the man rob a bank?”
“Why do you think that?”
“He wore a mask like bank robbers do.”
The ski mask we found in Conrad’s car. It means he didn’t want her to be able to identify him. It means he was planning on letting her go at some point.
“He wasn’t a bank robber,” I say. “He was just a really bad man.”
“A really bad man,” she says. She wraps her arms around me and hugs me tight. I hug her back.
“Now go with Rose. She’ll clean you right up and we’ll get your uncle here. How’s that sound?”
She keeps hugging me. “Will the bad man come for me again?”
“No.”
“If he does, will you save me?”
“Of course. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
She pulls back so she can look at me. “Cross your heart?”
I cross my heart.
The nurse leads Alyssa to the bathroom. Another nurse comes over, this one in her mid-twenties, her blonde hair cut short and swept back, her glasses looking more cosmetic than medical. Her name is Victoria, and Victoria is my sister-in-law.
She puts her hand on my arm. “Jesus, Noah, where did you find her?”
“Locked up in the basement at the old Kelly place.”
Her glasses shift a little on her face as she frowns. Her jaw tightens. “Who took her?”
“Conrad Haggerty.”
She says nothing for a few seconds. I suspect somewhere in her imagination she’s hunting down Conrad to do bad things to him. “That piece of trash,” she says, all the words coming out on an exhale. “You sure it was him?”
“I’m sure.”
“This is going to be bad,” she says.
I shake my head. “Bad doesn’t even begin to sum things up.”
Four
The parking lot lights up blue and red, first from the ambulance and then from the single patrol car that pulls in behind it. A ring of six-foot trees separates the parking lot from the road, and interlocking branches capture the light and don’t reflect any back. I watch from the window of a doctor’s office on the top floor as a pair of paramedics roll Conrad out from the back of the ambulance. They must have shot some painkillers into him because he looks in a better mood than when I left him. Drew spills out of one side of the patrol car and Sheriff Haggerty spills out the other. There isn’t much of a physical difference between Sheriff Haggerty and his son, other than the quantity of wrinkles and the color of hair, and of course the sheriff’s horseshoe mustache that, legend has it, was fully formed in the womb.
I stand at the window adjusting the ice pack on my hands. Victoria offered to x-ray them and clean them up, but I told her it could wait. There are posters on the wall of the human body, close-up drawings of shoulder joints and ankle joints and finger joints, the kinds of images that remind me how fragile we are. There’s a fake skeleton in the corner and cupboards and drawers full of latex gloves and bandages and syringes. I can smell disinfectant. Sheriff Haggerty is yelling at somebody outside the main entrance but I can’t see who. Then he hitches his thumbs into his belt and looks up at the window and finds me. We stare at each other for a few seconds before he follows his son into the hospital.
I wait for him.
He doesn’t come.
I give it a little longer.
He still doesn’t come.
After ten minutes I’m at the point where I just want this over.
I flinch when the door opens. It’s not the sheriff. It’s Maggie, my wife, and she’s all sharp angles and anger. Her eyes are dark, her face red and tight, her dark hair tied into a fast and messy ponytail. She closes the door and I push myself away from the window. She focuses on my hands.
“So it’s true,” she says.
I step toward her and she puts her hand on my chest. The anger is coming off her in waves. She isn’t here as my wife. She’s here as a lawyer, and not my lawyer.
“So how bad is it?” I ask.
“Let’s sit,” she says.
We take the two chairs in front of the desk and sit with our knees almost touching. I adjust the ice pack. None of the swelling has disappeared.
She holds up a finger and she says, “You beat him.”
“It was the only way.”
She holds up a second finger. “And you shot him.”
“He took her, Maggie.”
A third finger goes up. “You handcuffed Drew and pulled a gun on him.”
“He had her chained up like a rabid dog.”
She holds up another finger, and she says, “And you planted evidence and framed him.”
I fight the urge to jump up. “You’re kidding, right? Is that what he’s saying?”
“No, but he will. You said what you did was the only way, but it wasn’t, Noah, not by a long shot. You could have brought him in. I could have made a deal with him. We could have gotten Alyssa back and put Conrad away for a long time.”
“That’s bullshit. His dad might not like him much, but he sure as hell would have given him a pass. You know that better than anybody.”
She leans back as if slapped.
My hands are shaking. I tell myself to calm down. “Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Is that why you beat him so bad? Because of what happened when we were kids?”
“Of course not,” I say, but I can’t claim what he did back then wasn’t on my mind when my fists were flying. Anyway, we weren’t kids — we were teenagers. She makes it sound like it was just childhood antics. “It’s like Newton’s third law — for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. It’s possible you could have gotten Alyssa back, like you say, but it’s equally possible you couldn’t have.”
“You should have trusted me,” she says. “You should have trusted Drew and Sheriff Haggerty, and trusted yourself too. You should have trusted the system, but instead you broke the law and—”
“I couldn’t risk not getting her back. I know him, Maggie. He wouldn’t have—”
She puts her hand up. “Let me finish, Noah.”
“Conrad would have let her die.”
“I asked you to let me finish.”
I get up. I walk back to the window and stare into the parking lot. Moths not much smaller than the palm of my hand slap at the streetlamps. The sky doesn’t have the same sparkle it had out at the Kelly farm, most of the stars hidden now behind the curtain of light coming from the town. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“We can’t prosecute him,” she says, and I don’t turn to face her because I can’t look at the disappointment in her face. “I know you think you did the right thing, and I understand why you think you had to do it, but what you did makes it impossible for us to get a conviction. You violated his rights, and now he’s going to walk. And the worst thing is the fact you couldn’t see that makes you — and it hurts to say this, it really does — it makes you a bad cop.”
I did see it, and seeing it and ignoring it makes me an even worse cop.
“He can come after you, legally. You tied him up and beat him and you shot him. There’ll be an endless line of