smart about everything. Except how could you know John would go after Nico? How could you be sure he’d find him?”
“Oh, I wasn’t sure. But I thought one of you, maybe both, would turn up, and so I decided to wait around and see. It wasn’t hard; campus was practically empty. If you had come instead of John, or if you had both come together, I would have had to play things differently.” Low in Hazard’s field of vision, Mitchell’s hand, the one with the gun, had begun to move restlessly. “Now it’s my turn: why did you come, Emery? If you figured it all out, why show up like this?”
“I figured a cowardly little fuck like you might scamper off. I didn’t want that to happen.” Hazard took a deep breath, running his hand slowly over the pitted concrete until his fingers closed over something hard and rectangular. A brick, he guessed. “Why did you kill Susan?”
“Because I could.” Mitchell shrugged. “And, like Rory and Phil, she had a connection to you that was loose but real. I knew the chief would be focused on Wesley, and it was an easy way to make you suspect the people around you.” He smiled, a brilliant flash of teeth. “Tell me you had your doubts about John-Henry. Just for a moment. Tell me you wondered, when they found the drugs and Rory’s and Phil’s underwear, and Somers’s prints were all over everything. Tell me you at least had an instant when you worried your boyfriend might be the one behind everything.”
“He’s my fiancé,” Hazard said quietly. The wound in his leg was throbbing more fiercely, and he was vaguely aware that he’d lost quite a bit of blood. His vision was narrowing. Static hissed in his ears. “Do you know when I decided to kill you? Instead of wasting the taxpayer’s dollar on a trial, I mean.”
“Emery, only one person is going to die today, and that’s you because you were so desperate to play the lone hero—”
Hazard threw the brick. It caught Mitchell on the side of the head, tearing open his cheek and knocking his head back. He stumbled, screaming. Then, wiping blood from his face, he aimed the gun at Hazard.
Somers came out of the darkness, grabbing Mitchell’s arm and forcing the gun up and away. Mitchell squeezed off a shot as they struggled. The redhead was making a keening noise as Somers forced one arm behind his back. Hazard watched Somers’s face slowly darken with the effort, and then he scooted forward and drove the heel of his foot into Mitchell’s balls. Mitchell squealed, dropped the gun, and collapsed. He was puking while Somers snapped the cuffs on him.
“It was when I realized I’d trusted you with my daughter, you fucking monster,” Hazard said. “I left her in the van with you. Do you remember? You’d come to me with a story about a phone call, how I’d missed our appointment, and I believed you. I thought the Keeper of Bees had tried to lure you into a trap, and we rushed over to my office. I left Evie with you in the van. When I realized, later, who you really were, that’s when I decided.” He took a shaky breath. “And just for the fucking record, you fucking imbecile, I’m not alone; I have a fiancé.”
“Very romantic,” Somers muttered as he patted down Mitchell.
“Thank you,” Hazard said. The world had gotten squiggly and dark. “John, make sure—oh.” Hazard blinked, trying to clear his vision. “Shit.”
The last thing he heard was Somers’s panicked: “Ree?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
JULY 7
SUNDAY
2:38 PM
SOMERS HAD DECIDED THAT, if he got reincarnated as an engineer, he was going to spend his next lifetime designing a hospital chair that didn’t pinch the spinal column or dig right into the tender spot between his shoulder blades. He shifted on the chair again, adjusting his book on his chest, and wondered about having Cora bring up some pillows. Like, a million of them.
“You can go home,” Hazard said muzzily.
“I’m all right.”
“You should go home. Get a shower. Sleep in our bed.”
“Are you kidding? We’ve spent enough on hospital bills that I should own a private wing of this place. I’m going to get my money’s worth.”
“You’ve barely slept in the last week.”
“I caught a couple of hours when you were in surgery.”
“Liar.”
“And I did take a shower, for your information.”
Hazard, even very doped up, could still deliver a killer stare.