Hour of the Assassin

by Matthew Quirk

  After a long last breath, he doused his head and face in water and disappeared into the fire.

  99

  The blast had blown a hole in the stucco and wood of the exterior wall and Nick rushed into it. A stud slammed against his arm, then let go with a splintering sound. He pushed past the shattered framing and drywall within, pressing on blindly through the dying flames into the house.

  He tripped over something and caught himself with a long step. The heat pressed in against his lips and burned at his neck as the water cooked off. He opened his eyes a millimeter and saw light ahead.

  He kept going and made out two pairs of washer-dryers on his right and a wall covered in electrical conduit. Something crashed behind him, and burning embers spit past him. He turned in the doorway and saw that part of the wall had collapsed into the flames, blocking the way he had come in.

  He was in a custodian’s room. He looked down and saw a glowing patch of orange spreading up the sleeve of his jacket. He slapped at it twice, and the embers went black. Ducking low, he risked a shallow breath, then rose up and opened the metal service panels attached to the wall. The first held the circuit breakers. The second he had to pry open with the tip of his knife. It was the multiplex system for the alarms and doors. He ripped out the wires from the harnesses.

  Smoke stabbed at the back of his throat, but he held on until he had severed the last connection, then he turned, his lungs aching in his chest, starving for air. He stepped into the doorway and breathed. The walls seemed to sway. He didn’t have time to rest, to get enough oxygen to stop his head from swimming.

  He raised his gun, his shoulder stiff, the pain roaring. It felt like the cut had opened up in the chaos. He ignored it and stepped through the doorway, sweeping the hall.

  Tss-boom.

  A bullet sailed next to his head, blew out the wall in a puff of plaster. He dropped back into the smoke, cutting off his own desperate breaths, darted low to his right through the fumes, and came out on the other side of the expanding cloud.

  He recognized the man’s face behind the sights of a pistol—it was Singh—and then a light mounted under the barrel shot into his eyes, brilliant white, blinding him.

  He arced left, made himself a hard target as he aimed into the white, where the man’s face had been. One shot, two.

  The light tumbled to the floor, and he heard a heavy thud. He’d found his target. He blinked and tried to regain his vision, closing in. Singh was gone.

  A woman’s muffled cry came from upstairs.

  100

  Nick moved toward the sound of the voice. The main hall had stairs at either end and a mezzanine twenty feet up from the floor of black-and-white checkered marble.

  Guards were pounding on the doors from the outside, the echoes booming through the house. He watched the door handle shake, but it didn’t budge. Access was down.

  He climbed the stairs, following his pistol as it tracked from threat to potential threat. Another call. It sounded like Delia’s voice. He started down one of the halls that led off from the landing, passing through a small sitting area with twin club chairs and a Tiffany lamp. He caught his reflection in a glass-fronted bookcase.

  The hallway was clear, and he heard the voice again, coming from the far end.

  His throat burned, his mind and vision still clouded by the fumes. He fought the urge to run to her, even as he heard her voice, that muted cry. He counted six doors between him and the room, all dark, four partly open, and a side hall. It felt wrong. A setup. A shooting gallery.

  He moved slowly, testing each step for the slightest sound that might give him away. More display cases lined the walls. Antique canes filled one, ceramics another.

  With his back to the wall opposite the first door, he scanned inside the room as he passed. It was too dark to see every corner of the interior. He took a step closer to the threshold.

  Something skittered on hardwood, and his eyes and gun went instantly to the noise over his right shoulder, back the way he had come. Silver and copper flashed, and a penny rolled on its edge.

  A misdirection. He knew instantly, spun the other way and lunged toward the side hall to his left. The barrel of a pistol emerged and took aim. Jeff Turner’s face was behind it. Nick’s free hand shot out and seized the wrist. A white explosion went off a foot from Nick’s eyes as the gun fired, so close it deafened him, sudden silence in the midst of this chaos, and then a high drone like a mosquito’s. But he hadn’t been hit.

  Nick drove his fingers deep into Jeff’s forearm and wrenched his arm to the side. The gun slipped from Jeff’s hand, banged onto the hardwood behind him, and slid into one of the rooms. Nick twisted, bringing his own gun across his body to get a shot. Jeff blocked his wrist and then drove his knee straight up into Nick’s elbow, bending it the wrong way with a crack.

  The pain pushed Nick to the edge of a blackout, and his gun dropped to the ground. Jeff reached down for it. Nick kicked it down the hall as his right arm fell by his side.

  Jeff ran for Nick’s gun, crouching and lifting it and turning in one smooth motion, but Nick was already sprinting at him. He dropped low and caught Jeff around the waist, pulled him in with his good arm, shoved with his legs, lifting them both high, in the air now. Nick hoped that he could slam Jeff, come down hard enough on top of him to stun him and gain the advantage.

  They crashed into the bookcase near the top of the steps. The glass shattered and rained onto the back of Nick’s neck as it tipped over. Nick landed on top of Jeff, who was stretched out on his back across the broken woodwork and open books.

  Jeff groaned. He tried to raise the gun, but Nick knocked it away, out of his hand. The pistol slid across the hardwood. Nick watched it sail off the mezzanine and fall to the first floor, skittering along the marble.

  Nick raised himself up, ready for another blow, but Jeff seemed barely able to move, his eyes on the ceiling and mouth open in a mute scream.

  Nick’s broken arm was pinned underneath Jeff. As he wrested it free, he felt blood and his hand brushed against a shard of glass that had dug deep into Jeff’s back.

  “Where are Karen and Ali?” he asked.

  Jeff’s eyes looked straight up. His mouth writhed in pain. He was out of the fight for now. Nick put his hand to the ground. He needed to move. All the noises around him, even his own voice, sounded like they were coming from underwater, some aftereffect of the blast.

  “Help me,” Jeff gasped.

  Nick got up on one knee.

  His head turned to the sound of someone coming up fast behind him, but it was too late. A flash of metal swung toward his temple. The world shook, tilted on its side, as Nick fell.

  David Blakely stood over him, holding a cane with a brass grip in the shape of a horse’s head. It whipped through the air again.

  Nick raised his arm to block the cane, but the metal handle smashed into it, and made the limb drop, numb. The cane drove into his ribs, then his shoulder as he tried to cover up, pushing himself back on the landing, the broken glass crunching under him as Blakely struck him again and again.

  The brass grip flew toward his head, and Nick shoved himself to the side, his heel slipping across the carpet, as he went over the top stair. He tumbled, sliding and rolling down the stairs, the room spinning, bolts of pain shooting through his body.

  His head slammed against the floor as he landed on his back, knocking the wind out of him, fighting to breathe through paralyzed lungs.

  He couldn’t move, could barely keep his eyes open. He heard Jeff pleading with David for help, but Blakely simply stepped over him and descended the stairs, closing in on Nick.

  101

  Sam MacDonough stepped into the hallway, his breath sawing in and out. David had told Sam to wait in this room on the third floor, but now the guards were gone, and David’s head of security was nowhere to be found, and the house was a war zone: blasts and gunshots and smoke.

  Sam heard the sound of someone trying to break down a door, some
where close, and he knew he had to move. He wasn’t going to wait in that room to die. He was getting out.

  He crept down the back stairs, then paused. Come on, Sam, get your shit together. Someone is going to hear you.

  He dragged his hand over his face, took a long breath, and kept moving, toward the second-floor landing.

  He peered around the corner and saw a figure dragging himself along the floor, crawling toward one of the bedrooms. It was the man handling David’s security. Sam had only ever heard him called by a work name, Gray.

  Sam’s hand went to the wall to steady himself. A body on the ground in a country house. The wallpaper weave under his fingertips. The terror freezing him, making him numb. He was here, and he was back there, twenty-five years ago.

  The man raised his head and saw Sam, beckoned him over. Sam took a few cautious steps toward him.

  “How do I get out of here?” Sam asked him.

  Blood soaked Gray’s shirt, and he took ragged breaths. Sam followed his gaze into the bedroom, where a gun lay just under a chair.

  When he looked back, the man’s eyes were on his own. “Help me,” he said, and reached for his arm. Sam pulled away by reflex. He heard someone moving upstairs.

  “I don’t have much time. You get me out of here and I’ll tell you the truth about David Blakely,” Gray said, sneering as he spoke the name. “You want out from under him? Help me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sam said.

  Gray eased himself back, sitting against the wall, his body trembling. He licked his lips and shut his eyes against the pain. “Emma Blair. I brought her here.”

  Sam moved closer, crouched down to hear the man’s weak voice.

  “I got rid of the evidence,” Jeff said, and swallowed, fighting for air. “Her journal. I read it. David lied to you about that night at the Whitleys’. You didn’t kill that girl. He did.”

  102

  As David moved down the stairs toward him, Nick looked to the side, the edges of his vision fogged. The gun was down here. He had seen it slide toward the parlor.

  David stopped on the bottom step, holding the cane back, his other hand forward, trembling. They were the shaky, charged movements of a man unused to the fight, whose adrenaline was surging just at the edge of control. He hesitated, six feet away, looking like someone facing off against a wild animal, although it was Nick who was vulnerable.

  Blakely wasn’t used to killing, but Nick watched his eyes. He saw them lock on and then empty out as David seemed to look through him. He knew that look, had been trained to catch it as the telltale of an attack.

  Smoke drifted through the hall. Nick filled his lungs, fought against the vertigo.

  He was barely able to move, let alone get the better of an uninjured man, but he had to try to make it to his gun.

  David took three choppy breaths, clutched the cane, and came for him.

  Nick put his hand to the floor and prepared to rise. David stopped and looked to his left.

  Sam MacDonough was walking toward him with a pistol in his hand.

  David Blakely turned, the cane hanging from his fingers, and watched Sam approach from the other end of the hall, the blue eyes now dull, wide open with shock, unblinking as he looked from Nick on the floor to David.

  “How do I get out of here?” Sam asked.

  David crossed toward him. “Sam, give me the gun.” David didn’t like the way Sam’s shoulders rolled forward, how he held his head slightly down, showing his teeth but with no smile this time. He didn’t like the hand so tight on the grip of the pistol, or Sam’s eyes, how they drilled into him with hate.

  “Who’s outside?” Sam said.

  “Sam,” he said. “We can still make it out of this. I can—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Sam barked. “If I hear you talk about how you’re looking out for me one more time I . . .” He held up the gun. “It’s over. I know.”

  “Know what, Sam?” David said, his voice soft.

  “Fourth of July. You killed Catherine Wilson. She was alive when I left that room. Was it just so you could own me?”

  David moved toward him. “Sam, you’re not—”

  “Not one step closer,” Sam said, his voice a low growl. “Twenty-five fucking years. Emma Blair saw what you did in that room. You weren’t protecting me. You were protecting yourself. Your leverage.”

  David shook his head, and pulled his face into a mask of sympathy. “Sam, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I—”

  “I wasn’t a killer,” Sam said, his voice quiet now, as if talking to himself. He raised the pistol.

  David took another step.

  Sam’s hand shook. The gun barrel jittered in the air like it was writing in cursive, then went steady.

  David lunged toward him, hand out to seize the weapon. “Give that—”

  Three shots. David reeled back and looked down at his chest. It felt like three slaps. No pain. So strange. Then pressure bloomed near his heart, burning more than anything else. He dropped the cane and touched his fingers to his breastbone as his legs gave out.

  He hit the ground, and darkness moved in, his vision all black with a white spark here and there.

  He was in that room again, that Fourth of July, and through the window he could hear the Roman candles firing off the dock.

  He knelt over Catherine Wilson, looking for something he could use to clean up, to make this all go away. This was his moment, the outsider’s chance. He would do whatever it took to earn himself a piece of this world and of Sam MacDonough forever.

  Her eyes opened and met his. Her chest rose, the movement so slight he thought he’d imagined it. Before she could make a sound, before she could scream, he put his hand over her mouth. She was weak, so weak after she had struck her head. He barely needed to press. She was awake now. She would talk. She would tell everyone that he was part of it. Who knew how much she remembered? She might say he had attacked her, not Sam. It would be so easy for David to fall. He didn’t belong here. He had no senator father.

  But it was more than simply protecting himself. He knew how far Sam could go. He knew what this woman’s life would be worth. He held her nose gently and pressed his hand over her mouth until her body went still.

  103

  As the shots rang out and David Blakely fell back, Nick Averose raised himself and took three long, unsteady steps toward the parlor. The gun was there, resting against the fringed edge of a rug. Nick lunged for it with his left hand as he heard Sam MacDonough’s steps lumbering toward him. Nick closed his fingers on the textured grip of the pistol and turned.

  Sam stopped in the middle of the hall and brought his fists to the sides of his head, the right still holding the gun. He looked like a kid protecting his ears from some terrible noise. He shut his eyes. The muscles in his arms tensed, and his whole body shook as a hollow sound escaped his throat.

  He was breaking. Nick kept the gun on him, still in his left hand, his weak side. He could have killed him now. But there had been enough death. He wanted the truth.

  Sam took in a long breath and brought his arms slowly to his sides. His body quieted as he regained control. He opened his eyes and turned to Nick.

  “Sam,” Nick said. “You can put an end to all of this.”

  Sam looked down at his own gun.

  “Everything’s going to come out, Sam. Don’t make it any worse. Just put it down. That’s not you.”

  “It is now,” Sam said, his voice empty of all feeling. Nick saw his fingers tighten on the gun. He swept it toward Nick.

  “Sam, no!” Nick shouted, but he had no choice as he pulled the trigger twice. Sam fell and hit the marble flat on his back. Nick felt the floor shake and strode toward him, keeping the gun trained on him as he kicked the pistol out of the senator’s outstretched hand.

  He looked down at Sam’s eyes, open but unseeing, losing their light.

  104

  Nick climbed the steps to the second floor. David and Sam were
both gone. The taking of life—no matter how justified, and even in the middle of all this noise and smoke—left him with the feeling of standing in an empty church.

  He needed to get the others and get out of here. He turned on the landing and saw Jeff’s body slumped against the wall. The sight filled Nick with a dark satisfaction tinged with nausea, as all the corruption and violence of this place weighed on him.

  He kept moving past Jeff, his eyes on the door at the end of the hall where he had heard Delia calling for help. It was open. Someone had broken off the door handle to unlock it. He raised the gun and closed in. When he was twelve feet away, he saw two figures moving inside, turning toward him.

  Karen stood beside Delia, with Delia’s good arm draped over her neck. Karen’s right shoulder was held forward. It looked like it was injured. Nick lowered the gun and ran to them.

  “Nick,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Jeff told me that he could help bring you in safely, that it was dangerous to go to that park alone. He said if you kept running, you might get killed. With what the FBI told me, and everything happening, I believed him. God, Nick, I didn’t know.”

  The dread that had been rammed down his back like an iron pipe since before sunset was gone. They were okay. All he wanted to do was hold them close, but he couldn’t yet, not until they were all safe.

  “It’s all right,” he said, and scanned the room. “They had you upstairs?”

  “I forced the door after I heard the gunshots,” she said, her eyes going to her shoulder. “I was trying to get away when I heard Delia’s voice in here.”

  “Was there another woman? Ash-blond hair?”

  “Yes,” Karen said, closing her eyes and tilting her head toward the bedroom.