The metal object. I knew what it had to be. I yanked Bell’s gun out of the water and fumbled with the trigger. “Bell, no!” I screamed.
He kept on coming with the enormous rock held over his head. “Die!”
So I fired.
I couldn’t tell exactly what happened in the moonlit woods. I had no idea where he was hit, but he grunted noisily and stopped for a second.
Then he charged forward again. I fired a second time. And a third. Both upper-chest shots, at least I thought so.
The heavy rock he was holding fell back into the water. Suspended for a moment by some invisible force, Bell staggered away two or three drunken steps. Then he fell over face first into the water, making a loud splash.
Then nothing. Silence in the woods.
Trembling badly, uncontrollably, I kept the gun trained on Bell with my good hand. It took incredible effort just to get over the slick rocks to where he lay.
By the time I reached him, there was no movement. I took his arm, held it up. I checked, but he had no pulse. I checked it again—nothing, nothing but the silence of the woods, and the awful cold.
Michael Bell was dead, and so was Mary Smith. And very soon, in these freezing wet clothes, I would be, too.
Chapter 119
MY SLOW CLIMB UP and out of the gully from the crash site was hellish, nothing but excruciating pain, dizziness, and nausea. The only blessing was that I barely remembered any of it.
Somehow, I managed to get out to the main road—where an alarmed college student in a Subaru picked me up. I never even got his name. I guess I passed out in the backseat of his car.
By the next morning, Michael Bell’s body had been recovered from the stream, and I was resting in a bed at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington. Resting is probably the wrong word, though. Local police came and went from my room continually. I spent hours on the phone with my office in Washington, the L.A. Bureau office, and Jeanne Galletta, trying to piece together everything that had happened from the start of the murder spree.
Bell’s plan had been a feat of convolution and madness, but his cover was ultimately simple—diversion. And he’d succeeded until the very end. As Jeanne pointed out to me, Michael Bell wrote and produced stories for a living. Plot was his thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one ended up as a screenplay, written by someone else. The writer would probably change everything, though, until the movie carried the fishy title “based on a true story.”
“Who’s going to play you?” Jeanne kidded me over the phone.
“I don’t know. I don’t much care. Pee-wee Herman.”
As for Mary Constantine, I wasn’t sure how to feel about her. The cop in me had one response, but the shrink had another. I was glad she’d be getting back into the kind of treatment and care she needed. If Dr. Shapiro was right, maybe Mary was ultimately headed toward some kind of recovery. That was how I wanted to think about it for right now.
Around four o’clock, the door to my room creaked open, and none other than Nana Mama poked her head inside.
“There’s a sight for bed-sore eyes,” I said, and started to grin. “Hello, Nana. What brings you to Vermont?”
“Maple syrup,” she cracked.
She came in timidly, especially for her, and winced when she saw the truss around my shoulder.
“Oh, Alex, Alex.”
“Looks worse than it is. Well, maybe not,” I said. “Did you have any trouble getting a flight?”
“No trouble at all. You go to the airport. You pay money.”
She reached out to put a cool hand on my cheek. It felt familiar and so comforting. What would I do without this ornery old woman? I couldn’t help thinking. What will I do?
“They said you’re going to be fine, Alex. I suppose that’s a relative concept, though, isn’t it?”
I’d been shot before. It’s traumatic—there’s no way around that—but not irreversible, at least not so far.
“I’ll be fine,” I told Nana. “
Body and soul.”