Shut Your Eyes Tight

All he was truly aware of was her steady, perceptive, loving smile—the smile that was hers alone.

It enveloped him, warmed him, delighted him like nothing else on earth.

He was amazed that anyone who saw everything so clearly, who had all the light of the world in her eyes, saw in him something worthy of such a smile.

It was a smile that could make a man believe that life was good.

After a successful career in the advertising industry, John Verdon retired with his wife, Naomi, to the rural mountains of upstate New York—an ironically tranquil environment for creating the Dave Gurney series of thrillers.

Sometime after Hardwick left, Madeleine returned to the room, carrying a small container of coffee. Wrinkling her nose at it, she laid it on a metal table in the corner.

Gurney smiled. “Not very good?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she came to the side of the bed and took both of his hands in hers and held them tightly.

She stood there next to him, just like that, holding his hands, for a long while.

It could have been a minute or an hour. He couldn’t tell.

Without the golden eggs … the crazy goose … becomes a liability. Risk-reward thing. In the chapel Giotto finally saw Leonardo as all risk, no reward. Scale tipped … Greater benefit in killing him than keeping him alive.”

Hardwick emitted a thoughtful grunt. “A very practical madman.”

“Yes.” After a long silence, Gurney asked, “Giotto turn in anyone else?”

“Saul Steck. We went in with some NYPD boys, found him in that Manhattan brownstone. Unfortunately, he shot himself before we could get to him. Interesting thing about Steck, by the way. Remember I told you about his stint in a psychiatric hospital after his arrest years ago on multiple rape charges? Guess who the consulting psychiatrist was in the hospital’s sex-offender rehabilitation program?”

“Ashton?”

“The very same. Guess he got to know Saul pretty well—decided he had enough potential to make an exception to the Skard family-only rule. When you think about it, the man was a damn good judge of character. Could spot a useful psychopathic scumbag a mile away.”

“You find out who Saul’s ‘daughters’ were?”

“Maybe new Mapleshade grads doing an internship? Who knows? They were gone when we got there, and I’d be damn surprised if they reappeared.”

She nodded, stepped aside, as Hardwick came to the bed. “I’m going downstairs for some horrible coffee,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“You know,” Hardwick rasped after she left the room, raising a bandaged hand, “one of those fucking bullets went right through you and hit me.”

Gurney looked at the hand, didn’t see much damage. He remembered how Marian Eliot had referred to Hardwick: a smart rhinoceros. He started to laugh. Apparently the Dilaudid drip had been reduced enough that the laugh hurt. “You have any news that I might care about?”

And I guess then he started thinking about that other little unpleasantness you mentioned—the possibility of his fellow inmates taking the occasional piss in his face. So, bottom line, cut to the chase, he made a deal with the DA for life without parole with guaranteed medical separation from the general prison population.”

“What kind of deal?”

“He gave us the addresses of Karnala’s special customers. The ones who liked to go all the way.”

“And?”

“And some of the girls we found at those addresses were … still alive.”

“That was the deal?”

“Plus, he had to turn in the rest of the organization. Immediately.”

“He turned in his other two sons?”

“Without a second thought. Giotto Skard is not a sentimental man.”

Gurney smiled at the understatement.

Hardwick went on. “But I got a question for you. Given how … practical … he is about his business affairs, and how crazy Leonardo was, why didn’t Giotto do away with him the first time he heard about those peculiar little beheading requests that Leonardo was inserting into Karnala’s customer transactions?”

“Easy. Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

“The goose being Leonardo, aka Dr. Scott Ashton?”

“Ashton was big in his field … drawing card at Mapleshade. Kill him, the school might close … cut off a ready supply of sick young women.” Gurney’s eyes drifted shut momentarily. “Not something … not something Giotto would want to happen.”

“Then why kill him at the end?”

“All unraveling … going up in smoke, you might say. No more … golden eggs.”

He looked past her at the figure in the doorway, saw the gray crew cut, the ruddy face, the ice-blue malamute eyes.

Is he asleep?”

“Not really asleep. Just sort of dazed and dozing. They put him on a temporary Dilaudid drip to reduce the pain. If you talk to him, he’ll hear you.”

It was true. He smiled at the truth of it. But the drug did more than reduce the pain. It obliterated it in a wave of … of what? A wave of … okayness. He smiled at the okayness of it.

“I don’t want to disturb him.”

“Just say what you have to say. He’ll hear you perfectly well, and it won’t disturb him.”

He knew the voices. The voices of Val Perry and Madeleine. Beautiful voices.

Val Perry’s beautiful voice: “David? I came to thank you.” There was a long silence. The silence of a distant sailboat crossing a blue horizon. “I guess that’s all I really have to say. I’m leaving an envelope for you. I hope it’s enough. It’s ten times the amount we agreed on. If it’s not enough, let me know.” Another silence. A small sigh. The sigh of a breeze over a field of orange poppies. “Thank you.”

He couldn’t tell where his body ended and the bed began. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

Then he was awake, looking up at Madeleine.

“It’s Jack,” she was saying. “Jack Hardwick from BCI. Can you talk to him? Or shall I tell him to come back tomorrow?”

“What about Skard?” he asked, his voice hardly audible now.

“Giotto? You made as big a mess of him as he made of you.”

“Stairs?”

“Oh, yes. Probably the first time he’d ever been thrown down a flight of stairs by a man he’d already shot three times.”

There was so much in her voice, so many vying emotions, but he detected in that rich mixture an element of innocent pride. It made him laugh. The tears came again.

After a while his memory expanded backward. “The fire …?”

“Everyone got out.”

“Ah. Good. Good. Jack found the …?” He couldn’t remember the word.

“The remote lock thing, yes. You reminded him to look in Ashton’s pocket.” She made an odd little laughing, choking, sobbing sound.

“What was that all about?”

“It just flashed through my mind that ‘Look in Ashton’s pocket’ might have been your last words.”

He started to laugh but immediately cried out from the pain in his chest, then started to laugh again and cried out again. “Oh, God, no, no, don’t make me laugh.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks. His chest ached dreadfully. He was becoming exhausted.