by Lucy Score
She had to go now. It was her only chance. Hunching low, she jog-waddled her way along the east wing. The fountain spurted to life just ahead. From above, it looked like half of a perfect boob. But from the ground, it was much more dignified. Today, the waters spewing forth into the air were still a toilet bowl blue for the Fourth of July weekend.
Behind her, the sounds of angry law enforcement grew louder. It was now or never. One deep breath that really made her side hurt, and she was off and running again.
The sidewalk in front of her was empty. It opened onto the fountain’s courtyard, which also appeared to be sublimely devoid of gun-toting people ready to shoot her. Fueled by hope, she pounded across the concrete, making a beeline for the road. There were cars cruising by. She felt the spray from the fountain’s jets as she neared it. Almost there.
Maybe this would work. Maybe she would live through this after all.
Something hit her from behind. And then she was airborne, sailing into the toilet blue waters. She went under. Her brain found the unanticipated warmth of the water a little gross. And then she realized she couldn’t breathe. Someone pulled her up.
“When I say don’t move, I mean don’t fucking move, lady.” It was the capitol cop, who was super pissed off but not currently pointing a gun at Riley. “Damn it. I just ironed this shirt,” the officer complained.
“He’s trying to kill me. Mayor Flemming has a gun. He shot me,” Riley said, after spitting out a pint of fountain water.
The cop slapped a cuff on one of her wrists. But Riley was slippery when wet, and she flailed her other hand free.
“The mayor’s trying to kill you. Yep. Uh-huh.” She reached for Riley’s other wrist.
“I’m serious. Look. He shot me.” She yanked her tank up.
“Damn, girl. You got shot right through the muffin top.”
“He had Legislator Bowers murdered because he wants his seat,” Riley said in a rush. “He shot his henchman, Duncan Gulliver, on City Island. Call. Ask. Please! I’m not lying, Shanna. Just ask. For the love of cheese and crackers, save my life and ask,” she begged.
“How do you know my name?”
“I’m a psychic. Your PIN number is 0733, and when you were twelve, you kissed the neighbor boy, but you wished it was his sister.” It came out in a frantic rush.
“This is Officer Billings,” the cop said into the handset on her shoulder. “We got any police reports coming in from City Island?”
There was a crackle of static as Riley’s life hung in the balance.
“Got a report of gunfire and someone kidnapping a bus full of church ladies. Then some asshole drove his van across the pedestrian bridge, trying to mow down a girl on a bike. Just another day in paradise.”
“Me! That was me. I’m the girl on the bike,” Riley said, nodding so hard her teeth chattered.
Cars continued to whiz past on the road, either not noticing the wrestling match in the fountain or immune to it. Officer Billings had stopped reaching for her other hand.
“If what you’re saying is true—”
The sound of a shot echoed in Riley’s head, and she watched in horror as a tiny hole appeared in Billings’s chest and began to bloom red.
“No. No. No.” Riley grabbed the woman’s arms and tried to hold her up, but the officer’s knees buckled in slow motion. Riley lowered with her, resting Officer Billings against the lip of the fountain.
“Gun,” she whispered to Riley before her eyes rolled back in her head.
“You stupid, psychotic, son of a bitch,” Riley seethed as Mayor Flemming limped closer, casually wielding his gun.
“I had a feeling you’d come this way. Maybe I’m psychic too. Best of all, I reported a woman fitting your description trying to break into the State Museum, so it’s just you and me, Ms. Thorn,” he sneered. His laugh was unhinged, and she knew whatever sanity that had kept him from exposing himself as a monster was officially gone. She’d probably knocked it out of him with the skateboard… along with what looked like one of his canine teeth. Cool.
“You didn’t see this coming, did you?” Riley said, yanking Billings’s gun out of the holster and pointing it at him.
Why, why, WHY hadn’t she taken Nick up on the shooting lessons? Was there a safety? If so, how did she unsafety it? Was there a round in the thing? Was she supposed to pull back a hammer-majiggy?
This was bad. She couldn’t outshoot him. The only chance she had was luring him closer and beating the crap out of him.
Eh. Worth a shot? Ha. Little about-to-be-murdered pun there.
Riley dropped the gun to her side and crossed her eyes. “I’m getting a message from the beyond for you,” she said in a robotic monotone. She jerked back and forth like she was being electrocuted. She hoped the gravely wounded Officer Billings didn’t have a stun gun submerged in the water.
Flemming limped closer, still pointing the gun at her.
“I’m getting a motherly presence. Also the letter f,” Riley reported. “Mother Ffffffff…”
He was inching closer and closer. “Great-Aunt Frances?” he guessed.
She shook her head. “No. More like motherfu-u-u-u-cker!” Everything seemed to happen in slow motion as she hurled the gun at him. He put his hands up as if to catch it, just like Made it Out Alive said he would. Flemming wasn’t fast enough though. It hit him in the forehead with a satisfying thwack.
She dove sideways just as his finger tightened on the trigger. The shot went wide. At least, she assumed it did when she didn’t feel any new holes in her body.
She surfaced and tried to jump to her feet, but the jig was up. A howling, bleeding Nolan sloshed his way toward her.
Riley, out of weapons, splashed him as he came closer, gun raised.
“Say goodnight, bitch,” he snarled.
“You’re so original with your bad guy lines,” she complained, squeezing her eyes shut and keeping up the waterworks even as he pulled the trigger.
When there was no bang, when she didn’t feel the life drip out of her body, she opened one eye. Nolan was staring in horror at his empty magazine. Click. Click. Click.
Their eyes met over the barrel of the now-useless weapon.
She opened her mouth and let out an entire adulthood of pent-up rage in a terrifying battle cry. He took a floundering step backward. Riley lunged for him, and they grappled in the blue, blue water. It was a blur of limbs and toilet water. He yanked her hair, and she landed a stunning jab to his already wounded mouth.
He attempted a headlock hold, which she countered with a nasty bite to the bicep. A lucky punch slipped past her defenses and caught her right in the bullet hole. It took the breath out of her, and Nolan pressed his advantage, flopping on her with all his body weight. She went under and, with horror, felt hands tighten on her throat. He had her pinned against the floor of the fountain. A foot of water between her and precious, precious oxygen.
She bucked and punched and slapped. But she was growing weaker. A haze of red filtered through the water in front of her eyes. Just like her vision. Only it was her blood. Not Nick’s. She’d done it. She’d saved Jasmine and Nick. And if this was the way things had to end, she’d die knowing everyone she loved—or in Nick’s case really, really, really liked—was safe.
The red and blue were getting darker and darker and darker as the world gently disappeared.
57
7:39 a.m., Sunday, July 5
“Riley!” Her name ripped its way out of his throat as Nick ran toward her. Toward the madman intent on drowning the woman he wanted to do a lot of things to.
The entire ride back to Harrisburg, he’d planned out exactly how loud and long he was going to yell at her.
Stupid.
Irresponsible.
Selfish.
The plan had been to find her and then spend the next week or so shouting some sense into her.
He wasn’t exactly conscious of jumping into the fountain, of diving for the murderous monster, of his gun slippin
g out of his waistband and sinking. But the second his body collided with Flemming’s instinct took over.
Dragging Riley to the surface with one hand, he held Nolan under with the other, jabbing a knee into the man’s balls.
“Breathe, baby,” he demanded, giving Riley a little shake. Her lips and skin had a blue tinge to them. Actually, so did her hair.
Her eyes—thank fucking God—fluttered open. She coughed and choked and drew in a breath.
“I am so pissed at you, Thorn,” he told her as the world’s most evil mayor thrashed against his grip.
She pawed at him, trying to say something, but choked out more water instead.
He leaned in closer. “What?”
“Get out of the fountain!” she rasped. There was panic in her eyes.
“I’m a little busy saving your life,” he argued.
“Get out of the damn fountain, Nick!”
“As soon as I’m done kicking this weasel’s ass.”
He gave her one hard kiss and released her. Riley continued to shout nonsensically at him to get out even as she sloshed over to the unconscious cop.
Nick dragged Flemming back to the surface.
“Nobody fucking drowns my girlfriend,” he snarled. He grabbed the man by his stupid hair and landed a right hook that would have made Floyd Mayweather shed a tear of pride. Flemming deflated like a bagpipe.
Reaching down, Nick grabbed the poor excuse for a man by the back of the neck. He was in the middle of trying to decide whether to kick him in the face or step on his trachea when someone else shouted his name.
“Hands the fuck up!”
Detective Weber, in jeans and a t-shirt, stood against the lip of the fountain, gun pointed. A cop car with lights and sirens screeched to a halt on the street behind him.
“Don’t justh sthand there, you moronths!” Flemming sputtered through holes where teeth used to be. “Arresth theeth athholeth! They athaulted me!”
“Harrisburg PD! I wanna see some hands!” This command came from Detective Katie Shapiro, who vaulted out of the car, gun trained on them.
Nick saw the shift from terrified to smug as it played out on Nolan’s face. He tightened his grip on the man.
“Let the mayor go, Santiago,” Shapiro ordered.
“Weber,” Nick said. “You remember that thing in Tijuana?”
“Already ahead of you, brother,” Weber said, shifting his stance to point his gun at Shapiro.
Riley gasped. “Wait! Weber isn’t dirty?”
“That’s exactly what you wanted everyone to think, isn’t it, Katie?” Nick said.
The detective’s face remained an impervious mask. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Okay, she’s definitely lying,” Riley said, pointing at Shapiro. “And Nick, I swear to God, if you don’t get out of this water right now—”
But her threat was cut off by the arrival of the capitol police. There were more cars. More guns. More people. And lots more yelling.
Nick had about twenty weapons trained on him and, after a brief internal debate, decided the best course of action was to release the son of a bitch. Momentarily.
“They tried to kill me!” Flemming sputtered while he flailed around in the water, and two officers ran up to the cop slumped at the fountain’s edge.
“They did that! They thot tha offither,” Flemming said, pointing while he tried to get to his feet.
“It’s true. I saw the girl shoot her,” Shapiro called out.
Nick gave Flemming a kick to the chest and sent the man sprawling backward.
“Don’t fucking move,” five or six cops yelled at the same time.
“You lying sack of weasels,” Riley bellowed. She started coughing again, and Nick edged toward her. “The mayor shot Officer Billings. He also abducted my best friend and shot his communications director, which doesn’t really matter because he was a bad guy, too,” she told the crowd between coughs.
“Riley, honey. Maybe you want to shut up for a second and breathe,” Nick suggested.
“Oh, and he shot me, too,” she announced.
“He shot you?” Just when Nick thought he couldn’t possibly get more pissed off.
Flemming frantically tried to backstroke away from him.
“Stop moving, Flemming, or someone is going to put a bullet in you,” Weber shouted.
“You don’t have a badge, Weber,” Shapiro reminded him.
“Then consider this a citizen’s arrest,” Weber shot back. “You’re next.”
Nick eased to the left, putting himself between Shapiro’s gun and the woman he was probably going to have to marry for real. He was running calculations in his head. If they could get out of this fountain alive, they’d have a chance at getting someone to listen to the truth. But as the seconds ticked by, the odds of that were getting slimmer and slimmer.
“Halt!”
Nick blinked. Once. Twice. Even after a third blink, he was still seeing the same thing. A dozen masked vigilantes converged on the fountain. He recognized Richard Nixon and Elsa from Frozen from his late-night pick-up service. But he didn’t see Mrs. Penny.
“The mayor is lying!” the kid in the Elsa mask squeaked, holding up a phone.
“Back off now,” Detective Shapiro shouted. “This is official police business.”
“What in the fuck is going on? Who are we supposed to shoot?” growled one of the capitol cops.
“Show him,” Nick told Elsa the ninja, pointing with his raised hands at the grumpy cop.
Obligingly, the pubescent vigilante trotted up to the cop.
“What am I looking at?” the officer groused. “I don’t have my reading glasses.”
“Dude, it’s a Facebook Live. This mayor guy tried to kill the hot chick in the fountain on City Island and again on Second Street.”
“Hot chick? Aww, thanks, Elsa,” Riley croaked.
Nick rolled his eyes. And then realized he’d made his mistake. He’d let Flemming out of his sight.
“Nick!” Riley shrieked. He spun around in time to see the sopping wet mayor level a gun at him from the lip of the fountain.
“Ah, shit.”
He wasn’t going to have the chance to yell at Riley. He wasn’t going to find a house and figure out what settling down meant. He wasn’t going to get to give his cousin and Josie the raises he’d planned. He wasn’t going to wake up to another morning with Riley naked in his arms.
“Put the gun down, Mayor,” someone yelled. But it was too late.
Flemming pulled the trigger just as something wet and hard hit Nick from the side. He went under the water and stayed there, wondering when it would start to hurt. Maybe it was a kill shot, and he was already dead? That thought pissed him off. Maybe he was just super manly and pain didn’t affect him? He liked that better.
Then hands were grabbing at his shirt, his shoulders.
He wondered if this was heaven or hell. Most likely hell, he guessed. He’d been a real pisser as a teenager and twenty-something. He broke the surface of the water and dragged in a breath.
Huh. Hell looked a whole lot like Harrisburg in the middle of a gunfight.
The capitol cops were hunkered down behind vehicles and stone balustrades taking fire from one pissed-off Detective Shapiro and the city’s soggy-ass, blue-tinged mayor who had Nick’s fucking gun. The vigilantes had scattered to take cover behind trash cans and stone benches.
“You okay, man?” Weber asked, dragging him backward behind the fountain’s concrete center.
“When did you get in here?” Nick asked, feeling a little dazed.
Weber dropped him unceremoniously next to Riley.
She grabbed him and held on tight. “You’re not dead!”
“Are you okay?” he asked, returning the embrace.
“Ow,” she said. “Except for my side.”
“She pushed you out of the way,” Weber said grimly.
“I can’t believe that guy shot you,” Nick croaked, sta
ring in horror at the wound in her side.
“I know,” she groused. “He got me in the love handle when I was running... or maybe it was when I was on the bike. I thought it was appendicitis.”
“We’re sitting in a lot of blood for one bullet hole,” Weber observed.
She swiveled her head back to Nick. He started to feel a strange stinging beneath him. “Oh, come on,” he said.
Weber grinned and pushed Nick onto his side. “Congratulations, brother. You’ve got yourself an extra hole in your ass.”
“For Pete’s sake! All my freaking heroics, and you still get shot?” Riley yelled over the sounds of gunfire.
“I got shot in the ass? That’s not sexy,” he complained.
A bullet pinged into the concrete above their heads. Weber positioned himself to return fire. “We might want to save the arguments for when we’re not taking fire,” he suggested.
“Nick?” Riley’s pretty brown eyes were watery.
“Yeah, Thorn?”
“If we don’t get out of here, I just want you to know that I had a really good time last night. Like really good,” she yelled.
His male pride puffed up automatically. “You’re damn right, you did,” he shouted. “And we’re getting out of here. So don’t try to say some dramatic goodbye.”
“How are we getting out of this?” she asked as bullets flew over their heads.
“It’ll take a miracle, but you’re pretty damn lucky. I’ll take my chances with y—”
The sound of squealing wheels and a revving engine cut him off. They poked their heads up and watched in sick fascination as a dusty gray minivan jumped the curb and hurtled toward the fountain.
“Is that…”
“Cabbage casserole,” Riley breathed.
Detective Shapiro and Mayor Dirtbag Flemming were too busy in their murderous rampage to pay attention to the minivan as it accelerated toward them. It hit Flemming first, sending his body bouncing over the hood and into the windshield before the man rag-dolled onto the sidewalk. It didn’t slow when it struck Shapiro, tossing her a good ten feet. She hit the fountain’s concrete centerpiece with a sickening thud, followed by a belly flop into the water. The minivan came to a crunching halt when it slammed into the concrete bollards that ringed the front of the fountain.