“Can I please just go?”

Half a dozen different medical personnel answer in the affirmative over the course of a couple of hours, but there’s always another doctor to see, another bout of bedside manner to endure, until I start to feel like an animal in a zoo. Finally, a thick-waisted nurse comes in, her every movement calibrated to communicate how unimpressed she is by my suffering – after all, her frown seems to say, they get plenty of real gunshot wounds here. I’ll have to do better next time if I want to be taken seriously.

“You’re ready to go,” she says, and this time she really means it.

Charlotte, who’s been sitting quietly at the foot of the bed most of this time, rises to her feet. As I put weight on my injured leg, she rushes forward.

“Are you all right to walk?”

“Of course,” I say, trying not to wince at the jab of pain.

Out in the hallway, Cavallo leans against a wall checking messages on her phone.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Your next appointment’s waiting.” She nods down the corridor toward a couple of guys in nice suits. IAD and the District Attorney’s office. Standard procedure after a shooting. “And when they’re done with you, you’ve got a few days off, March. Don’t even think of coming back.”

Charlotte coils her arm around mine. “He won’t.”

On the way home, Charlotte swings by Whole Foods, leaving me in the car while she picks up all my favorites, which means nothing but ice cream and white chocolate until the weekend, possibly fried chicken and barbeque, too. She makes me wait in the car with the engine running.

“Keep the doors locked,” she says, like she’s afraid someone might come along and snatch me.

I sit fiddling with the radio for a while, avoiding anything that promises to develop into a news update. Two meteorologists are arguing on an AM call-in show about the severity of a hurricane building out in the Caribbean, so I let them talk. My hearing seems back to normal, but I snap my fingers a few times just to be sure.

As I’m waiting, a squeaky shopping cart rumbles past. I crane my neck around to watch. Last time I found myself sitting in a car, somebody tried to kill me. It seems like a long time ago, but it was only a few hours. The sun is just now setting on the near-fatal day.

My phone rings. Checking the display, I see it’s Bridger.

“You heard, huh?”

“Everything’s all right?”

“Don’t worry,” I say, “I won’t need you to do my autopsy for a while yet.”

“Actually, I think Dr. Green has first dibs.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Listen,” he says. “Are you sitting down? I have the results of that dna test for you.”

My back straightens and I press the phone tight against my ear. “Go ahead.”

“Sheryl did the comparison, but I went in and double-checked, just to be certain. We worked up the swab from the mother, got a profile, then made the comparison with the samples taken from the sheets at your crime scene.”

“I understand the process, Alan. What did you get back?”

“The results are pretty conclusive…”

“You’re killing me here, man, and I was already in some pain. Just tell me. Is the girl missing from my scene a match for Hannah Mayhew?”

He lets out a long sigh. “No, Roland. It’s not a match. Not even close, I’m afraid.”

The driver’s door opens and Charlotte leans in, asking me to reach over and pop the hatchback button. She turns, then does a double take, leaning further into the car.

“Roland, what’s wrong? What are you doing?”

Her eyes are wide with alarm. I glance down. My free hand is clutched around my bandaged thigh, squeezing hard enough to make the blood seep. I don’t feel pain, though.

“Bridger,” I say into the phone, “I’ve gotta go now. Thanks for letting me know.”

I close the phone and toss it onto the dashboard while Charlotte leans over my leg, clamping a hand over her mouth.

So that’s it. My long shot proved too long. Of course it did. A coincidence like that, how did I ever convince myself it might pan out? I’m a fool. They all knew it. Hedges and Bascombe with their convulsive back-patting, the long-suffering Cavallo indulging my idiotic whim. It would have made for such a neat, simple conclusion, but then there are no simple conclusions or neat ones, either. I want to hit something, even shoot something – only I’ve done that already today, and it didn’t seem to help.

Charlotte loads the groceries, then studies me for signs of collapse.

“You are all right, aren’t you, Roland?”

“I’m fine.”

If I were the sort of man to learn from his mistakes, I would be fine. I could go home with my beautiful wife and let her prop my leg up and proceed to baby me, passing the next couple of days in a well-earned anesthetized haze. Then I’d go back to the job practically a hero, having fought off single-handed a pair of stone-cold killers, no doubt gang muscle, hardcore enforcers.

Instead, as Charlotte drives quietly toward our neighborhood, as the sun’s orange hues deepen and the first fat drops of rain break across the windshield, I steel myself for a nighttime errand. Once she’s satisfied that I’ve been squared away in front of the television, confident enough for a glass of water and a couple of sleeping pills, I’ll dress quickly and limp out to the car, keeping a rendezvous with my last hope.

Joe Thomson, if he’s going to drop in on me, won’t do it at my house. He’ll be waiting at the Paragon for me to show. And after today, there’s not a chance I’ll disappoint him.

The girl tied to the bed and Hannah Mayhew are not one and the same. But Thomson’s still dangling the names of the shooters. My path back into Homicide just contracted into the tightest of crawl spaces, but it’s still there. And no matter what it takes, I intend to squeeze through.

CHAPTER 15

I wait, alone at a table, quite still in spite of the movement all around. For ten minutes. For sixty. For half as much again, until the ice in my untouched glass is down to a pair of floating lozenges, murkily transparent. I wait as the crowd ebbs and wanes, as the music changes and the lights dim. The second hand on my watch crawls by, but I’m done with checking it.

Either he’ll come or he won’t.

If he doesn’t, then I’ll make it my business first thing in the morning to track him down. Regardless of my enforced leave, ignoring all the hoops still left to jump through after a good shooting, I will make Joe Thomson my focus, my case, my mission in life. If he doesn’t come to me, then I will go to him.

The bartender’s playing one trance anthem after another, the rapid pulse insinuating itself into my leg, which doesn’t seem to know the difference between superficial and serious wounds, judging by the throb no quantity of prescription tablets seems to dissolve. No sign tonight of the waitress Marta, sparing me any potential drama. There’s only so much I can take in the space of a single day.

All the televisions overhead are showing silent baseball highlights, except for the small flat-screen just over the bar, where the close- captioned news is running. My eye, drawn to the screen, anticipates the familiar images of Hannah Mayhew, her Ford Focus, the seventies Greenwood Forest mock-Tudor she and her mother call home. Or a clip from one of the local interviews Donna Mayhew finally submitted to – not Larry King, not yet, but she’s finally doing her duty to the public, to all those strangers out there acting, as Carter Robb said, in loco parentis, at least as far as the grieving is concerned.

But they don’t appear. Instead, the usual montage of men in dark suits lit by camera flashes making carefully worded statements to the press, interspersed with the occasional defendant trying to shield his face from the lens as he’s hustled up the courthouse steps. Maybe people have grown tired of Hannah, or at least need a break.