Kiel be abused and humiliated, however, he could not look away or close
his eyes, because Sharp’s unexpected behavior was the most morbidly,
horrifyingly fascinating thing Peake had ever seen.
He was nowhere near coming to terms with his previous shattering
insight, and already he was experiencing yet another major revelation.
He’d always thought of policemen-which included D.S.A agents-as Good
Guys with capital Us, White Hats, Men on White Horses, valiant Knights
of the Law, but that image of purity was suddenly unsustainable if a man
like Sharp could be a highly regarded member in good standing of that
noble fraternity. Oh, sure, Peake knew there were some bad cops, bad
agents, but somehow he had always thought the bad ones were caught early
in their careers and that they never had a chance of advancing to high
positions, that they self-destructed, that slime like that got what was
coming to them and got it pretty quickly, too. He believed only virtue
was rewarded. Besides, he had always thought he’d be able to smell
corruption in another cop, that it would be evident from the moment he
laid eyes on the guy, And he had never imagined that a flat-out pervert
could hide his sickness and have a successful career in law enforcement.
Maybe most men were disabused of such naive ideas long before they were
twenty-seven, but it was only now, watching the deputy director behave
like a thug, like a regular damn barbarian, that Jerry Peake began to
see that the world was painted more in shades of gray than in black and
white, and this revelation was so powerful that he could no more have
averted his eyes from Sharp’s sick performance than he could have looked
away from Jesus returning on a chariot of fire through an angel-bedecked
sky.
Sharp continued to grind the girl’s hand in his, which made her cry
harder, and he had a hand on her breasts and was pushing her back hard
against the bed, telling her to quiet down, so she was trying to please
him now, choking back her tears, but still Sharp squeezed her hand, and
Peake was on the verge of making a move, to hell with his career, to
hell with his future in the D.S.A, he couldn’t just stand by and watch
this brutality, he even took a step toward the bed And that was when the
door opened wide and The Stone entered the room as if borne on the shaft
of light that speared in from the hospital corridor behind him.
That was how Jerry Peake thought of the man from the moment he saw him,
The Stone.
“What’s going’ on here?” The Stone asked,in a voice that was quiet,
gentle, deep but not real deep, yet commanding.
The guy was not quite six feet tall, maybe five eleven, even five ten,
which left him several inches shorter than Anson Sharp, and he was about
a hundred and seventy pounds, a good fifty pounds lighter than Sharp.
Yet when he stepped through the door, he seemed like the biggest man in
the room, and he still seemed like the biggest even when Sharp let go of
the girl and stood up from the edge of the bed and said, “Who the hell
are you?”
The Stone switched on the overhead fluorescents and stepped farther into
the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. Peake pegged the guy
as about forty, though his face looked older because it was full of
wisdom. He had close-cut dark hair, sun-weathered skin, and solid
features that looked as if they had been jackhammered out of granite.
His intense blue eyes were the same shade as those of the girl in the
bed but clearer, direct, piercing.
When he turned those eyes briefly toward Jerry Peake, Peake wanted to
crawl under a bed and hide. The Stone was compact and powerful, and
though he was really smaller than Sharp, he appeared infinitely
stronger, more formidable, as if he actually weighed every ounce as much
as Sharp but had compressed his tissues into an unnatural density.
“Please leave the room and wait for me in the hall,” said The Stone