to imagine the unimaginable themselves.
“Bobby,” she said firmly. “You don’t want to know what happened to Alissa. Go on with your life, remember all the beautiful things about her, and don’t ever look back.”
He stared at her.
“Not ever, Bobby,” she whispered. “Not ever.”
He wanted to ask more, he would have asked more. But the room exploded with noise as two uniformed cops burst through the door, a harried administrative assistant close behind them.
“He’d want to know,” one of them was saying, but he stopped short and stared when he saw Maggie.
“What?” Maggie asked sharply.
“We heard you were in a wreck,” the patrolman explained, sounding confused. “At an intersection a couple blocks up Independence. It just came over the radio—”
“Peggy,” Maggie cried as she jumped to her feet. She was out the door before anyone else could react. I was right behind her.
Chapter 34
The intersection was in chaos. Maggie’s car had rolled over several times and come to rest smashed against a telephone pole. The roof and driver’s side door were crumpled in and the hood was jackknifed against the front windshield. A fire hydrant nearby had been sheared off and water sprayed out in a wide arc over the scene. Oil swirled over the surface of growing puddles nearby, creating miniature rainbows of incongruent beauty.
Two fire trucks and four patrol cars had responded to the scene, with more arriving every minute. All were being frantically cleared away to make way for the Jaws of Life rescue team with their portable engine and strangely oversized hydraulic tools that looked like weapons out of a science fiction movie. They worked with choreographed determination, positioning the spreader, attaching the piston rod, and readying the cutter nearby. They used the spreader to pry the front door open and a rescue worker placed a ram against the driver’s side floor. He began extending the piston rod, working frantically to push the dashboard up to create enough space to free Peggy from the car.
A growing crowd formed a shield around the wrecked car. Policemen were starting to direct cars around the scene and were pushing back the curious that stood in a ring around the wreck. I scanned the crowd eagerly wit nessing the disaster, trying to find Maggie, and recognized several faces: the two men and the woman who had been at the Double Deuce the night before, staring at the bloodied victims of the fight, as if waiting for death to arrive.
Unless that’s exactly what they were.
The watchers felt my presence and looked up at me, furtive at being caught. No, it was more than that. They seemed almost frightened that I had spotted them. Just then, a car drove by the scene too fast and had to swerve to avoid by- standers. People screamed and I looked away at the sound. The car recovered and sped on, the crowd unharmed, but when I looked back at the wreck, the watchers were gone.
Who were they? What were they? And why did they fear me?
Did this mean that Peggy would live?
An angry murmur was starting to run through the crowd like an electrical current: Maggie was shoving her way through the onlookers. There was no way she would be stopped. The patrolmen guarding the perimeter recognized her and let her though. She pushed to the front of the rescue group and I caught a glimpse of her face as she reached out to Peggy, still trapped in the car—and what I saw in her face, oh, what I saw in her face. It could not be good. Whatever Maggie had seen in the car, I knew it could not be good.
What I saw next made it all worse. I saw Danny. He stood half a block away, staring toward the chaos, staring at Maggie, mouth open. And he was covered with blood. Blood smeared his face and stained his shirt, and his hands were drenched in it as if he wore long red gloves. He stood as if he were in a daze—had he somehow been in the car with Peggy? No, I had seen Peggy drive off alone. That could not be the case. But he had gone to her after the wreck; that was where he’d picked up the blood. Had he been the one to call it in?
Or had he been the one to cause it?
Gonzales had arrived. He strode through the crowd like a conquering hero, people parting before his authority and gawking at his uniform. Danny saw Gonzales, too. He