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support, every girder, and the entire stadium will collapse. And there you’ll stand, untouched, like Joshua at the battle of Jericho, as the walls come tumbling down . . . and everybody around you dies.”
“Why would you do that? You want to kill me—I know that. I even understand it. But why try to kill all those innocent people instead of me?”
“To make you suffer.” Satterfield practically spat the words. “Killing you isn’t enough. You have to suffer. I can’t make you suffer for thirty years, like I did—not unless I let you live. Maybe I should kill your family—slowly and painfully—but let you live. Cut off your hands and feet, put out your eyes, slice off your dick and make you eat it. That would be perfect. But what is it the business gurus say? ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’? Perfect revenge isn’t an option. But I think this’ll do. You know why?”
I didn’t want to hear it; everything that came out of his mouth was like poison spewing into the air, seeping into my soul, but I knew the only hope—for me, and Miranda, and the unsuspecting crowd above us—was to keep him talking. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years,” Satterfield said. “Who do you love, and what do you care about? Your family, sure. It goes without saying that they’ll be dying very soon, and very painfully. But who else do you love—and what else—as much as your family? More than your family?” He looked around the bone lab, his expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer. “That’s your dirty little secret, isn’t it, Brockton? You love this place—your precious job, your precious university, your precious reputation—even more than you love your family. And so your legacy—the thing you’ll go down in history for—will be wholesale destruction and mass fatalities. Twenty times the death toll of the World Trade Center. And your finger will be the one pushing the button, Dr. Brockton. Doctor of Death. The man who singlehandedly destroyed the University of Tennessee.”
“I won’t do it,” I said. “So just go ahead and kill me and be done with it.”
“Oh, I will kill you. But only after you push the button. Only after you commit the massacre. On national television.”
I shook my head. “I won’t do it,” I repeated. “You can’t make me.”
“I think I can,” he said. He looked at Miranda, the gun still pressed against her head. Slowly he slid the barrel down her neck, her chest, her belly, her crotch. “I think I can find ways to motivate you. A knife, I think, might be a better motivational tool. Or a scalpel. There must be scalpels in here somewhere.” Miranda was trembling. I could see it, and I knew he could feel it, and the knowledge was bitter beyond all reckoning.
“You sick bastard,” I said. But I was the one who was on the verge of vomiting and fainting. Dizzy and breathing hard, I put more of my weight on the table behind me, steadying myself with both hands.
And that’s when I felt it: the shaft of a femur. The femur of a robust male Arikara Indian. The bone was twenty inches long, topped with a hard round knob—the femoral head—measuring a good two inches in diameter. The Holy Family, I thought, in a bizarre flashback to Peggy’s characterization of the Arikara man, woman, and child. Then—another bizarre flashback—I thought of Decker’s whispered, panicked prayer: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. My fingers curled reflexively around the bone, midshaft. The femur felt smooth and strong, solid in my grip, and it was the comforting familiarity of it—a shape I had clasped thousands of times over the decades—that slowly eased my distress and cleared my mind. I remembered my order, my plea, to Decker—“Stop praying and do something”—and I eased my fingers down the shaft toward the distal end, to a point just above the flare of the condyles, before tightening my grip. The bone felt awkwardly thick in my hand—I would rather have gripped it near the proximal end, where it was thinner—but as Satterfield himself had just said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The femur felt ergonomically imperfect but savagely good. Taking care not to scrape the bone on the table, or rattle it against other bones, I began to lift it with one hand, with agonizing slowness, holding the rest of my body motionless, using my torso as a screen, a shield, to conceal what I was doing.
“Showtime, kids,” said Satterfield, motioning toward the door with the hand that held the detonator. “Let’s go.” Any moment, he would don the helmet and become—to all outward appearances, at least—one of the good guys.
It’s now or never, Brockton, I thought, my arm tensing. But the gun was pressed against Miranda’s head once more, his right index finger curled around the trigger, his left index finger hovering above the button of the remote control. A flex of either finger would be catastrophic.
“Don’t make me tell you again,” Satterfield said. “Let’s go.” He gave the gun a push, jabbing it hard against Miranda’s skull.
“Fuck you, asshole,” she snarled, and then—so fast, my conscious mind didn’t even realize what was happening—he raked the end of the barrel across Miranda’s face, the gun sight tearing a ragged furrow up her cheek, over the zygomatic bone, and across her forehead.
I saw her yank away and spin toward him, her “fight” reflex fully engaged. “Miranda, no,” I shouted as Satterfield swung the gun toward her forehead. My arm, seemingly of its own will, with no conscious thought on my part, arced from behind me in a sidearm swing, impelled by terror or rage or some lizard-brain hatred deep in my DNA. I felt the femur slam into Satterfield’s temporal bone with crushing force, the shaft snapping from the stress of the impact. Satterfield’s head seemed to burst, the entire back of his skull erupting in a geyser of blood and brain matter and bone. He began toppling backward, and I heard myself shout “no!” as I lunged—dove—for his hand, in a desperate effort to grab the detonator. But I was too late, and too far away, and as he hit the floor, my hand a maddening eighteen inches from his, I saw his knuckles slam down onto the concrete, saw the fingers clench, even saw the movement of the button and a blinding flash of light.
Then the world itself seemed to explode, with a deafening roar and a force that shook my entire body. I tried reaching out for Miranda. If I could at least hold her hand as I died—and as she died, and as throngs of people above us died, burying us deep beneath the rubble, with the bones of the Arikara—my death would not be utterly devoid of grace or comfort. Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death. The room faded to black.
And then it faded to gray, and green—olive drab—and swirling figures amid the dust. “Doc? Doc. Can you hear me?” I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them, struggling to focus on the figure kneeling beside me. “Talk to me, Doc.”
“Deck? Is that you? Are we alive?”
“It is. We are.”
“But . . . how? The detonator—I saw his fingers push the button when he fell.”
“Didn’t matter,” Decker said. “The detonator was dead. After you called, one of our bomb techs crawled out your window, shinnied across a beam, and broke the circuit—cut the wires connecting the charges. I got the word literally five seconds before things went crazy in here.”
Suddenly I felt a rush of panic. “Miranda—my God, what about Miranda?”
“I’m over here.” Her voice was weak, but it was hers. Unmistakably, miraculously hers. “I’m okay.”
“Oh, thank God.” I pushed myself into a sitting position. Miranda was by the desk, half leaning, half sitting on it, dabbing her face with a bloody paper towel. The gash from the gun sight would require stitches—possibly dozens of stitches—and would probably leave a scar, but at the moment, I had never seen a more beautiful sight than that torn and bleeding face. “Thank God.”
“Actually, I give the credit to mere mortals. Mainly you.” She smiled broadly but briefly, then the smile morphed into a flinch. “Oww,” she said. “It only hurts when I blaspheme.”
I looked down, for the first time, at the motionless form of Satterfield, his shattered skull lying in a puddle of its former contents, the head of the Arikara femur embedded deep in Satterfield’s temporal bone. “Jesus,” I
said. “So much for mercy. I guess I went for justice instead. Big time. I don’t even know how I did all that damage.”
“You had a little help,” said Decker. “I was watching y’all through the blinds—good thing the slats are so crooked and busted. When it looked like he was about to shoot Miranda, I said a prayer and squeezed off a round. The Hail Mary pass of gunshots.”
I looked closer, and this time I saw the entry wound, centered in Satterfield’s forehead. The exit wound must have blown off the back of his head. “That was an amazing shot.”
“Mostly lucky,” Decker said. “Really, really lucky. But just in case you were gonna feel bad about killing him, you can take that off your worry list. I killed him. And I won’t lose one second of sleep over it.”
“I appreciate your trying to ease my mind,” I told him. “But the whack I gave him—this temporal fracture? Fatal, for sure.” The bullet and the bone, I realized, must have hit Satterfield at exactly the same instant. “Truth is, we both killed him, Deck. And maybe that’s how it should be.” He stared at me, then nodded slowly.
I looked around the bone lab now—the locus of so much of my life and work; this crossroads of the dusty dead and the miraculously alive; this little world we had created out of bones and study and the quest for justice—and I saw that it was good.
Through the broken blinds—the lifesavingly broken blinds—I saw men in uniform erecting barricades and stretching crime-scene tape to create a wide perimeter around the bone lab. From somewhere above us, a roar of excitement drifted down, and the stadium vibrated, like some vast musical instrument, tuned to the key of gladness, resonating with life.
And again I saw—and I felt—that it was good. Very, very good.
CHAPTER 37
IT WAS ONLY WHEN I GLANCED OUT AND SAW A TOWBOAT passing—we were at a big round table flanked by windows overlooking the water—that I realized: This was the very same table where some of us had sat almost twenty-five years before, when Satterfield had entered a guilty plea and been sentenced to life in prison. Jeff and Jenny, seated to my left now along with Tyler and Walker, had been at that lunch, although their teenaged boys—not yet a gleam in their parents’ eyes, way back then—had not, of course. Nor had Miranda, who had been busy coloring, doubtless outside the lines, in elementary school at the time.
