“Move, move, move!”

I jump clear just as the Ford hits, smashing the front of the car, dragging its crumpled shell into the street before slinging it aside. My sights come up again, but before I can fire, the truck hauls across the road, rumbling over the curb, heading straight into the curtain of trees separating us from the houses on the other side. It crunches into a thick oak, sending up a cloud of smoke and steam.

Cavallo limps up beside me, clutching her elbow.

“Are you okay?”

She nods quietly, advancing across the street. I follow, ready to fire. We reach the far curb just as the backup units roll up.

“Stop.” I put a hand on her arm. “Let them take it from here.”

I toss the AR-15 to the ground and pull my badge out, just so we’re clear on who’s who. Cavallo holsters her Beretta and sits down on the curb, burying her head in her hands. The uniforms rush up to us, then creep steadily across the grass toward Salazar’s mushroomed truck, weapons drawn. They haul him out of the cab. I hear him screaming as they push him to the ground, twisting his wrists back for cuffing. I slump down beside Cavallo and try to catch my breath.

I tell the story a dozen times, first to strangers and then to friends. Amazingly, when they haul Salazar to the road on a backboard, he’s still breathing in spite of the hole in his upper chest. Wendell Cropper isn’t so fortunate. His body, covered by a tarp, lies where he fell. Numbered markers sit next to my shell casings and his unfired Glock. Inside the box Salazar dropped, Lieutenant Bascombe, one of the first detectives on the scene, discovers the cocaine and the printed photos described by Balinski. The bed of Salazar’s Ford is full of more boxes, some stacked to the brim with coke, some with dog-eared bundles of cash.

Mitch Geiger, the narcotics intel guru, arrives in time to catalog everything, speculating that the truck’s contents represent the haul from at least five stash-house heists.

“They couldn’t move this much,” he says, “so they just sat on it for the time being. If you hadn’t shown up, he’d have disappeared with it all.”

When he finishes with me, Bascombe turns to Cavallo for her account of the action. As she’s speaking, he stops her with an exclamation of surprise, then bends over, scratching at her chest. She swats his hand away.

“Just look,” he says, laughing incredulously.

She glances down. There’s a pancaked bullet lodged in her vest. She panics as soon as she sees it, flailing with the Velcro straps. I help her take the Kevlar off, then inspect the damage.

“You didn’t feel that?” I ask.

She presses a hand to her sternum. “I didn’t realize – ”

Bascombe puts an arm over her shoulder, bares his gleaming teeth. “The boss told me March got his luck back. Looks like it rubbed off on you.”

Instead of basking in the sense of relief, Cavallo sits down again, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. “I could’ve been killed.”

“But you weren’t.”

She doesn’t look reassured.

Before we’re released from the scene, I get a call from Wilcox, who’s been camped out at the hospital since the ambulance transported Salazar.

“He’s still in surgery,” he says, “but they’re telling me he’s going to pull through.”

“Good for him.”

“Good for us, March. I was right about what I said before. On the ride over, he kept taking the oxygen mask off and saying one word. Want to take a guess? Immunity. I’ve got a lawyer coming now. I’m pretty sure he’s going to talk.”

When I hang up, part of me wishes I’d aimed better, putting the round through his head instead of his chest. But then I remember Cropper lying dead on the pavement, and figure I’ve got enough blood on my hands for one day. There’s a burden that goes along with killing, even when you’re justified in taking a life. So being spared that is something, even if it means a deal for Salazar, the man who tried to get me killed.

CHAPTER 27

Donna Mayhew reaches her hands out, one toward Cavallo and the other toward me. Without thinking, I clasp the hand, cool and small. She seems smaller since the funeral, diminished, a wan light in her eyes.

“We’re here to talk to Mr. Robb,” I say.

She nods, as if she’d known this already. “He’s upstairs, doing the high school Bible study.”

The double doors leading through to the stairwell are at the end of the hall, but we don’t move. The three of us stand in the office corridor, exchanging no words, no eye contact. After a moment, Hannah’s mother sighs.

“Evey, too,” she says. “And in that terrible place.”

So Robb told her. Of course he did.

“I tried calling her mom, but I couldn’t bring myself to…” She blinks at me, smiles weakly, and folds her arms tight around her frame. “I don’t know this world. I don’t recognize it anymore.”

Cavallo’s arm goes to her shoulder.

“It’s all right. I just, there’s a connection, isn’t there? The two of them, what happened to them. Something was happening and I didn’t see it.”

“You couldn’t have,” Cavallo says.

But Mrs. Mayhew cocks her head toward me, like she’s just noticed something that should have been obvious all along. “You knew, isn’t that right? When you came here that first time, that thing with the Q-tip. You thought – what? That Evey was Hannah?”

“More or less.” My mouth is so dry, the words come out in a whisper. “I got it wrong.”

“Maybe we all did. For a long time now I’ve had this feeling I don’t know my daughter anymore.” Her tear ducts open, her eyes shine with damp. “And now, I can’t really explain it, but it’s like I got her back.”

At the top of the stairs, my leg throbs and I lean against the wall for a breather, grateful to have the bullet wound as an excuse so Cavallo can’t make any cracks about my being an old man. She waits patiently, chin tucked, preoccupied by our encounter with Donna Mayhew.

“Ready?”

I’m not ready, not after that. Mrs. Mayhew has something to work through, a mystery of her own, much deeper than ours. A solitary question that can never be adjudicated, any answers she might find in this life impossible to validate. I know something about that, and what it can do to a person.

So I push on with a nod. This wing of the church is new to me, a long linoleum-lined hallway with classroom doors on either side. It could pass for a high school except for the Bible verses painted on the walls and the framed portraits of robed and bearded men, heroes of the faith presented in a sentimental neo-Victorian soft focus. I glance into a couple of empty classrooms, noting folding tables and stackable chairs, the space flooded by afternoon light.

At the end of the hallway, Cavallo pushes through a set of double doors, holding one open for me. We pass into a larger classroom, where the office-building suspended ceiling has been torn out, the exposed trusses painted black. Past a sea of now-empty couches, a group of thirty or forty teenagers sits in a semicircle around a raised stage. Carter Robb is up there, a tiny book dangling from one hand, a trap set and amplifiers and a couple of guitars on stands behind him.

“Let’s wait back here,” Cavallo whispers, motioning toward one of the couches. Glancing around, I spot a table in back stacked with empty pizza boxes and two-liter bottles of Coke and Sprite. We take our seats, and a couple of kids turn to see who’s come in. Robb gives no sign of noticing us, though we’re hard to miss.

Judging from the tone of his voice, the lingering pauses between the words, the way he makes pointed eye contact with first one student then another, his talk has reached its climactic finale. Robb’s style is very different from, say, Rick Villanueva’s, making up for what it lacks in polish with an extra dose of intensity. But then he’s not coaxing ex-convicts with outstanding warrants into a state of mental paralysis; he’s telling a bunch of slouching, dough-faced teens that all God wants from them is justice, mercy, and humility. Justice must be the greatest of these, because it’s justice Robb lingers on – not only justice for ourselves, he insists, but for the strangers among us, for the outcasts.