Moses took three short breaths, air grasped desperately from the night, then he uttered the final word of his life. “Home.”
Bo saw him yield, saw his body go slack and relax into the earth. He waited and watched, looking for a twitch that would give away Moses’s charade, if charade it were. He heard crickets now, felt the kiss of a breeze, saw how lovely the river was, strewn with diamonds of light thrown down by the moon.
The pain of his knee gradually drew all his attention. He slid to the ground and sat propped with his back against the rock. He was sitting this way when the men with drawn weapons swept down the hill and gathered atop the sandstone outcropping.
“Down here,” Bo called.
Several powerful flashlight beams played across him.
“Police! Freeze!”
Bo didn’t move.
“It’s Thorsen, for God’s sake.”
Bo recognized the voice of Stu Coyote. A minute later, Coyote was at his side.
“You hurt, Bo?”
“S’okay,” Bo said. “I’m getting pretty used to it. What’re you doing here?”
“I located Otter,” Coyote said. He gently took the gun from Bo’s hand and sat on the ground beside him.
Special Agent Stan Calloway joined them and directed the beam of his flashlight toward the body. “Who’s this?”
“Moses,” Bo said.
“David Moses?” Calloway threw the beam up to the outcropping.
“How about up there?”
“The enemy,” Bo said.
Calloway looked him over and said, “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Bo said.
Calloway headed back up the hill.
“Otter sent you?” Bo said to Coyote.
“In a way. I came back as soon as I heard about Diana. I figured you’d turn to a friend, and the only friend of yours I ever met was Otter. I got his address from the visitor’s log security kept during your stay at the hospital.”
Bo smiled grimly. “You and Moses.”
“What?”
“Never mind. So you put two and two and two together?”
“That’s pretty much it. I talked to Calloway at Wildwood. We kept the First Lady off the bluff tonight.”
“And then you came over here because you thought he’d try the hit from here.”
“Not exactly. We got a call from the St. Croix County Sheriff’s Department. A farmer a mile north of here found a pickup truck parked on his land. Truck was full of ordnance. Had a Minnesota plate.”
“Let me guess,” Bo said. “Registered to Luther Gallagher.”
Coyote nodded. “We were up there investigating when we got the call on shots fired here.”
“Agent Coyote, I have to ask you to step away.” A man in a dark suit stood looking down at them. “This man is still wanted for questioning in the death of Diana Ishimaru.”
“FBI,” Coyote said to Bo. Before he stood up, he said, “Need anything?”
“A doctor would be nice. My knee’s pretty screwed up.”
Coyote glanced up at the federal agent. “Get paramedics down here.”
“We’ll take care of everything.”
Bo looked across the river. The bluffs at Wildwood were so bright in the flood of moonlight that even from this distance he could make out details. But it was not what he saw that made him smile even in his pain. It was what he did not see.
Bo lay on the hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling light in his room. A casing of wire mesh protected the bulb. Tendrils of cobweb fuzzy with dust hung from the mesh like unraveled threads. Although there was no breeze that Bo could feel, the tendrils gently waved in some high current of air.
They’d transported him to the nearest medical facility, the St. Croix Regional Medical Center. They’d done a CAT scan to make sure there was no internal damage from his fall. They’d x-rayed his knee, had found bone chips, and had immobilized the joint pending surgery. They’d cleaned and dressed the wound on his head. Then they’d isolated him in the Psychiatric Unit. No one had come to see him since he’d been taken into custody and had told his story. He hadn’t been read his rights, nor had they given him an opportunity to make a phone call. He was not under arrest, they said. Since they’d locked him in the room hours before, he hadn’t seen a living soul.
He didn’t mind the isolation. It gave him time to think. And what he thought about was David Solomon Moses.
