Page 34 of Wrong Way

Miles believed him. Death for their cause seemed to be a recurring theme for Kane’s disciples. He looked at the wire in Gallagher's hand. Sixty amps or so through standing water would cover the entire floor in a fraction of a second. It would not distinguish between the man it was intended for and any other person standing in the current's path. He did notice that Gallagher was in insulated boots and gloves, which might save him. But Miles was in leather-soled dress shoes and was standing on the mostly dry side of the threshold, but the threshold was not wide.

"Owen," Miles said. "I need you to set that wire down somewhere other than the floor."

"No." He said it simply, without acceleration.

Miles looked at the panel behind Gallagher. The breakers were all in their up positions, all of them live. Upstairs, the event was still running. He had no way to know how far along it was or whether Vic and Kowalski had reached the auditorium floor yet.

He turned his head slightly toward the guard. "Go back upstairs," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "Tell them to cut every circuit from the stage lighting board, everything they can get to from up there. Go right now."

The guard looked at the water on the floor and then at Miles and then at Gallagher, and then he went. The metal door swung behind him and Miles heard him on the stairs, moving fast.

Gallagher watched this without reacting. "You can't cut the sign array from up there," he said. "That panel is down here."

"I know."

"And the primary feed to the stage is down here, too, on a separate breaker from the lighting board. Your people upstairs can cut the theatrical lights, but they can't cut what I need to cut." He glanced at the panel with a brief, proprietary certainty. "I know this building's systems better than anyone currently in it." He said this with a good deal of pride, with that eerie smile still on his face.

Miles looked at him across the wet floor. Ten feet of standing water between them. Gallagher's boots and gloves, and the wire in his hand, and the auditorium full of people directly above their heads. He knew he had to disarm the man somehow…and if it couldn’t be physically, maybe it had be mentally instead.

"Tell me about Rachel," Miles said.

Gallagher's expression shifted instantly. The smile was gone now and was replaced by something that was not surprise, exactly, and not grief. It was something that moved through his face and settled back to neutral before Miles could fully read it.

"You know about Rachel."

"We know she came to Laurence. We know about Celestine and Song and Valdez, too." Miles kept his voice conversational, making sure to keep any sort of aggressive or accusational tone out of it. "We know what she wrote about them. We know how she died."

Gallagher was quiet for a moment. The wire sat in his fist and he was not moving. "She paid Laurence four thousand dollars," he said finally. "Four thousand dollars for an eight-week intensive program. She paid Celestine twice a month for nearly a year. She was looking for someone to help her understand why she couldn't stop feeling the way she felt, and every one of them took her money and gave her nothing back that she could actually use." His voice was not raised. It had the flattened quality of something that had been said internally so many times it had lost its edges. "She got worse, not better. And she kept going back because she was so fucking sure something would finally work…because they told her she was close to a breakthrough. Because they told her the work was building…that they had given her a framework for her pain that made her dependent on them to interpret it."

"I know," Miles said. “And it wasn’t fair, was it?”

"She grabbed a two-hundred-amp cabinet," Gallagher said, his voice growing a bit angrier now. "Outside a bar on Red River Street. Two in the morning."

"I know that, too, Owen."

"The neon was still running when they found her."

Miles didn't respond to that. He held Gallagher's gaze across the water, looking for any opening…any moment he could somehow resolve this.

"She chose that," Gallagher said. "Out of everything she could have done, she went to a neon sign and she grabbed it. And I've thought about that for two years." He looked down at the wire in his hand. "I don't think it was random. I think she was trying to tell me something about where the blame belonged."

"Rachel made a decision," Miles said carefully. "The people upstairs in that theater didn't make it for her."

Gallagher looked at him without expression. "No," he said. "They just took her money while she was making it."

The basement was quiet except for the low and distant vibration of the building above them, the muffled presence of one thousand people in their seats as they listened to what Laurence was saying. Miles stood at the edge of the water, slightly afraid to move. His weapon was holstered and his hands were at his sides while Owen Gallagher stood in front of the panel with the bare wire in his gloved fist.

Neither of them moved and Miles had the feeling that whoever did decide to move first was probably going to die.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Vic saw that the auditorium was full…and that was the first problem.

Yes, she knew that there would be one thousand people, but it somehow looked to be much more than that. Someone could have told her it was ten thousand, and she would have believed it. Most of the people were seated in the orchestra section, with additional rows in the mezzanine above. The stage was lit in warm amber and the house was dimmed, and Timothy Laurence was at the center of the stage in a cream-colored shirt with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, speaking in the measured and unhurried cadence of a man who had given this talk many times and knew exactly where he was in it. The audience was quiet and attentive in the specific way of people who had paid a substantial amount to be there. The room had the collective stillness of a group in the middle of something they considered significant.

Kowalski was a few paces behind her. She had no idea where Hess had gone to…maybe cowering in a corner somewhere out of fear of what he knew was about to happen. They had come in through the main auditorium doors at the rear of the orchestra level, and the sound of the doors opening had drawn a few heads in the back rows.

"We need to do this fast and loud," Vic told Kowalski. “But we also need to try to keep some sort of order.”