Shadowfires

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 DSA, 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 goin' 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 quietly.
    Astonished, Sharp took a couple of steps toward him, loomed over
him, and said, “I asked you who the hell you are.”
    The Stone's hands and wrists were much too large for the rest of him: long, thick fingers; big knuckles; every tendon and vein and sinew stood out sharply, as if they were hands carved in marble by a sculptor with an exaggerated appreciation for detail. Peake sensed that they were not quite the hands that The Stone had been born with, that they had grown larger and stronger in response to day after day of long, hard, manual labor. The Stone looked as if he thrived on the kind of heavy work that was done in a foundry or quarry or, considering his sun-darkened skin, a farm. But not one of those big, easy, modern farms with a thousand machines and an abundant supply of cheap field hands. No, if he had a farm, he had started it with little money, with bad rocky land, and he had endured lousy weather and sundry catastrophes to bring fruit from the reluctant earth, building a successful enterprise by the expenditure of much sweat, blood, time, hopes, and dreams, because the strength of all those successfully waged struggles was in his face and hands.
    “I'm her father, Felsen Kiel,” The Stone told Sharp.
    In a small voice devoid of fear and filled with wonder,