First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [10]
JACK'S MIND seemed to drift, as if the jolt he'd received in the crash had dislodged him from the present. He saw himself standing in National Memorial Park over the freshly dug hole in the ground into which Emma's mahogany casket would be lowered as soon as Father Larrigan ceased his interminable droning. Sharon was standing beside him, but apart. There might have been a continent between them. For her, he didn't exist, or rather, he existed in a world full of horror and death she could no longer inhabit. They'd yelled and screamed at each other, dishes had been hurled, a lamp that caused a flurry of flame that Jack quickly stamped out. No matter. The fight went on as if no bell had rung, until they came to blows, which was what they wanted or, at least, needed. Then all was still, save for Sharon's quiet sobbing.
Father Larrigan was done and the casket began its mechanical descent into the ground.
"No!" screamed Sharon, breaking to the casket. "My little girl! No!"
Jack made a move toward her, but Father Larrigan was closer. He put a sheltering arm around her.
Sharon leaned against his big Irish frame. "Why did Emma die, Father? It's all so senseless. Why did she have to die?"
"God works in mysterious ways," Father Larrigan said softly. "His plan is beyond human understanding."
"God?" Sharon shoved him away from her in disgust. "God wouldn't take the life of a young innocent girl whose life hadn't yet begun. No plan could be so cruel, no plan could excuse my daughter's death. Better to say it was the work of the devil!"
Father Larrigan looked like he was about to faint. "Mrs. McClure, please! Your blaspheming—"
But Sharon would not be denied. "There is no plan!" she howled to Father Larrigan, to the unfeeling sky. "There is no God!"
AS JACK sucked in pure oxygen, his brain ceased its wandering. He opened his eyes.
"Ah, you're with us again," Bennett said.
He sat with only one buttock on the bench, tipped slightly forward. "D'you feel up to telling me what happened, Jack? Last I know you defused the packet of C-four the perp set in the basement of Friedland High School."
To the EMT woman's distress, Jack slipped off the oxygen mask. "The perp broke free of custody, I don't know how. I know my way around that basement, I knew he must be headed for the Bilco doors on the east side—besides the stairs, they're the only way out. I went after him. He hot-wired the principal's car, took off. I took off after him."
"You lost him?"
Jack tried to smile, but grimaced instead. In the aftermath of the crash, his head throbbed, but his body buzzed with the excess adrenaline it was still pumping out. "There's a steep embankment about a half mile back. He swerved into me there. I braked, swung into him, and he did a three-sixty while going off the edge."
The EMT strapped the mask back over Jack's nose and mouth. "Sorry, I need to get him back on oxygen."
Bennett shot her a glance. "Is he in shock?"
"No, but he will be if you keep this up."
Bennett frowned disapprovingly. "I mean, how's he doing overall?"
"There's no outward sign of concussion." She tightened the straps of the mask. "No broken bones, and the laceration to his scalp is superficial." Noting Jack's pallor, she recalibrated the flow of oxygen. "But I'm not a doctor. He needs to be properly evaluated."
The chief nodded vaguely. His face was fissured by hard decisions, painful failures, bureaucratic frustrations, cragged with the loneliness that only men like Bennett and Jack could feel. We're a breed apart, Jack thought. We inhabit the world just like everyone else, but we walk through it as shadows. We have to in order to find the places where the vermin live, worm ourselves in to lure them out, or to chop them into tiny pieces. And after a while, even if we're extremely vigilant, we become so used to being shadows that we don't feel comfortable anywhere else