In Big Trouble

A huge cheer went up from the street below, and Steve glanced out the window. In the split-second his head was turned, Tess saw Emmie slide the knife along Clay's spine, into the waistband of his khakis.

"Here comes Gus. You're up, Emmie," Steve said. "You can jump, or I'll kill you-but not before I kill your cousin. I've got no problem with letting Al Guzman wrangle over a mysterious quadruple murder for the next twenty years."

"Please," Clay said. Emmie broke their embrace and backed away from him. "We'll go to the police. My dad will confess. At the very least, he'll have to tell the grand jury."

"What grand jury?" Steve asked.

"The one that's convened whenever a cop is killed."

Clay hurled his book at Steve's face, and the young cop reflexively put up a hand to deflect it. "What the-" Steve didn't drop the rifle, but with one hand swatting at a book, there was no way he could get a shot off. He was thrown off-balance for no more than a second or two, but that proved to be all the time Clay needed. With a speed that surprised everyone, perhaps himself most of all, Clay pulled the knife from his waistband and ran forward, jamming it through the bullet-proof vest and into Steve's chest with one sure thrust.

Steve Villanueve died surprised.

Surprised that all his reco

"Clay, get the cell phone from my knapsack and dial 911," Tess called to him, for he was staring stupidly at the dead man at his feet, and she still had her hand pressed to Crow's midsection. "I just hope they know how to get an ambulance to us with most of Broadway blocked off."

Clay took the knapsack from Emmie, dug out the cell phone, and punched in the number. As he turned his back on the window, covering one ear so he could hear over the parade noise, Emmie began moving like a sleepwalker, her blue eyes empty. She stepped around Steve's body as if it weren't there, then clambered to the ledge behind him.

Later, Tess would wonder if she did the right thing. Wasn't Emmie Sterne entitled to her death wish? She was broken, and all the king's horses and men and money couldn't put Emmie together again. Did Emmie even have a life left to save, given that her fate was now a narrow destiny limited to a prison or a psychiatric hospital? But these questions came later, when there was time to think. In the moment, without the luxury of contemplation, she hurled herself across the room and caught Emmie by the knees just before she launched herself into the sky.

If Emmie had weighed a little more, she might have dragged Tess out the window with her. As it was, she kicked and twisted and screamed, begging to die, clawing at Tess's face. Clay dropped the phone, ran forward, and grabbed Tess, and the three fell backward together in a pile, even as a silver Lincoln glided into the intersection below.

They could hear the crowd cheering the benefactor who had brought them this beautiful day, this wonderful parade, all this good food and good music. Of course Gus Sterne waved back, they knew that without looking down. What they couldn't know was if he ever noticed those few spectators who had screamed and pointed upward as Emmie and Tess dangled above him. On Cha

Chapter 30

The emergency room at the county hospital was filled with the usual parade detritus. Children who had fallen on broken bottles, men who had fought over the stupid things that men fight over, pregnant women who had gone into premature labor. Guzman told Tess he could find her a quieter, more private place to wait, but she preferred to stay here, pressing a piece of gauze into her elbow, where a nurse had taken her blood at her insistence. She wasn't sure how these things worked, but Crow was going to need blood, lots of it, and she might as well make the first deposit into his account.

Guzman kept trying to get her to drink a soda, or eat a cookie, but she refused this offer, too. She couldn't imagine anything staying in her stomach, although she was achingly hungry. The last thing she had eaten must have been her breakfast of beans, cold from the can.

"You got a stab wound, this is the emergency room where you want to come," Guzman said. "They see a lot of stab wounds here."

"Humph," she said. Tell the Chamber of Commerce to put it in the brochure.

"Truth is, I've seen a lot of stab wounds, and your friend-well, if you're going to get a knife stuck in your belly, that's the way to go. If anything was hit, it was the appendix, and who needs that anyway? He did lose a lot of blood-"

"Tell me about it," said Tess. She had tried to wash, but the fingernails on her left hand looked as if they had rusted. "He was half-empty when they finally got him in here."

"Now if you were an optimist, you'd say he was half-full."

To her own surprise, she almost laughed, but it was a mirthless, barking sound that veered dangerously close to a sob. She bit her lip. Whatever happened, she didn't want to cry in front of Guzman.

"You know, I don't think I've ever heard you laugh," Guzman said.

"You still haven't."

Guzman scratched his head. "That's fair. Yeah, I guess that's fair. We haven't been having a lot of fun, have we?"

He walked away, toward a bank of phones at the end of the hall. He had been going back and forth to the pay phones since arriving here. Damage control, Tess assumed. The press was all over the story, they just didn't know what the story was. The paramedics had put the call out as an officer down, and every newsroom in town had jumped when that code went across. According to the television bolted high on the waiting room wall, four people were in custody for the stabbing death of an off-duty police officer. It was easier, Guzman had told her, not to try to set the record straight tonight. They'd atone on Sunday morning. Until then, let the city have another night of i

The one good thing about Guzman was that he had instantly grasped what really happened from the moment he arrived at the hospital. "Pilar Rodriguez was Steve. Villanueve's grandmother," Tess had said, and he had nodded sadly, with no need to have anything else explained to him. Then again, he didn't bother to admit she had been right about Gus Sterne, either.

He came back from the phones and settled next to her in one of the hard plastic chairs.

"Whose butt is shaped like these chairs, anyway? Not mine."

"It's not like you'd relax here under any circumstances. A comfortable chair would be a waste."

"Good point," Guzman said. "I never thought about it that way."

Oh shut up, Tess thought. Just shut up. And she heard Steve's voice in her head, saying the same thing.

"You know, Steve was a good cop," Guzman said, although he couldn't possibly know what she had been thinking. "Or so it seemed. Now I find myself wondering when he crossed that line. Did he become a cop to avenge his grandmother's death? Or did the opportunity present itself once he was on the force and began to hear about the information we had developed on Darden and Weeks? I guess we'll never know. But these things usually happen in degrees. A young man starts off trying to catch his grandmother's killer. Who could argue with that? Then one day, he's cutting a man's fingers off in a deserted restaurant, and setting up a deranged young woman to take the fall for everything he's done."