometimes in threes. But never, in my experience, four of them. Not unless they intend to steal something big— furniture, for example—but in that case, they use a van, but we haven’t found one. In fact, we haven’t found any vehicle that seems out of place in the neighborhood. What’s more, they chose the wrong time to break into your house. Last evening was the start of Fiesta. Most people go out for the celebration. The smart thing would have been for them to watch to see if you left the house and then to break in as soon as it got dark. These guys were smart enough to cut the phone and power lines. I don’t see why they weren’t also smart enough to get their timing right.”

  Decker’s face felt haggard. Tense and exhausted, he rubbed his forehead. “Maybe they weren’t thinking clearly. Maybe they were on drugs. Who the hell knows the way burglars think?”

  “Burglars with a sawed-off shotgun, two Uzis, and a MAC-10. What did those men expect they were going to have to deal with in here, a SWAT team?”

  “Sergeant, I used to work in Alexandria, Virginia. I traveled into Washington a lot. From what I heard on TV and read in the newspaper, it seemed every drug dealer and car jacker had a MAC-10 or an Uzi. For them, submachine guns were a status symbol.”

  “Back east. But this is New Mexico. How long have you lived here?”

  “About a year and a quarter.”

  “So you’re still learning. Or maybe you’ve already realized, they don’t call this the City Different for nothing. Out here, in a lot of ways, this is still the Wild West. We do things the old fashioned way. If we want to shoot somebody, we use a handgun or maybe a hunting rifle. In my fifteen years of being a policeman, I’ve never come across a crime involving this many assault weapons. Incidentally, Mr. Decker ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you ever in law enforcement?”

  “Law enforcement? No. I
sell real estate. What makes you think ...?”

  “When Officer Sanchez found you, he said you acted as if you understood police procedure and how an officer feels in a potentially dangerous situation. He said you emphasized that you’d have your hands up when you left the laundry room, that you’d show your hands first before you stepped into view. That’s very unusual behavior.”

  Decker rubbed his aching forehead. “It just seemed logical. I was afraid the officer might think I was a threat.”

  “And when I told you to put some clothes on, you took for granted you couldn’t go into the bedroom to get them, not until the forensics crew was finished in there.”

  “That seemed logical, too. I guess I’ve seen a lot of crime shows on TV.”

  “And where did you learn to shoot so well?”

  “In the military.”

  “Ah,” Esperanza said.

  “Look, I need to know about my friend.”

  Esperanza nodded.

  “I’m so worried about her, I can hardly concentrate.” Esperanza nodded again. “I tell you what, why don’t we stop by the hospital on our way to the police station?”

  “Police station?” Decker said.

  “So you can make your statement.”

  “Isn’t that what I’m doing now?”

  “The one at the station is official.”

  A phone, Decker thought. He needed to get to a pay phone and call his former employer. He had to tell them what had happened. He had to find out how they wanted to handle this.

  A policeman came into the kitchen. “Sergeant, the medical examiner says it’s all right now for Mr. Decker to go into the bedroom to get some clothes.”

  Decker stood.

  “While we’re in there, let’s do a walk-through,” Esperanza said. “It would be helpful if you showed us exactly how it happened. Also ...”

  “Yes?”

  “I know it’ll be difficult, but this is hardly an ordinary situation. It would save a lot of time if we knew right away rather than waited until tomorrow.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Decker said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Look at the faces.”

  “What?”

  “Of the bodies. Here, instead of in the morgue. Maybe you can identify them. Before, in the dark, you couldn’t have seen what they looked like. Now that the lights are back on ...”

  Decker wanted to look at the bodies in case he recognized them, but he had to pretend to be reluctant. “I don’t think my stomach would ... I’d throw up.”

  “You’re not obligated. There are alternatives. The forensics crew is taking photographs. You can examine those. Or look at the bodies later in the morgue. But photographs don’t always provide a good likeness, and rigor mortis might distort the features of the corpses so they don’t seem familiar to you even if you’ve crossed paths with them before. Right now, though, not long after the attack, there’s always a possibility that...”

  Decker couldn’t stop thinking about Beth. He had to get to the hospital. Continuing to feign reluctance, he said, “God help me. Yes, I’ll look at them.”

  3

  Wearing jeans and a gray cotton sweater, Decker sat in a rigid chair in the almost-deserted waiting room of the emergency ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital. A clock on the wall showed that it was almost six-thirty. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling hurt his eyes. To the left, outside the door to the waiting room, Esperanza was talking to a policeman who stood next to a teenage boy with a bruised face who was strapped to a gurney. Esperanza’s battered boots, faded jeans, shoulder-length hair, and leather cowboy hat made him look like anything except a police detective.

  As a hospital attendant wheeled the gurney through electronically controlled swinging doors that led into the emergency ward, Esperanza entered the brightly lit waiting area. His long legs and lanky frame gave him a graceful stride that reminded Decker of a panther. The detective pointed toward the gurney. “An accident victim. Drunk driving. Fiesta weekend. Typical. Any news about your friend?”

  “No. The receptionist said a doctor would come out to see me.” Decker slumped lower in his chair. His head felt as if someone had tied a strap around it. He rubbed his face, feeling scratchy beard stubble, smelling gunpowder on his hands. He kept thinking about Beth.

  “Sometimes, under stress, memory can take a while,” Esperanza said. “You’re sure the bodies you looked at didn’t seem familiar?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen them before.” The cloying smell of blood still lingered in Decker’s nostrils. The dead men had all appeared to be in their twenties. They were husky, wore dark outdoor clothes, and had Mediterranean features—possibly Greek, or maybe French. Or were they ...? The previous evening, at the Fiesta party, Decker had brooded about his last assignment for the Agency. Rome. Could the olive-skinned gunmen have been Italian? Did the attack on his house have something to do with what had happened in Rome a year and a quarter ago? If only Esperanza would leave him alone long enough so he could make a phone call.

  “Mr. Decker, the reason I asked you if you’d ever been in law enforcement is, I can’t get over what you managed to do. Four men break in with assault weapons. They blow the hell out of your house. And you manage to kill all four of them with a handgun. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

  “Everything about this is strange. I still can’t believe ...”

  “Most people would have been so overwhelmed with fear, they’d have hidden when they heard someone breaking in.”

  “That’s why Beth and I ran to the walk-in closet.”

  “But not before you grabbed the pistol you keep in your bedside drawer. You’re a Realtor, you mentioned.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you feel the need to keep a pistol by your bed?”

  “Home protection.”

  “Well, it’s been my experience that pistols for home protection don’t do much good,” Esperanza said. “Because the owners themselves aren’t any good with them. Family members end up getting shot. Innocent bystanders get hit. Oh, we have plenty of gun clubs in the area. And there are plenty of hunters. But I don’t care how often you’ve practiced with a pistol at the firing range or how frequently you’ve gone hunting—when four men come at you with heavy artillery, you’re lucky if you have time to piss your pants from fright before they kill you.”

  “I was scared, all right.”

  “But it didn’t impair your abilities. If you’d been in law enforcement, if you’d been tested under fire, I could understand.”

  “I told you I was in the military.”

  “Yes.” The weathered creases around Esperanza’s eyes deepened. “You did tell me that. What was your outfit?”

  “The Rangers. Look, I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Decker said impatiently. “The army taught me to handle a pistol, and when the time came, I was lucky enough to remember how to use it. You’re making me feel as if I did something wrong. Is it a crime to defend myself and my friend against a gang that breaks into my house and starts shooting? Everything’s turned upside down. The crooks are the good guys, and decent citizens are—”

  “Mr. Decker, I’m not saying you did anything wrong. There’ll have to be an inquest and you’ll have to testify. That’s the law. All shootings, even justified ones, have to be investigated to the fullest. But the truth is, I admire your resourcefulness and your presence of mind. Not many ordinary citizens would have survived what you went through. For that matter, I’m not sure I’d have been able to handle myself any better in your circumstance.”

  “Then I don’t get it. If you’re not saying I did anything wrong, what are you saying?”

  “I’m just making observations.”

  “Well, this is my observation. The only reason I’m alive is that I got angry. Furious. Those bastards broke into my home. The sons of bitches. They shot my friend. They ... I got so angry, I stopped being afraid. All I wanted was to protect Beth, and by God
, I managed that. I’m proud of that. I don’t know if I should admit that to you, but I am proud. And this might not be the sort of thing to tell a police officer, either, but I will anyhow. If I had to, I’d do the same damned thing over again and be proud of it. Because I stopped the bastards from killing Beth.”

  “You’re a remarkable man, Mr. Decker.”

  “Hey, I’m no hero.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “All I am is awfully lucky.”

  “Right.”

  A doctor appeared at the entrance to the waiting room. He was short and slight, in his thirties, wearing hospital greens and a stethoscope around his neck. He had small round spectacles. “Is one of you Stephen Decker?”

  Decker quickly stood. “Can you tell me how my friend is doing?”

  “She sustained a flesh wound just below her shoulder. The bleeding has been stopped. The wound has been sterilized and sutured. She’s responding to treatment. Barring unforeseen complications, she ought to recover satisfactorily.”

  Decker closed his eyes and murmured, “Thank God.”

  “Yes, there’s a lot to give thanks for,” the doctor said. “When your friend arrived at the hospital, she was in shock. Her blood pressure was low. Her pulse was erratic. Fortunately her life signs are back to normal.”

  Back to normal? Decker thought. He worried that things would never be back to normal. “When will she be able to go home?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll see how well she continues to improve.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “She needs rest. I can’t let you stay long.”

  Esperanza stepped forward. “Is she alert enough to make a statement to the police?”

  The doctor shook his head. “If I didn’t think it was therapeutic for her to see Mr. Decker, I wouldn’t allow even him to visit.”

  4

  Beth looked pasty. Her auburn hair, normally lush-looking, was tangled, without a sheen. Her eyes were sunken.

  Given the circumstances, to Decker she had never seemed more beautiful.

  After the doctor left, Decker shut the door, muting noises from the corridor. He studied Beth a moment longer, felt a tightness in his throat, went over to the bed, held the hand that wasn’t in a sling, then leaned down and kissed her.