10. Farrow #2
“Out the back. Alley clear. Need pickup.”
“Collins is rolling around to you,” Dane said. “Sixty seconds.”
“Copy.”
The SUV came around the corner, and Collins stopped with the rear passenger door at my hip. Wiley and I were inside before Collins had taken his foot off the brake.
“Mt. Auburn?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I took a long look at Wiley. He was a wreck. He was holding himself together, but his color was wrong, and his hands were folded on his thighs with the left one trembling.
I tapped the comm.
“Moving to Mt. Auburn. Wiley’s intact.”
“Copy,” Dane said. “Eamon’s in the ambulance with Patterson. They’re three minutes ahead of you.”
“Conscious?”
“Was when they loaded him. They put a line in him on the sidewalk.”
“Through and through?”
“Don’t know. Eamon said low chest. That’s all I have.”
Low chest. Christ. That could be a lung, or it could be the liver.
“Cabot?”
“He’s right here and quiet.”
“Tell him Wiley is fine.”
“He heard you. He’s two feet away from me.”
I closed my eyes for one breath.
“Farrow,” Dane said.
“Yeah.”
“You got him out. You did the job.”
“Don’t make it a thing, Dane.”
“I’m not.”
Collins made the turn onto Memorial. The Charles River opened on our left, gray and flat under the late autumn sky.
Wiley spoke. “He was twenty feet from the door. He was almost inside.”
“Yes.”
“They waited until he was almost inside, Farrow.”
“I know.”
Collins took the turn to the hospital. We went up the long drive without speaking.
The waiting room was at the end of a corridor that smelled like floor polish and industrial-strength antiseptic. There were two rows of bolted chairs in harvest gold. A vending machine hummed at one end of the space.
It was the wrong room for what was happening. That was the thing about hospitals. The architecture never quite lived up to the news being shared inside it.
I put Wiley in a chair against the back wall, nothing behind him but cinderblock. I took the chair beside him without sitting all the way back.
Eamon joined us four minutes later. He had dried blood on the cuff of his right sleeve. He sat across from us in a chair with a broken armrest.
“He’s in their hands now,” he said.
“Surgery?” I asked.
“Surgery. They had him on an IV on the sidewalk. He was talking when they put him in the ambulance. He wasn’t talking when they took him out.”
“Lung?”
“They don’t know yet.”
“Where’s the briefcase?” Wiley asked.
“Cambridge PD has it,” Eamon said.
“Was it open?”
“Closed.”
Wiley nodded. “I want to call my husband.”
Eamon smiled for one second and drew a handset out from inside his jacket. He passed it across the gap between the chairs. “Five minutes.”
Wiley took the phone with one hand and handed me my jacket with the other. He stood and looked down the corridor in both directions. He chose left, where there was an alcove with a window and an empty chair.
“Farrow, do you need anything?” Eamon asked.
“I need Patterson to make it through the next two hours.” I also wanted Dane, but that wasn’t a need—yet.
“Beyond that.”
“I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”
Wiley stopped speaking. He didn’t hang up. He held the phone against his ear with his eyes closed and his free hand pressed flat against the top of his thigh.
Then he said something and hung up. He sat in the alcove chair for another half-minute before moving.
When he returned to us, Wiley handed Eamon the phone. “Thank you.” He sat beside me.
“He was my editor,” Wiley said.
“He is your editor,” I corrected.
My phone buzzed against my hip.
I checked the screen. It was Dane on the phone, not his comm.
“Two minutes,” I said.
“Take what you need,” Eamon said.
I walked to the same alcove where Wiley had taken his call. I kept him in my peripheral vision the entire time.
“Dane.”
“Where were you?”
“At the elevator. I saw the gun a split second before the shots and put Wiley under me.”
“Distance from the glass?”
“Twelve, fifteen feet.”
“So, Patterson—”
“Thirty-five or forty from me, on the other side of the glass.”
“What did you see?”
“Shooter wore a charcoal coat. He fired both rounds before I had the sidearm out."
Through the line, I heard the sounds of the safehouse: the radiator and a chair creaking, probably Cabot’s. I listened for Dane’s breathing.
“Farrow, there were two shots.”
“I’m not hit, Dane.”
“Building security caught the second shot,” he said. “I watched it go in. I saw the angle. Doing the geometry, if you’d been six inches to the left, they’d have taken you out in a body bag.”
His words knocked the breath out of me.
“Farrow, are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“He was carrying a sealed envelope, Farrow.”
“Envelope?”
“It was in the case. Cambridge PD has it.”
I paused. “Dane, I’m bringing Wiley back.”
“Yes, you are.”
He hung up. After one more beat, I stood and walked back down the corridor. Eamon was on the phone, and he ended the call when I was three chairs short of Wiley.
I stopped at the foot of Wiley’s chair.
“Patterson’s out of surgery,” Eamon said. “He’s going to live.”
Wiley closed his eyes. His shoulders dropped a full inch.
“There’s something else,” Eamon said. “He woke up in recovery and asked for a pen. He wrote one word on the inside of a chart and then he went back under.”
“What word?”
Eamon looked at me. Then at Wiley.
“Cabot.”