Was he screwing with me now?
“Don’t lie to me. That girl is still missing. She’s just your type. You told us that you had killed her. I need to find her body, Randy. Give her back to us. I’m asking you, please.”
Deputy Chief Robbie Wilson appeared in the frame of the windshield. He said, “We’re getting you out, Mr. Fish. This could hurt, so brace yourself.”
Wilson gave me a look that seemed to say, “Sergeant, you brace yourself.”
The hydraulic cutters chomped through the passenger-door hinges. Heavily gloved hands wrenched the door away. A hook came in from above and Wilson positioned it under the engine block.
I heard Ron Parker calling, “Wait. Wait.”
He ran as if he were in a steeplechase, clearing hurdles of twisted metal as he galloped toward the car. The hydraulic winch whined. Metal clanked as the hook got purchase and five hundred pounds of steel began to rise.
Fish’s face stretched in pain. He looked at me, said, “Love you. Mackie.”
And then he died.
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Parker was right outside the wreckage when it happened. He was panting, leaning forward, his hands on his knees.
“I had more questions for him.”
“Sorry,” I told him. “He took the express train to hell.”
“Shit. I didn’t get to wish him a good trip,” he said.
I put my fingers on Fish’s eyelids and closed them. The last person he’d seen in this life was me. I didn’t want him to look at me anymore.
I was done with Randolph Fish. Done.
Chapter 104
RICH CONKLIN BRACED himself inside the rear of the ambulance as it sped over the slick streets toward Metropolitan Hospital. He kept his eyes on Mackie Morales, who looked like she’d been catapulted into a brick wall.
Air bags deploy at about a hundred miles an hour, and Mackie had gotten the full blunt force of the bag. She had also been whipsawed during and after the collision as the car was dragged along 3rd Street.
She hadn’t regained consciousness, even though they were traveling in a stream of screaming sirens, the ambulance jerking and swerving around traffic.
Right now, she was immobilized by a C-Spine collar and strapped to a long board to protect her head, neck, and spine. She could have brain damage, internal bleeding, broken bones—all of it was possible.
Conklin reached over and squeezed her hand, got no response. He wanted to hold her, tell her she was going to be okay, and somehow make that be true.
But even as he worried about Mackie, he was completely mystified as to why she had been driving the killer’s getaway car. Had she fired the flashbang into the storage unit? Was she the cop who had bundled Fish into the passenger seat? Why would she do that?
What didn’t he know about Morales?
The ambulance took a hard right on Valencia, a sharp left on 26th Street, then blew into Metro’s ambulance bay. The EMTs had the back doors open the instant the vehicle braked to a stop. Rich jumped down, then ran with the EMTs as they transported Mackie’s gurney into the emergency room.
The ER was noisy and full. Victims of the multicar crash were being treated in curtained cubicles, and those who weren’t in danger of dying had been parked in wheelchairs and on gurneys wherever space permitted.
Mackie, on the board, was lifted onto an exam table in a trauma room. Medical personnel crowded in, began assessing the damage.
The attending physician was about forty, wiry, efficient. Her name was Emily Bruno and she and Conklin had met many times in circumstances like this one.
Bruno said to Conklin, “What’s the patient’s name? What happened to her? Do you know anything about her medical history?”
Conklin said, “This is MacKenzie Morales, twenty-six, single mother, and I don’t know her medical history. She drove the car into that semi outside the ballpark. Two fatalities so far. I’ve got to talk to her.”