Oath of Office (7 page)

As if underscoring his thoughts, their camera lights lit up as soon as he and Carolyn neared. He wondered how long it would take for them to come up with
his
name. Calls to Filstrup would be sure to follow.

Oh, happy day.

Lou pulled Carolyn close to him, shielding her from the onslaught. Reporters shoved their microphones in her face like mothers trying to force-feed their children, and shouted out questions that became garbled as they clashed with one another in midair. Carolyn was silent ice, her head high, her intelligent green eyes fixed straight ahead. Through the swarm, she somehow managed to get her door unlocked, and then reached across the seat to open Lou’s side. He tossed his rain-dampened jacket into the backseat and quickly climbed in. Carolyn turned the ignition key. The reporters banged on the windows and doors, and stepped aside only when the car began to move.

“Lou?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Something made him do this. He was not a violent person. Something made him do what he did.”

Lou passed on the urge to remind her that a few years ago, her husband had nearly gotten booted out of medicine for losing control.

“I suppose that’s an understandable feeling,” he said instead.

As she pulled onto the driveway, John Meacham’s widow left rubber on the wet tarmac of the doctors-only parking lot.

“Find out what happened, Lou,” she said. “Find out why John killed those people.”

CHAPTER 9

They drove largely in silence, wipers on intermittent, traveling along a country road that snaked through a hilly landscape. Dusk had passed, and night had settled in quickly, but Carolyn did not appear bothered by the headlights of the vehicles splashing past in the opposite direction. In fact, Lou guessed she might be going as fast as any of them.

“Are you all right to be driving?” he asked.

Carolyn sighed heavily. “I need to be driving,” she said. “Even in this crappy weather, I need to be doing something. Just sitting in that lounge … waiting for news … trying to make sense of it all … hoping he would live, praying he would die. It was so horrible, so lonely, Lou. You couldn’t possibly imagine.”

A beloved husband dead. Hundreds of lives irreparably shattered. Carolyn left to dwell in the aftermath.

Those were Lou’s thoughts before he said, “No, Carolyn, you’re right. I couldn’t imagine.”

They fell back into the heavy silence. The Volvo’s wipers now beat a steady rhythm against the driving rain. Fog transformed the approaching headlights into a hazy glow that stretched across the darkening horizon. Even with bad visibility, the rain-slicked road, and Carolyn’s above-the-limit speed, there were drivers daring enough pass them when permissible.

Carolyn made a disgusted sound when one zipped by. “I’m not going to speed in weather like this,” she said.

Lou reached for his jacket in the backseat and fished out his cell phone. He assumed that Renee had already seen news reports of Meacham’s death, but knew, since she and Emily were there when the call came in from Filstrup, that she’d want to hear directly from him. He began keying in Renee’s number, when he felt the SUV shift hard to the left. His seat belt went from loose to taut in a blink, keeping him from being thrown against Carolyn.

Before Lou could regain his bearings, the car swerved again, this time to the right. The tires lost traction on the rain-soaked road; suddenly the Volvo was fishtailing, lurching violently from side to side. Moments later, Carolyn had calmly regained control. Her speed had, if anything, increased.

Lou flashed on the possibility that she had insisted on driving because of some kind of suicidal urge.

She veered right, then left, then right again.

Lou’s stomach dropped as though he were front seat in a roller coaster. The left wheels of the SUV crossed the solid center lines twice, one of those times coming close to crossing into the oncoming traffic. But in both instances Carolyn pulled the car back just in time. Her expression had grown tense, her eyes narrowed.

She leaned on her car horn and began flashing her lights at the driver in front of them. “Get out of the way! Move over!” she shouted.

“Carolyn! What’s going on?” Lou cried out. “What are you doing?”

Carolyn’s eyes remained locked forward, unblinking. She continued to flash her lights and beep her horn. “Move over!” she yelled. “Get over now!”

“Please slow down! Carolyn, slow down and pull over!”

Instead of responding, Carolyn steered the SUV into oncoming traffic, presumably to try to pass the car in front. But here the road turned, and Lou saw the dotted yellow dividing line become a solid one. In the next instant, he was blinded by a set of powerful headlight beams. He heard a deep-timbred horn—not a car’s beep, but something much larger. Lou’s stomach knotted. The horn had to be an eighteen-wheeler. A second later, he saw the rig emerge from the fog like a huge phantom. Carolyn, acting unfazed, continued on a straight course, unable to pass the car to their right. She sped forward as though playing a game against the forty-ton machine.

“Look, Lou,” she called out, still surprisingly calm though her voice had an anxious edge. “The car three ahead of us. Its left taillight is out. Someone’s going to get killed unless we warn them. There’s been enough death today.”

“Carolyn, let it be! Slow down. Please, slow down!”

The car boxing them in accelerated. Lou reached across his seat and took hold of the wheel, pulling it clockwise, aware that the move might well cause Carolyn to lose control.

“Lou, don’t do that! I have to warn him!”

The tires slipped several feet, then gained purchase, pulling them into the right-hand lane. Lou released the wheel. The car shuddered and rose on two tires. There was a ferocious crack as the rig sheared off the left-side mirror. The rush of wind as it flew past was probably all that kept them from flipping over.

“Okay, now, Carolyn,” Lou said with as much insistence as urgency. “Pull over there and let me drive.”

Again she leaned on the accelerator and the horn. “In this fog, somebody is going to ram into the back of them.”

“Carolyn, don’t!”

She turned the wheel right this time, attempting to pass the intervening car via a narrow, muddy soft shoulder. Lou sat pressed against his seat back, unwilling to grab at the wheel again. The speedometer moved upward.

Forty.

Fifty.

Fifty-five.

Carolyn Meacham looked purposefully ahead, beyond reason.

“Carolyn, stop!” Lou screamed. “You’re going to kill us both because a guy’s taillight is out!”

They raced even with the car to their left. The driver leaned on his horn and refused to slow down.

Lou could feel the high center of gravity in the SUV threaten to flip them. Every jolt on the uneven ground seemed magnified.

“They’re just two cars ahead.”

Patches of fog flew past like ghosts. Then, Lou froze. Through one of the patches, directly in front of them, a speed limit sign had appeared.

“Carolyn!” he shouted. “Get back into your lane! Do it now!”

Instinctively, Lou clenched his teeth and readied himself for impact. They were going sixty.

Lou couldn’t hold back. He leaned as far to the left as his seat belt would allow, grabbed the wheel, and pushed it counterclockwise. The Volvo skidded into a left turn and fell behind the car Carolyn had been trying to pass. Perhaps instinctively, she slammed on the brakes. The front two tires dragged along the grassy shoulder, kicking up dirt and rocks. The sign slammed into the hood and sheared off, vanishing upward into the mist. Then, in a full spin, the car left the road. Lou saw a tree materialize from the fog. He shut his eyes tightly and raised his arms to his face for protection. The impact wasn’t as violent as he had expected.

Lou’s head snapped against the window beside him as the Volvo spun viciously. Splintered glass exploded into his face and cut his neck. The rear of the Volvo was still in the center of the road. Then, without warning, the coaster ride was over.

“Carolyn, are you all right?” he said, wiping at his forehead and seeing blood on his hand.

“Did you see that?” she asked him, her breathing not far from normal. “Did you?”

“You mean the taillight?”

“Yes, the taillight. Drivers never fix them until the vehicle-inspection people tell them they have to. That guy could have caused an accident.”

CHAPTER 10

Throughout most of the bizarre chase to overtake the driver with one working taillight, Lou remained in what he called “emergency calm”—a state of heightened awareness and preparedness, cloaked in an external composure. It was a reaction to crisis shared by those caregivers whose business often revolved around sudden changes for the worse in their patients—intensivists, anesthesiologists, surgeons, physician assistants, nurses in the ER and various units, EMTs, and paramedics.

Now, with the immediate danger over, it was as if whatever had been blocking the surge of adrenaline through his body had been removed. His pulse had doubled—or tripled, he was breathing heavily, if not hyperventilating, and when he opened the dashboard compartment looking for tissues, his hand was shaking.

The cut to his brow did not look like much, and pressure with a wad of Kleenex quickly stopped the bleeding.

“Carolyn, can you get us out of the road?” he asked, his voice louder than he had intended.

John Meacham’s widow nodded weakly and drove the Volvo farther onto the roadside’s muddy shoulder. She appeared dazed, though to Lou’s relief, uninjured. Still, he checked her head, neck, and extremities and palpated her chest and abdomen for areas of tenderness. His blood pressure cuff and other instruments for emergencies were in a large medical bag, which he kept in the trunk of his car, but he assured himself that her cardiac rhythm was under a hundred and regular, and her radial and carotid pulses were strong.

Finally, using a flashlight from the dash, he did a crude neurologic exam, including eye movements and pupillary response.

“What did I do?” Carolyn muttered. “What the hell did I just do?”

There were several cars stopped behind them. Lou gave the thumbs-up sign through Carolyn’s window, and the drivers slowly pulled out and drove away. Two of them paused long enough to say they had called 911.

“Lou … that taillight … I was so worried the missing light would cause an accident.…”

Her voice trailed away. She continued staring blankly out the windshield at the rain. Her hands, right at two o’clock, left at eleven, gripped the wheel tightly as though she were still driving. Lou took an umbrella from the rear floor and climbed out of the car. His left knee was stiff, and had probably taken a hit, but it was not nearly sore enough to keep him from tomorrow’s sparring session at the Stick and Move Gym. He took in several sharp breaths of chilly night air and tested the rest of his limbs. Nothing. Next, he made a quick circle around the Volvo. The damage appeared minimal. He waved to a driver who had slowed down, signaling that everything was okay. Then he climbed back into the car.

Whatever had possessed Carolyn seemed to be resolving. Her eyes were no longer glazed. Her hands had relaxed.

“Carolyn, the car should be okay to drive, but this time if it’s alright with you, I’ll do the driving.”

“That would be fine,” she said, still somewhat vaguely.

Lou patted her on the shoulder. “Everything is going to be okay.”

“Lou, what did I do?”

“Look, you experienced a major trauma back in the hospital. You weren’t thinking clearly. That’s all. It happens in extreme stress situations. A person just does something … something irrational. We see it in the ER all the time.”

He felt a flash of embarrassment at what might be construed as a reference to Carolyn’s husband.

“I was so worried about those taillights,” she said again as Lou gently separated her hands from the steering wheel. “What’s going to happen to me now?”

Before he could answer, a siren blared behind them, and then whined down into silence. The flash of blue strobe lights danced erratically inside the Volvo’s interior. Lou glanced in the side-view mirror to see a plus-sized police officer exit his vehicle and snap open an umbrella. The policeman sauntered over to the driver’s side of the car and shone a powerful flashlight beam through the rain-spattered window onto Carolyn’s face.

“Oh, goodness,” Carolyn said, gripping the wheel once again.

Lou set a cautioning hand on her arm. “Roll down your window and let me do the talking,” he whispered. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Carolyn did as he asked.

The officer, umbrella keeping them both dry, bent at the waist and poked his head inside the car. “Anybody hurt?” he asked. He spoke with a modest Southern drawl. His eyes, which Lou read as showing no threat, scanned the two of them with concern.

Carolyn immediately became more animated. “Oh, Gilbert. Thank goodness it’s you,” she said, talking without taking a breath. “This was all my fault. I … I was chasing down a car in front of us that had one broken taillight. I got so worried they were going to cause an accident, that I ended up having one myself.”

Lou gripped Carolyn’s arm. She nodded and stopped. He climbed out of the car, opened his umbrella, and still slightly favoring his leg, walked around to the officer. “Officer, my name is Lou Welcome. I’m an ER doc from Eisenhower Memorial, and a friend of Carolyn’s and … um … of John’s.”

“Gilbert Stone. Chief of police of Kings Ridge.” Stone took his hand and, maintaining steady eye contact, squeezed it with near bone-crushing force.

Cap Duncan, Lou’s mentor and owner of the Stick and Move, had once told him that any statement of superiority or control a man wanted to make should begin with the handshake. Lou wondered now if the husky lawman was trying to do just that. He gave thought to matching or besting the man’s grip, but set the notion aside in his dumb-moves file.

Stone shone his flashlight on Lou’s face, momentarily blinding him. “You sure you’re all right, son?” he asked.

“We’re both fine. Thanks.”

“Given what you do and where you do it, I’m inclined to trust you in that regard.”