GLASS STAYED WHERE HE WAS. THE GRIN STAYED ON HIS FACE. “YOU know, there is just so much wrong with this picture. You guys are way out of your jurisdiction. Go back to Washington where you belong.”
Sampson’s Glock was out now, too. “Oh, we’re going back to Washington,” he said.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Glass rolled his eyes at us and turned halfway around like he was walking away.
“Glass—”
But it was only a cover. He swung back around fast, and as he did he pulled something out from under his jacket. A pistol in his right hand.
“Glass, don’t!”
“Glass!”
The words came out at virtually the same time that I fired. Sampson, too. Glass’s own shot went wide as he took two bullets high in the chest. We weren’t messing around. These were kill shots, and he went down hard.
I kept both hands on my gun and sited him as I stepped closer. He was out flat, with both eyes closed. There was no discernible movement. Was this finally over?
“Check him,” I told John. “Careful.”
Sampson kicked Glass’s gun away first. Then he ran his hands down Glass’s sides and each leg to check for other weapons. He put two fingers to Glass’s carotid artery. “There’s a pulse,” he said, and turned toward the car. “I’ll call it in.”
Glass groaned weakly.
“Rodney?” I said. “Can you hear me? Hang on. We’ll get you help.”
He didn’t say anything. But he wasn’t grinning anymore.
I used my knife to cut up the middle of his sweatshirt. There were two dark burn holes in his chest. As far as I could tell, neither of the bullets had passed through.
I could hear John on the radio phone. He sounded urgent. “This is Detective Sampson with Washington PD. We need immediate medical assistance. We’re on an unmarked fire road, just off of Hampton Valley…”
Even as John was talking to dispatch, he handed me a plastic take-out bag from the car. I pressed it over Glass’s chest, trying to seal the two wounds and keep them from sucking air.
Glass shook his head. He reached up with a hand on my wrist and tried to stop me.
“Doesn’t matter,” he gutted out. “No use.”
He’d obviously punctured a lung, if not both. A fine mist of blood was coming out with every labored breath. Essentially, he was drowning, and he knew it. Glass was a nurse, after all.
“My boy… shouldn’t have died,” he said. And then, unbelievably, that awful grin of his returned. “You should have died. You ruined it.”
Then, before Sampson was even off the phone, Rodney Glass let out one last, long hiss of air, and he was gone. Bizarre turnarounds happen sometimes. One second, you’re trying to stop someone from killing you, and the next you’re doing everything you can to save his life.
I’d like to say I felt something when Glass died, but the truth is, nothing came. I wasn’t glad, and I wasn’t sorry, either. After everything that had happened, it all seemed to be over incredibly quickly—just like the story Glass had been trying to tell all this time, in his own deluded way.
He never did get the ending he wanted so badly, but he got the one he deserved.