Cardinal put the phone down, holding his hands up. "Okay, look. I'm not armed, all right? Just take it easy, now."

On the TV, Fraser entered the scene and yanked the woman away. Todd Curry raised his hands in pretended surprise.

"Did you follow a script?" Cardinal asked her. "Work out the moves ahead of time?"

The woman turned to follow his gaze. "That's Eric," she said in a small voice. "That's my Eric."

Cardinal inched ever so slightly toward the closet, the half-open door where the Beretta hung in its holster.

"Don't move."

"Just relax. I'm not moving. I'm not going anywhere." Cardinal used the gentlest, least threatening voice he could summon. On the TV, Fraser gripped a hammer. It must have been resting on the back of the couch, ready for use. He raised the hammer and was shouting something at Todd Curry.

He brought the hammer down. The boy's mouth gaped, all the facial muscles went slack. Fraser hit him again and again. The woman had moved behind the couch, behind the boy, and was pulling back on his bloodied hair. She pulled back on his hair the better to expose him, while Fraser kicked the life out of him.

"He was nothing," the woman told Cardinal. "He was just some scum off the street." She pulled the remote out from under her and pressed the rewind button.

On the screen the action reversed. Fraser pulled his boot repeatedly from Todd Curry's ribs, and the boy slid back up onto the couch. Strength flowed back into the slack, battered limbs. The woman let go of his hair and backed around the end of the couch to sit once more beside him.

Now the hammer was taking back its blows, sucking murder back into itself. Blood flowed upward into the boy's nose; scarlet tears shot backward into his eyes. He lowered his arms, and they healed. Terror gave way to astonishment, and with one last comical jerk, the hammer yanked all pain and shock from Todd Curry's face. The boy sat back and laughed.

Cardinal was backing closer to the closet. "Why don't you tell me how it happened? Did Eric force you to help? Was that it?"

The woman stood up. "Eric never made me do anything I didn't want to do. Eric happened to love me. Can you understand that? Eric loved me. We had a special love. Better than anything you read about in books. And it was real. It transcended space and time, if you can understand that. No, I don't think you can."

"Tell me about it, then. Help me understand."

She was in the proper stance, slightly crouched, left hand cradling the right. She sighted down the barrel at him.

Cardinal was moving ever so slightly back toward the closet. He began to raise his hands, to show her they were still empty.

The woman pointed the gun lower. Her expression was distracted, as if she were seeing not Cardinal, not the scene before her eyes, but some distant, remembered scene. Then her eyes cleared, and she shot him.

The bullet entered Cardinal's abdomen just below the navel. He fell to one knee as if genuflecting. A moment's grace, and then it was as if his entrails had burst into flame. He curled over and fell on his side.

The woman took two quick steps and stood over him. She neither grimaced nor smiled. "How does it feel?" she asked quietly.

The closet door was maybe three feet away. It might as well have been twenty. The woman stood over Cardinal, still gripping her revolver, keeping out of range of his hands and feet. Cardinal's only thought was for the closet, but he could not get back on his knees.

"How does it feel?" she asked again. "Does it feel good? Tell me how you like it."

Cardinal heard himself crying. You didn't often hear a grown man cry like that. He remembered a car wreck on the overpass, a man with a piece of aluminum trim clean through his belly, impaling him to the seat. He had wept like this.

Blood spilled hotly over his hand. He was trying to hold his stomach together as he struggled to his knees. The woman backed away.

Two steps to the closet. Two steps, then a long reach and he would have the Beretta. Cardinal tried to crawl, but his arm crumpled under him.

The woman came closer. She looked upside down- a trick of perspective that his brain, half-blind with pain, could not sort out. "It's a belly shot," she said. "It takes forever to die with a belly shot," she said. "What do you think about that?"

She was aiming again, pointing at his belly again.

Cardinal said, "Oh, fuck," or something like it, and raised a pathetic hand to stop her.

He didn't hear the shot this time. The bullet burst through his hand and tore into his belly. The room went white, then gradually returned like an image in a developing tank. Cardinal could not remember where the thing was that he had been trying to reach. What had he been looking for? What had been so important?

That woman was speaking, but he could not distinguish the words over his pain. Four more? Was that what she said? I have four more for you? The words lined up in his head but would not make sense. Four more where those came from, that was it. She says she has four more bullets where those came from.

The gun wavered over him. Cardinal curled up on his side, as if he could deflect the next bullet with a rib. Then there was a roar and something heavy hit Cardinal's leg. The gun had tumbled from the woman's hands.

Cardinal opened his eyes. The woman's chest was covered with blood. She had jerked up and back, as if hearing her name called from a distance. A hand drifted up to her chest wound, dabbed at it, and the woman's face creased into an expression of irritation, as if she were anticipating a nasty cleaning bill.

She's dead, Cardinal thought. She's dead and she doesn't know it yet. The woman collapsed on top of him, her breasts pressing into his hip.

Then Delorme was kneeling over him. Lise Delorme was kneeling over him and talking in the soothing tones he had heard himself use with victims of terrible accidents. You'll be all right, hang in there, don't disappear on me now. Futile in the extreme. But Delorme had something white in her hands- a pillowcase, or was it the sling from her injured arm?- and she was tearing it very efficiently into strips.

59

THE Intensive Care Unit at St. Francis Hospital is much stricter than the one at City Hospital where Keith London was confined. St. Francis has a firm rule: No visitors except close relatives.

How then, Cardinal wondered- even stupefied by painkillers, he turned this over in his mind- how then did it happen that Arsenault and Collingwood had been standing in this room? Arsenault and Collingwood, yes, and then Delorme had shown up, arm once again in a sling. Cardinal would have to upbraid her for not using the proper stance, for not cradling the revolver properly. That should get a rise.

Delorme had shown him- with earnestness and a great show of secrecy- a sealed envelope. He knew this was full of meaning, but treading his anodyne ebb and swell, he could not piece it together. It was his handwriting on the envelope. Why had he been writing to the chief?

And how on earth had McLeod come to be here? Wasn't McLeod laid up in traction? He had come hopping in, loomed beside the bed with crutches jammed in either armpit, displaying the filthy sock over his cast, or whatever they called those plastic things they used instead of casts. McLeod had upset some other visitors with his language. Head nurse had been summoned. Head nurse not pleased.

Karen Steen had come. Lovely, gentle Karen Steen, bearing thanks and solicitude like balm. She had brought Cardinal a teddy bear dressed in a cop's hat, he could smell her perfume on it still. From Miss Steen's visit he retained this much: Keith London was out of intensive care. The doctors at City Hospital proclaimed Keith London was on the mend. He was conscious now, and speaking slowly, Miss Steen had said, but Keith remembered nothing of the events surrounding his injury and she hoped he never would.