Coombs’s face twisted into a contortion of shock and pain. He staggered, reflexively crunching into a ball to protect himself.
When I saw him coil up, I reached inside my pant leg. I pulled out the Beretta strapped to my ankle.
Everything happened so quickly, like a film with the action running but the sound a high-pitched distortion.
Coombs, seeing me, swung his rifle into firing position.
I fired three times, spurts jerking back my hand. The bells continued to gong… over and over.
Three crimson bursts spattered across Coombs’s broad chest. The force sent him tumbling backward.
Then the bells again. Each earsplitting clang felt like a sledgehammer slamming into my skull.
Coombs came to rest in a sitting position. He gazed down, saw his torn flesh. He blinked with a glazed, mystified look. He raised his rifle toward me. “You die, too, bitch!”
I squeezed the trigger of the Beretta. The bells gonged as a final blast thudded into his throat. He grunted loudly and his eyeballs rolled back into his head.
I realized that my hands were cupping my ears again. My head ached. I crawled to Coombs and kicked his rifle away. The bells continued to sound, a melody that was unidentifiable to me, maybe an answer to my prayer.
My eye fixed on something as I knelt beside Coombs. “There it is,” I whispered.
A curled, reptilian tail in red and blue, leading into the body of a goat with the fierce and proud heads of a lion and a goat. Chimera… One of my shots had pierced the wicked beast’s torso. It looked dead, too.
I heard shouts coming from behind, but I continued to kneel over Coombs. I felt I had to answer what he’d said at the end. You don’t have the slightest idea what it’s like… to lose your father….
“Oh, yes I do,” I told his still eyes.
Chapter 120
THIS TIME the newspapers had it right. Chimera was dead. The multiple-homicide case was closed.
There was no great joy in the final outcome, at least not for me. Homicide didn’t get together and wipe the board clean. There were no toasts with the girls. Too many people had died. I was lucky not to have been among them. So were Claire and Cindy.
I took a few days off, to give my side and hand some time to heal, and the IA teams a chance to piece together what had happened at the shooting scenes. I hung out with Martha, took some long walks along the Marina Green and Fort Mason Park as the weather turned damp and cold.
Mostly, I replayed the events of the horrible case. It was the second time I’d had to fight a killer one-on-one. Why was that? What did it mean? What did it say about my life and what it had come to?
For a moment, I’d had an important piece of my own past given back, a father I never really knew. Then, that gift was taken away. My father had disappeared into the dark hole from which he had crept. I knew I might never see him again.
In those days, if I could have come up with one meaningful thing I wanted to do with my life, I might have said, Let’s give it a ride. If I could paint, or had some secret urge to open a boutique, or the stick-to-itiveness to write a book… It was so hard to find even the thinnest slice of affirmation.
But by the end of the week, I just went back to work.
Late that first day, I got a buzz from Tracchio to come up to his office. As I walked in, the chief stood up and shook my hand. He told me how proud he was, and I almost believed him.
“Thanks.” I nodded, and even smiled. “That what you wanted to say?”
Tracchio took off his glasses. He shot me a contrite smile. “No. Sit down, please, Lieutenant.”
From the edge of his large walnut desk, he picked up a red folder. “Preliminary findings on the Coombs shooting. Coombs Senior.”
I regarded it tentatively. I didn’t know if some IAB bureaucrat had found something suspicious.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Tracchio assured me. “Everything checks out. A perfectly clean shooting.”
I nodded. So what was this all about?
“There is one thing outstanding, though.” The chief stood and leaned against his palms on the front of his desk. “The M.E. lifted nine rounds out of Coombs’s body. Three belonged to Jacobi’s nine millimeter. Two came from Cappy’s. One from your Glock. Two twenties from Tom Perez out of Robbery. That’s eight.”