Shoot First

by Eva Hudson

  Ingrid looked down at Kerrison. His body had lost all tension; he looked as if he’d been poured onto the floor, his chin resting on his chest. He was beaten. A brilliant artist, a successful man, but a broken human being.

  “When I saw you arrive I knew there was only one way out for me. I should have done it weeks ago. I meant to, before the exhibition. Even joked with Truman that the value of all the works would double if I got hit by a falling branch or something...”

  Ingrid was sure she could hear someone outside, but there was no sign of Nick or a Fortnum Security swat team.

  “…and I thought, yeah, double for a tragic accident, quadruple for a suicide.”

  Ingrid had stopped listening. If Tom Kerrison wanted to kill himself she wasn’t going to stop him. He wasn’t her priority; Kristyn was. And if someone was walking round outside who wasn’t Nick Angelis, she had to go and deal with them.

  “Tom?” Her voice was firm.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I need you to go and look after your son.”

  “What? I told you, I don’t want him, that’s what this is all about, making him disappear. Don’t you get that?”

  “I don’t fucking care.” Ingrid picked up the Ruger. “This loaded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good”

  He scrambled onto his knees. “What’s happening?”

  Ingrid stood in front of him. “The guy you thought was FBI is still on your property and he has plans for Kristyn. I’m going to stop him, you understand?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Your job is simple. You just need to go downstairs and be a father.” She marched over to the door.

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “You know what, Tom, about half an hour ago a teenage girl figured out how to give birth. I just figured out how to feed a baby. I reckon you’ll work it out.”

  He looked scared.

  “He’s not even an hour old. Just go to him. Be with him.”

  Ingrid darted out of the room and down the corridor. When she reached the top of the stairs, she tripped on the rug.

  A gunshot reverberated through the house.

  50

  Ingrid stumbled but found her feet. Clutching the carbine, she reached the main landing when another shot rang out, making the baby cry. Vinny had found her Glock.

  She ran down the main staircase, past the dark portraits of long-dead men, to the ground floor. She stopped and listened. Nothing. That wasn’t a good sign. What she wanted was Vinny shouting his head off, making demands for Kristyn to be brought to him or else.

  Then she heard something: rapid, light footsteps on the flagstone floor. The dog.

  Ingrid hadn’t fired a carbine in over a decade. They’d been useful on the farm but they were no good for combat, and almost useless against a Glock. But it looked impressive. It was intimidating. Ingrid figured it might buy her a few seconds. She shouldered it and walked toward the kitchen.

  The dog barked. Not an angry bark, or a distressed bark, more of a ‘hi, over here’ bark. She had a vision of Cully sitting at the feet of a man with a gun, wagging his tail and hoping for a biscuit.

  Ingrid took long, deliberate strides. Careful, considered movement lowered the heart rate, improved decision-making. She stopped every couple of paces to listen.

  When she was close to the kitchen she thought she could hear heavy breathing. After another few paces she thought the breaths had become sobs. She walked forward, waiting at the doorway before taking a deep, steadying breath and stepping inside.

  Slumped against the refrigerator door was Kristyn. Her numb, unseeing eyes stared straight ahead, oblivious to the dog whimpering at her side. Ingrid followed Kristyn’s gaze toward the supine figure of Vinny, sprawled on the limestone slabs, his head lying in an expanding pool of blood.

  Ingrid placed the Ruger on the kitchen table and knelt down next to Kristyn. She could see without touching that there was a strong pulse in the girl’s neck. Then she blinked.

  Ingrid placed a hand on the girl’s knee. “Hey.”

  Kristyn looked at her, with the swimming eyes of a drunk, someone so inebriated they were liable to pass out. Her clothes were covered in blood. Drying blood. From giving birth, not a gunshot.

  The girl moved her lips, but no words came. Lying on the stone floor next to her right hand was the Glock. Ingrid leapt up, grabbed a tumbler from a cupboard and filled it from the faucet. She held the glass to Kristyn’s lips. “Drink. You need to drink something.”

  Kristyn’s lips feebly held onto the rim of the glass, though most of the water dribbled down her chin.

  “A doctor is coming. Are you in pain?”

  Kristyn’s head shook by the tiniest of increments. “Hungry.”

  Ingrid hoped the girl had a taste for gourmet chocolates and artisan breadsticks. She raided the cupboards and brought her a selection of snacks. Ingrid opened the packets then set them down on the floor and crouched beside her. The girl was exhausted, like a marathon runner who’d hit the wall.

  How many women, Ingrid wondered, in the history of mankind, have given birth and killed someone within an hour? Her heart ached for the girl.

  “Here, let me help.” Ingrid unwrapped a chocolate truffle and popped it in Kristyn’s mouth. “Better?”

  The girl nodded, then a tear fell down her cheek. Ingrid reached an arm round her shoulders and pulled the girl toward her, holding her as she began to sob.

  How many women, Ingrid wondered, in the history of mankind, will have embraced after both killing a man within an hour of each other?

  Ingrid felt her own eyes prickle with tears. Vinny and Donaho might have been gangsters—they had probably always known their lives would be ended by a bullet—but neither of them had got up that morning and thought it would be their final day.

  Ingrid stroked Kristyn’s hair and kissed the top of her head. “It’s OK, you’ve not done anything wrong. I promise you, this is going to be OK.”

  The dog sat obediently in front of them, whimpering slightly. Ingrid supposed it wouldn’t do him any harm: she unwrapped a chocolate and held it out for him.

  “Good boy.”

  Ingrid started to tremble. Adrenaline was leaving her system. The threat was over. Her body was entering a correction phase, also known as the what-the-hell-have-I-done phase. Ingrid knew many of her colleagues had taken a life and had always wondered how they coped. She feared the guilt might extract a price she would be unable to pay. There was no getting round it: she had taken a man’s life. And in doing so she had forfeited her career. She was going to have to leave the FBI: it would be the minimum payment Angelis would require to clean up her mess.

  “I…” Kristyn’s voice was faint, “I had no choice.”

  Neither did I.

  “In a little while, when the doctor gets here, a team of people is going to come in and take care of this. No one will ever find out. You’re not going to go to jail, or spend the next twenty-four hours in a custody suite.”

  Kristyn pulled away from her. “Why? I killed him, didn’t I? Just like someone killed my sister. Isn’t…” She reached out and took a sip of water. “Isn’t somebody going to want justice for him? Like I want justice for Kate-Lynn?”

  Ingrid pushed Kristyn’s dirtied hair from her face and looked into the girl’s steely blue eyes. Kristyn Bowers was possibly the toughest woman she’d ever met, tougher than Svetlana, tougher than any of her Quantico instructors. Maybe even tougher than she was. After everything Kristyn had been through in her seventeen years, and after everything the past few days had thrown at her, she still wanted justice for her sister. Ingrid’s admiration for the girl was boundless.

  “You know, there are a lot people who’ll say Vinny just got justice.”

  Kristyn nodded. “But, still…”

  “No one’s even going to report him missing. You know that if he’d died in Aurora, he’d be in a dump truck, or under concrete on a building site. This is what
happens to men who lead lives like that.” Now wasn’t the time to tell her the best way to get the justice she sought was to testify. The conversation about returning to Chicago could wait: she had twenty-four hours before she needed to put Kristyn on a plane.

  “How’s the baby?” Kristyn asked, wiping away a tear.

  Ingrid looked in the direction of the hallway. “I’m guessing that the fact we can’t hear anything is a good sign. Tom is with him.”

  Evolution. She knew it would work. You can’t hold a newborn and not feel something. You just can’t.

  Kristyn flinched. “What’s that?”

  The dog ran to the back door and started barking at the noise of a helicopter coming in to land.

  Ingrid took the deepest of breaths. “That’s the cavalry.”

  She slid her arm out from behind Kristyn and held the girl’s shoulders firmly. The two women stared at each other, both blinking back tears.

  “I’ll be OK,” the girl said. “Go.”

  Ingrid slowly got to her feet and shakily stepped out into the garden. She followed the sound of the rotors and reached Arding Manor’s broad, sweeping lawn just as the Sikorsky six-seater made contact with the ground. The blades pounded the air with such force she felt they might blow the dried blood from her skin. The door slid open and a tall, muscular man in black fatigues jumped down.

  “You Skyberg?” he said, though the rotors drowned out his voice.

  “Yes.” She was shaking.

  “Ambrose.” Behind him, three operatives in Tyvek suits began unloading a series of flight-cases from the helicopter. “A truck is on its way to remove the vehicles. Angelis said there was a body—”

  “There are now two.”

  He nodded, as if that was a perfectly normal confession.

  “Which one of you is the doctor?”

  “That’s me,” Ambrose said.

  “It’s this way.”

  As they ran toward the house it occurred to Ingrid that not hearing a sound from Tom or the baby wasn’t a good sign after all. In fact, it might be an extremely bad one.

  51

  Three days later, Ingrid was standing outside the entrance to St Thomas’ hospital Accident and Emergency department. She had one finger in her ear to block out the sound of the driving rain and tried to listen to Sol on a temperamental line.

  “Yup, Kristyn testified, we did our bit,” she said, hoping her reply made sense as she hadn’t properly made out what her boss had said.

  “Now we have to hope the jury does theirs.”

  An ambulance siren crescendoed, making it even harder to have a conversation. “I should go.”

  “You must be tired,” he said.

  It was 11pm or thereabouts and she was shattered. The flight back from Chicago had been delayed by four hours and all Ingrid wanted to do was climb into bed and sleep for a week. “I’m OK.”

  “Good, because you really ought to be in early tomorrow.”

  “Why?” The ambulance turned into the parking lot, its blue lights flashing against an eggplant sky. Ingrid winced until the driver turned the siren off.

  “Louden’s replacement is starting.”

  “That was quick.”

  “They obviously don’t trust me to hold the fort.”

  Ingrid thought better of telling Sol over the phone that it didn’t matter whether or not she made a good impression with the new boss, because the first thing she had to do in the morning was tender her resignation. She watched the EMTs open the back of the ambulance and lower a gurney onto the wet blacktop. The ambulance was parked under an awning, but the wind whipped the rain under the cover and onto the patient. Ingrid took a slow, purposeful breath, steeling herself for whatever lay inside. “I better go,” she said. “This is a crappy line and I’m getting wet.”

  “OK, see you in the morning. Bright and early.” He hung up.

  The sliding doors opened automatically and Ingrid walked up to the reception desk, dragging her flight-case behind her. The floor was wet with muddied footprints: how many people had fallen over and broken a bone after they’d made it to the ER?

  There was a line of people at the reception desk. An LED display announced the average waiting time to be seen by a doctor was three hours and twelve minutes, and the counter staff were getting a hard time from impatient relatives and patient casualties.

  How many days had it been since she had been admitted here? Was it really only four days ago? That seemed impossible, as if someone had invented a time-bending machine and used her without consent in an experiment. She counted the days: today, fly back from Chicago; yesterday, escort Kristyn to court; Sunday, fly to Chicago; Saturday, killed a man; Friday, stabbed a man, got drugged and woke up in this very hospital. Just four days. Impossible. Ninety-six hours and she’d barely slept: closing her eyes was like loading a cassette of her firing a gun at a speeding car and pressing replay. She knew she hadn’t had a choice, but that did nothing to put her at ease with what she’d done.

  “Hi,” Ingrid said when she made it to the counter. She pushed her wet hair off her face. “I’m here to visit Natasha McKittrick. She was brought in earlier today.”

  The receptionist, a stocky man with thick-rimmed glasses and a plaid shirt, looked at his computer screen. He said something to her, but she was too embarrassed to ask him to repeat it. He had a thick accent, sub-Saharan Africa was as specific as she could pinpoint, and she could not understand him. She waited until he repeated himself.

  “It is on the third floor,” he said.

  “What is?” she asked.

  “ICU.” So that’s what he’d said.

  “She’s in intensive care?” It was only when she spoke the words out loud that Ingrid felt the full horror they represented.

  “Third floor,” the man repeated, and pointed in the direction of a bank of elevators.

  Ralph had meant it when he’d said to get there quickly. Intensive care?

  The elevator doors closed and Ingrid looked at herself in the mirror. She had gotten drenched just walking from the taxi to the hospital and her hair was plastered flat against her scalp. She wasn’t wearing any make-up; there was no barrier between her puffy under-slept eyes and the scrutiny of the world. Or the scrutiny of Ralph Mills.

  The doors opened and Ingrid followed the signs to the ICU, the wheels of her case rattling noisily on the tiled floor. She hoped she wasn’t disturbing patients. The corridors were surprisingly quiet: visitors had gone home to be replaced by a skeleton night shift. She pushed through a set of double doors into the ICU reception area. There was no one behind the desk, but Ralph was sitting alone on the visitor chairs.

  “I came straight here,” Ingrid said. “You didn’t say she was in ICU.”

  He stood up and embraced her. She could tell he’d been crying.

  “She wasn’t when I called, but she had some kind of seizure, a stroke they think, and so they brought her here.”

  Ingrid’s mouth fell open. “A stroke? Is she going to be OK?”

  Ralph bit his bottom lip and took hold of Ingrid’s hands. “I don’t know.”

  Ingrid’s jet-lagged brain tried to compute the new information. “Who’s in there with her? Is Marcus here?”

  “Who’s Marcus?” So Ingrid wasn’t the only one who didn’t know. “I don’t really know her family. She’s the boss, right? Or she was. Oh, God, I don’t mean past tense because… but, you know, the misconduct thing… oh shit, I’m really useless at this sort of thing.” Mr Sensitive. It wasn’t without appeal, but it wasn’t for Ingrid. She knew that now. She just had to find a way of telling him.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  He grabbed the handle of Ingrid’s sodden case and wheeled it over to the seating area. “Multiple stab wounds to the abdomen.”

  Ingrid shivered. Liquid nitrogen replaced the blood in her veins. She was too stunned to say anything.

  “Then internal bleeding.” Ralph sat down and pushed the hair off his face. “When I first
got the call I thought it had to be revenge, you know, for the case we’re working.”

  Ingrid sat beside him. “She mentioned it. Some random stabbing outside a pub.”

  He shook his head. “I mean, what are the odds? She’s investigating a shanking, a case of mistaken identity, and the moment she gets taken off the case she becomes the victim of a copycat crime.”

  “She was stabbed in a pub?”

  He rested his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “You know that pub I told you about? The Queen Mary? The one in Pimlico?”

  Ingrid’s face went novocaine numb. “What?”

  “I mean, what the hell was she doing in there?”

  Her jaw moved but words wouldn’t come out.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  Could he see her guilt? Was it that obvious? “She was there for me,” she managed. “I asked her to look into something. Thought it would keep her occupied, keep her mind off the misconduct thing.” Her head slumped into her hands but the second she closed her eyes an instant replay of the Arding Manor driveway knifed its way through her head. The spray of Donaho’s blood on the other side of the windshield was stained into her retinas.

  A set of double doors opened at the far side of the reception area. Two orderlies wedged open the doors and wheeled a gurney through. Neither Ingrid nor Ralph commented on the strapped and shrouded corpse they were taking to the hospital’s mortuary. Ingrid pictured Donaho and Vinny’s bodies being zipped into bags and loaded onto the back of a white truck. Angelis said they’d be wrapped in concrete and dropped somewhere over the English Channel. The image was quickly replaced by one of Megan’s coffin being lowered into the ground. Ingrid shivered. Not enough sleep, not enough food, too many memories. When the orderlies had pushed through another set of doors, the reception area returned to stillness, the quiet punctuated with occasional electronic bleeps from distant machinery and the whirr of a coffee vending machine.