The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

moment, and she was pricked by shame. She had no right to expect his trust, not after what had happened in the cemetery. The vision still haunted her, of a stricken Korsak, lying alone and abandoned in the darkness. And she—so single-minded, so oblivious to everything but the chase. She could not look him in the eye, and her gaze dropped, settling instead on his beefy arm, crisscrossed with tape and I.V. tubing.
    “I am so sorry,” she said. “God, I’m sorry.”
    “For what?”
    “Not looking out for you.”
    “What’re you talking about?”
    “Don’t you remember?”
    He shook his head.
    She paused, suddenly realizing that he truly did not remember. That she could stop talking right now and he would never know how she’d failed him. Silence might be the easy way out, but she knew she couldn’t live with the burden.
    “What do you remember, about the night in the cemetery?” she asked. “The last thing?”
    “The last thing? I was running. I guess we were running, weren’t we? Chasing the perp.”
    “What else?”
    “I remember feeling really pissed off.”
    “Why?”
    He snorted. “ ’Cause I couldn’t keep up with a friggin’ girl.”
    “And then?”
    He shrugged. “That’s it. That’s the last I remember. Till those nurses here started shoving that goddamn tube up my . . .” He stopped. “I woke up all right. You better believe I let ’em know it, too.”
    A silence passed, Korsak with his jaw squared, his gaze fixed stubbornly on the EKG monitor. Then he said, with quiet disgust: “I guess I screwed up the chase.”
    This took her by surprise. “Korsak—”
    “Look at this.” He waved at his bulging belly. “Like I swallowed a goddamn basketball. That’s what it looks like. Or I’m fifteen months knocked up. Can’t even run a race with a girl. I used to be fast, you know. Used to be built like a racehorse. Not like I am now. You shoulda seen me back then, Rizzoli. Wouldn’t recognize me. Bet you don’t believe any of it, do you? ’Cause you just see me like I am now. Broken-down piece of shit. Smoke too much, eat too much.”
    Drink too much,
she added silently.
    “. . . just an ugly tub of lard.” He gave his belly an angry slap.
    “Korsak, listen to me. I’m the one who screwed up, not you.”
    He looked at her, clearly confused.
    “In the cemetery. We were both running. Chasing what we thought was the perp. You were right behind me. I heard you breathing, trying to keep up.”
    “Like you gotta rub it in.”
    “Then you weren’t there. You just weren’t there. But I kept running, and it was all a waste of time. It wasn’t the perp. It was Agent Dean, walking the perimeter. The perp was long gone. We were chasing after nothing, Korsak. A few shadows. That’s all.”
    He was silent, waiting for the rest of the story.
    She forced herself to continue. “That’s when I should’ve gone looking for you. I should’ve realized you weren’t around. But things got crazy. And I just didn’t think. I didn’t stop to wonder where you were. . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know how long it took me to remember. Maybe it was only a few minutes. But I think—I’m afraid—it was a lot longer. And all that time, you were lying there, behind one of the gravestones. It took me so long to start searching for you. To remember.”
    A silence passed. She wondered if he’d even registered what she’d said, because he began to fuss with his I.V. line, rearranging the loops of tubing. It was as if he didn’t want to look at her and was trying to focus instead on anything else.
    “Korsak?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t you have anything to say?”
    “Yeah. Forget it. That’s what I have to say.”
    “I feel like such a jerk.”
    “Why? ’Cause you were doing your job?”
    “Because I should’ve been watching out for my partner.”
    “Like I’m your partner?”
    “That night you were.”
    He laughed. “That night I was a friggin’ liability. A two-ton ball and chain, holding you back. You been getting all worked up about not looking out for me. Me, I’ve been lying here getting pissed off for falling down on the job. I mean,
literally.
Kerplunk. I been thinking about all the dumb-ass lies I keep telling myself. You see this gut?” Again he slapped his belly. “It was gonna disappear. Yeah, I believed that, too. That one of these days I was gonna go on a diet and get rid of the tire. Instead, I just keep buying bigger and bigger pants. Telling myself those