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Or, forget justice, just call it what it was: revenge.
But maybe, nothing at all.
Just another birdwatcher …
And indeed when he looked once more, the person was gone.
He turned his binoculars away from where they were trained—on a small jittery bird of brown and black plumage—back to Rhyme’s town house.
Now there was a flurry of motion as Lon Sellitto hurried out the door. He spoke briefly to the pair of uniformed officers outside, who nodded, and the round detective walked quickly to a car and sped away.
The present had been opened.
64.
HIS HEADACHE WAS BRUTAL.
As his vision returned, Ron Pulaski inhaled deeply, like that might make the pain recede.
Curiously, the effort worked, a bit.
Or maybe headaches from being knocked out with horse tranquilizer just naturally diminished upon waking.
He was looking around. Taking stock.
He was lying on an air mattress, in the corner of a windowless room—a basement, he guessed.
The stark lighting was from a single overhead bulb. The door was metal—and, surely, locked.
He struggled to rise, which sent a new pinwheel of agony through his head, and his vision began to crinkle to black once more. He lay back. Then rose and checked the door.
Locked tightly, yes.
Then back to bed.
Remembering the minutes leading up to the blackness.
The ski mask.
The muzzle of the animal control tranq gun, the projectile apparently containing enough drug to knock a fair-sized horse to the ground.
During a case he’d worked with Lincoln and Amelia a few years ago, Pulaski had learned that the drug in question—used by wife on husband—was a mixture of etorphine and acepromazine. The side effects upon waking had not been part of that investigation, but Pulaski could now attest to one: it left you feeling really shitty.
He slowly sat up then, in relative control once more, rose to his feet again. Woozy, but he’d stay awake.
And upright.
Looking around more carefully now. On the floor on the other side of the mattress sat the medical records he’d stolen from the hospital. His phone and wallet, though, were missing. The first because it was Kidnapping 101 to take the victim’s means of communicating with the outside world. The second so that they could prove they’d got him.
And who wasthey?
Hale was behind it, but he probably wasn’t the ski-masked tranq shooter.
And there would be another player too. Lincoln had told him on several occasions that Charles Hale never worked for himself only. He always had a client.
And that person or entity?
High up, pulling strings. But no point in guessing their identity.
