Unhinged by Sarah Graves Page B

minute.” Harry’s eyes said I wouldn’t be happy with it, either. But by now of course I had to hear the rest.
    “I also didn’t catch
that
guy,” he said grimly. “Instead, he caught me. Here.” He pulled a folded newspaper clipping from the breast pocket of his worn leather jacket. “This sums it up.”
    The date inked on the clipping said it was three years old but the events popped out of it as if they were only yesterday, the kind of occurrences you imagine only happen in nightmares.
    Or you hope so. “Jesus,” I said when I finished. There was a lot more detail in the clip than the
News
had picked up from the wire stories.
    “This guy found out you were after him? He killed your wife
and
your . . .”
    He winced. “Yeah. I had a girlfriend. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it was.”
    “And he found out about them, somehow, and he killed her. I mean, killed them both.”
    “Right. But there’s more. Final act: the guy suckers me to a rooftop by the river. He’s got a woman up there, he’s holding her hostage at knifepoint. The woman is a hooker, addict, well-known skell. In other words, she’s trash.”
    My turn to wince. “I mean,” he said, “from the way they spun it, the tabloids. Not from my point of view. Never from mine.”
    He took a deep breath. “So anyway, he’s got a mask on, so I can’t identify him, and he’s got the woman at the edge. Ten-story building. And he’s dancing around up there, daring me to take my shot.”
    “And?” Had the
News
named the cop involved in what it had called a hostage situation gone wrong? I couldn’t remember.
    He continued steadily. “This is a guy who has killed people I love, people my friends love. I don’t know why I didn’t charge him, take the three of us off the goddamned roof.”
    “But you didn’t. And you didn’t shoot.”
    He dropped his gaze. “No. He kept holding her so I’d have to shoot her, to get at him. I’d put in a call for backup and I was waiting. But before they were even in position, he spotted them. It was like
he
was waiting for
them
.”
    The fluorescent lights set into the ceiling tiles made an insectile hum, flickering just at the edge of my awareness like the light in a bad dream. “Waiting for . . . ?”
    “Witnesses,” Harry said flatly. “Cop witnesses, who’d know how badly I had screwed up, going up there alone. And the reporters who’d heard the radio traffic on the call, so everyone else was going to find out about it, too. Once he had them arranged . . .”
    I caught on. “He was taunting you. You could’ve shot him but he was betting you wouldn’t shoot an innocent woman. Innocent at the time. Beside him, she must’ve looked like an angel.”
    Harry Markle’s eyes gazed into the middle distance. “Yeah. Like an angel. But when he pushed her, she couldn’t fly.”
    He looked at me. “Didn’t,” he said, “fly.” Suddenly my son in his hospital bed seemed safe as houses.
    “He scrambled down a roof door,” Harry recited, “locked it inside, got clean away. And that was the end of my cop career.”
    Wade came to the door with a copy of
Working Waterfront
in one hand. The big front-page story was about an old lobster boat fitted out like an emergency room, to bring health care to island towns even more remote than Eastport.
    Wade made an A-OK sign with his thumb and fingers, waited as Harry went on: “I got put on desk duty, finally sent to a shrink, which by that point I needed. I kept seeing the woman’s face.”
    “I can imagine,” I sympathized, then wished I hadn’t.
    Because I couldn’t imagine. Not really.
    “But it was also all
they
needed, the bosses, to get rid of an embarrassment. Me.”
    He looked up. “I traveled. Now I’m here. Decent retirement package, I had my years in. They did what they had to do, get me to go without a big fight. So I buy an old house, get a dog, live a life. Such as it is.”
    None of that had been in the papers, of course.