4:01 P.M.
“Theresa?”
She opened her eyes, shut them again. The sunshine hurt too much. Damn, it was hot.
Cavanaugh persisted, patting her cheek. “Theresa. Are you okay?”
She squinted, tried to shake off the liquid dripping into her eyes. It hurt to breathe. “I’d be better if you hadn’t landed on top of me.”
He made a sound like a laugh and helped her to sit up. One side of his face bled where it had scraped the ground. He held up their bound hands; now both their wrists were bloody. “You don’t have another one of those scalpels, do you?”
Her body seemed intact, nothing broken or even bleeding profusely. But it hurt to sit, hurt to breathe, hurt to exist, especially for the right half of her torso-she must have cracked a few ribs. Her lungs worked in short gasps, expanding no more than absolutely necessary.
Sirens wailed around them in a symphony of noise. Most continued past them, skimming the bleachers, but one pulled up in front of them. Mulvaney, Jason, and Frank piled out.
The veteran detective reached her side before the other two got out of the car. “Theresa.”
“I’m all right. At least I’m still alive, I mean. Lucas-”
“They’re under the bleachers,” Cavanaugh cut in.
“We saw it. They won’t get far.”
“Certainly not Lucas,” Theresa said, with only a twinge of hysteria. She let Cavanaugh explain the plan. Mulvaney got on the radio; he instructed the assembling marine units to check all boats in the area for Lucas’s accomplice. “Where’s the money? I mean, what they didn’t distribute to the masses.”
“In the car, with the RDX,” Theresa said, grimacing as Frank cut apart the tie-wraps with a Swiss Army knife. “How’s Paul?”
Frank looked up, into her eyes, and she knew. She knew.
“Mom!”
Rachael bounded from another arriving patrol car before it even stopped moving. Mindless of her ribs, Theresa opened her arms. The impact hurt like hell, and she sobbed for a moment, from relief, and pain, and guilt. “I’m so sorry, honey. This will never happen again, I promise. I promise. I promise.”
Abruptly Rachael separated from her, but still grasping her arms with a grip so tight it took her attention off the ribs. “Mom.”
“I’m sorry-”
“Mom.”
Theresa watched the struggle as her daughter tried to find the right words, to deliver news that no one should ever have to deliver, much less a child to her own mother.
“He’s dead.”
Confirmation, of something she’d known for hours. She knew it from the pallor of his face when he stumbled past her on the burning street. She knew it from the location of the wound and the amount of blood on the floor of the lobby. She knew it from the refusal of the sergeant and Chris to tell her the truth.
Yet she tried, even as Frank put his arm around her and Rachael laid her raven-colored locks on her neck. “No, honey, the hospital probably-”
“Paul’s dead, Mom. I was with him. He died a half hour ago.”
Theresa slid her bleeding arms around her daughter and held on.