Page 201 of The Grey Wolf
Beauvoir ran to the door to Pump Two and pulled it open. There, on the floor, lay the workers. For a moment Beauvoir thought they were all dead. Then, one by one, they lifted their heads.
“Stay where you are. I’m with the Sûreté.”
“She’s one of them,” a worker said, pointing to a woman in a white coat. “She put something into the water.”
“Hands on your heads,” Beauvoir commanded. “All of you.”
Wide-eyed, wild-eyed, he looked for the landline. He had to call emergency measures. He ran toward it.
“No.”
Beauvoir saw Gamache leaning against the door. Blood covered half his face, and his voice was unnaturally loud as though shouting over some sound.
“I have to call for help,” said Beauvoir.
“Not poison. Water. Switched.” His head was throbbing, and his vision blurred, and he was losing his ability to speak. His senses seemed to be abandoning him. He could feel his legs buckling. “Left poison at Pump One. Below console. You need to get it.”
Beauvoir stared at Gamache. “Water?” Jean-Guy could feel himself growing giddy. “It was just water they put in?”
But the Chief was now just staring, his head lowering. His breathing coming in short gasps. He was on the verge of passing out. Beauvoir knew the bullet had grazed the Chief’s head, but the explosion so close to his ear must’ve caused a bad concussion, maybe worse.
He moved toward him.
“Go,” said Armand, shaking his head. “Secure the plant.”
Before he did, Jean-Guy patted down the head technician and found another vial. He cuffed her to the pump.
“You going to be okay?” he asked Armand, who nodded.
Then Jean-Guy disappeared down the corridor. Pushing himself off the doorway, Armand stumbled back, passing the bodies of the gunmen and David Lavigne, before slumping against the wall next to the woman who’d saved his life.
Holding her in his arms, he whispered, “Jeanne?”
CHAPTER46
“He didn’t,” said Clara, laughing.
“He did, I swear it.”
They were in the bistro in front of the fire, and Jean-Guy was regaling them with what had “happened” in the treatment plant. It was, Armand knew, mostly fiction.
He could have protested but was enjoying their laughter. Albeit at his expense.
“Now,” Jean-Guy was saying, “you have to know that when he fell forward, he bit his lip and hit his nose on the floor.”
“Klutz,” said Ruth, and Rosa nodded. But then ducks often do.
The “he” was Armand. They all looked at him with amusement. It was not really funny. Certainly wasn’t at the time, though somehow Jean-Guy was managing to make it funny.
Armand smiled back, though he was straining to understand what was being said. He couldn’t actually hear the words, but in the weeks since the attack, he’d become very good at lipreading.
“All I could see was blood coming from his mouth and out his nose. I didn’t realize he’d pretty much done it to himself. It looked far worse than it was.”
Now, thought Armand, that was true. Jeanne Caron had shot the gunman at the very instant the man had pulled the trigger on Armand, jerking the gun millimeters away at the last instant so that the bullet just grazed him. But like most wounds to the head, thoughsuperficial, it had bled. A lot. He’d been stung by the bullet, but it was the explosion right next to his head that had done the damage.
The body of the gunman had propelled him forward, into the concrete floor, where he’d lain, stunned, semiconscious. Unsure what had happened. But sure he must be dying.
“So,” Jean-Guy continued, “as I held him, Armand whispers, ‘Tell’… then he coughs… ‘that I love’… and he coughs again.”
