Merritt ran, jumped a track, and crouched low behind a series of track-mounted tele-cars with beige bins. The man fired. I couldn’t see Merritt, but I knew she was still moving. I could hear her feet pound against the metal grid floor.

She leapt another track. I lifted a fire extinguisher from a nearby rack and threw it as far as I could in the opposite direction. The man with the gun spun and fired at the bouncing canister before he recognized the diversion.

He looked right at the electrical panel that I was hiding behind. I couldn’t tell if he saw me. He then turned and refocused on Merritt.

She was gone. It was obvious he couldn’t locate her. Frantically, I scanned. I couldn’t locate her either.

The man in the bomber jacket jumped a track, almost getting himself clobbered by a tele-car. He checked behind him for a moment and was more careful as he crawled across the next track, to the place where he had last seen Merritt.

She wasn’t there. I started scanning the tele-cars that were scooting on the tracks around the room. He did, too. Neither of us found her.

Frustrated, he started back toward the bridge. Above me, I heard a muffled squeal and saw Merritt as she was thrown from a beige bin on a tele-car as a cam forced it to tilt down to be certain it was empty and ready for its next load. Instantly, she realized her sudden vulnerability and cowered in a tight ball. She looked like a pile of laundry on a stainless steel tray.

The man reached the top of the bridge, raised his arm, and aimed his weapon at Merritt.

I screamed, “Nooo!” as two quick gunshots exploded.

Merritt lay immobile.

The man stood immobile, too, and didn’t fire again. He seemed to lower his gun an inch or so.

Another shot rang out.

The man’s knees buckled and he pitched forward over the rail at the top of the bridge, falling head first into a tele-car that was loaded with a car seat in a plastic bag. The tele-car immediately sped up an incline and started to exit the loading area to begin its journey to the concourse.

Six inches to the left of Merritt’s buttocks I could see a bullet hole ripped in the stainless steel. I called out, “Merritt? Merritt?” and began to run toward her, dodging tele-cars and leaping tracks.

I watched as she unfolded herself and sat, hugging her knees to her chest. She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking high above me, behind the bridge. I turned, too, and saw her Uncle Sam standing on a catwalk with three uniformed Denver cops. He was holding a handgun as though it were a precious baby.

“Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam. Did you get him?”

Sam lowered his weapon and said, “Yes, babe. I got him. It’s over.”

Forty

Merritt and Lucy missed their flight.

But United Airlines officials scrambled to take advantage of the goodwill opportunity and offered to upgrade them to first-class on the next nonstop, which happened to be my flight. Unfortunately for me, only two spare seats were available in front of the curtain, and I was left with my aisle seat in the main cabin.

Merritt and Sam and I spent the time until takeoff talking to Denver cops.

Sam stayed so close to Merritt, it was if he were handcuffed to her. I knew that when the time for boarding came, he had every intention of walking her onto the plane and buckling her seat belt around her waist.

The airport security offices where we were being interviewed were on the sixth level of the main terminal building, not more than fifty feet above the location where Sam had shot Dr. Terence Gusman to death. For almost ten minutes after the siege ended, none of us knew that the man pursuing Merritt had been Dr. Gusman, or that he was dead. It took that long for the tele-car with his body and the car seat to make its way to Concourse B, Gate 28.

Gusman had been carrying an ID and a neatly written note assailing the media for twice destroying his family. He wasn’t naive about his plan; he had apparently anticipated the possibility of not surviving this last attempt at earning some vengeance on the media in general, and Brenda Strait in particular, by making one last assault on Brenda’s family. While Lucy accompanied Merritt to the bathroom, Sam was quiet and showed no signs of regret over shooting Gusman. I wanted to provoke some words from him, so I said, “At least your loose end is tied up now, Sam.”

He looked at me curiously. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been wondering why the harassment against Brenda stopped when it did. Well, Gusman chaired the medical board; he knew about Chaney’s illness through MedExcel. That’s why the harassment stopped before Chaney’s condition became public. He was sure he could keep the protocol from ever being approved for her and he was waiting patiently for her to die. Chaney’s death would be his retribution against Brenda. There was no need to continue the harassment anymore.”

He waved his arm in the direction of the baggage system. “This was what, desperation, then?”

“Don’t you think? He hears that his medical board’s decision to deny additional care for Chaney has been overruled and that Chaney is off to Seattle to get the protocol. He sees on the news that Merritt is going to follow her. Maybe he thought this would be his last chance to get even.”

I expected he would argue with me. Instead he lamented that he’d let Gusman slip. “You know, I should’ve had him picked up. I didn’t figure him for this. I played this too delicate. I should have plowed his head into the boards when I had him in the open. If I had done that, he would have been too timid for this kind of bullshit.”

“Hindsight’s great. Yeah, you probably should’ve had him picked up. And if you did, how long do you think he would have been in custody?”

Sam scoffed, “Eight hours. Maybe a day. Maybe not that long. That’s not the point. I needed to send him a message to leave my family alone. I didn’t.”

“This isn’t hockey, Sam.”

“Hockey is life. This is life.”

“So? What difference would it have made had you gotten in his face? Everyone survives, the way it turned out. Merritt’s going to be okay. Chaney has a chance. No way of telling what would have happened the other way.”

“Yeah,” he said.

He was blowing me off. “Sam, thanks for all you did. You’re a hero today.”

He nodded, acknowledging something. I wasn’t sure what. “You know, you two were great down there. Merritt, what a kid, the way she moved around. And you did good in there, too, you know that? He would have had her without you.”

“I don’t know about that, Sam. I will say it was the oddest ten minutes I’ve ever had in my life.”

“You reach Lauren, tell her what happened?”

“No. I’ll tell her when we get there. She has enough on her mind with her mom. You reach Brenda and John?”

“John. Told him there was a delay. That’s all. They have enough stress too, you know; I didn’t want to go into this on the phone. Chaney is still set to start those new drugs tomorrow. You’ll have to fill them in about Dr. Gusman when you get there. Use your judgment.”

“Fine,” I said.

Lauren was standing with Lucy about thirty feet from John Trent as I exited the plane a long time after the first-class cabin was empty. I kissed her and held her and kissed her again. Over my shoulder, I watched Trent as he embraced Merritt ten yards away.

Her arms still around me, Lauren turned to Lucy as though she were continuing an earlier conversation. She said, “You said you missed the earlier flight? What happened?”

Lucy looked at me, hoping I would field the question. I grinned and glanced once toward Merritt, then back at Lucy before I said, “Oh, you know, just another problem with the baggage system at DIA.”

Sam phoned me at Lauren’s parents’ house that evening. He had already spoken with his wife and learned that early the next morning, Chaney would indeed start receiving the experimental drugs from Japan that would, with luck, arrest the virus that was destroying her heart. A short while later she would be a prime candidate for a donor organ.