by Zoe Sharp
But Sagar was already moving as the first shot landed, ducking and spinning away, so the round grazed across the back of his shoulder blade rather than landing solidly in his upper body, as it had been intended.
Sagar let out a grunt of pain and fired again as he bolted for the doorway, four rapid shots let off straight-armed behind him, blindly, as fast as he could work the trigger. The muzzle oscillated crazily as the action cycled, but his rounds were intended purely to cause havoc and confusion, to delay pursuit, fired without any clear target in mind.
But they found one anyway.
I couldn’t tell which of those wild shots hit Sean. All I saw was his head snap back and to the side, the mist of blood and something else, some heavier debris, sluice upwards across the clinical white wall of the trailer, then he went down.
No staggering halt. No controlled descent. No realisation of pain or damage. Just a sudden total overwhelming collapse as all motor function ceased.
Inside my own head, someone started screaming.
I don’t remember jacking upright, but next thing I knew I was on my feet, snatching up Sean’s Glock where it had dropped from his lifeless hand. Lights exploded behind my eyes, a howling filled my ears, the smell of blood was in my nose, my mouth.
And I wanted it.
I threw myself at the closing door before it had time to swing fully shut behind Sagar’s fleeing figure.
He’d got to the bottom of the steps and had started to run, awkward, stooped because of the shoulder injury Sean had inflicted. Sagar wore a pale-blue shirt and the blood was already soaking through the back of it in a spreading diagonal slash as if from the blade of a sword, his ponytail lank with it.
With a snarl I barely recognised, I bounded off the top flight of steps at full stretch, aiming straight for the blood like a starving predator going after wounded prey. I landed hard on his back and felt the almost irresistible urge to sink my teeth into the back of his neck and keep crushing until they met bone.
The weight and speed of my attack sent Sagar face first into the dirt, spilling me over his shoulder. He had time to let out a wail of pain and anger and shock before the air thumped out of his lungs.
As I rolled through the fall, he was fighting for breath, but still had enough left in him to swing the gun up towards me. I grabbed his arm and broke it cleanly at the elbow across my knee. He shrieked.
But the noise was cut off, sharp and abrupt, when I shoved him onto his back, knelt astride his chest and, as his mouth fell open on a gasp, thrust the muzzle of Sean’s Glock into it. I pushed the barrel all the way in, until the curve of the trigger guard crushed his bottom lip against his teeth and the front sight gouged into the roof of his mouth, and the hot steel burnt his tongue.
He went rigid under me, eyes jammed open, wild with panic as he looked into my face and saw his own death there waiting for him.
Around me, I was vaguely aware of torrential movement, of running boots and shouting, of the mechanical rasp of weapons being brought to bear. Gradually, as the initial burst of rage subsided into a cold ruthless flame, the sounds began to individuate.
Someone was yelling for a medic, someone else for backup, and just about everyone was yelling at me to put the gun down.
Not a chance.
Slowly, minutely, I felt the muscles in my forearm contract, through my wrist and the tendons in the back of my hand, and into my right index finger. I began to take up the trigger, first the tiny blade that forms part of the Glock’s safety mechanism, then the curve of the trigger itself, balancing against the slight restriction. In my imagination, it quivered like a drawn bow.
‘Charlie!’ Parker’s voice finally penetrated, tight and shaken. I took my eyes away from Sagar’s face briefly. After all, it wasn’t like I needed to aim.
Parker had moved carefully round into my field of view. His hands, his shirt, the legs of his trousers, were all covered in blood, gleaming dark against the black of his gear, and a stark bright velvet crimson against his skin.
Sean’s blood.
‘Stand down, Charlie!’ Parker said, and in all the time I’d known him, it was the first time I’d heard him sound afraid. ‘He’s not dead. Sean is not dead. Do you understand me? They’re working on him. The medics are working on him, right now.’
In my mind’s eye, I saw again the pink mist and the shards at the moment of impact, the way Sean had dropped and folded. I’d seen people go down like that before. None of them had ever got up again.
‘I’m sorry, Parker, but I don’t believe you,’ I said, the words very clear and calm.
Another man moved round into my line of sight. Conrad Epps. And if I’d seen a momentary vulnerability in him, back there when Bane had mentioned his daughter, any weakness was well buried now.
‘If you pull that trigger, Fox, my men have orders to take you out,’ he said, and the words had a studied carelessness about them, as if discussing a garbage bag.
Parker flung him a desperate look. ‘Don’t do this, Charlie.’ His voice cracked. ‘You don’t have to do this. They’ll kill you if you do this. They won’t have any choice.’
I closed my eyes for a moment. Back in Fourth Day, I’d made the decision that I didn’t want to go on without Sean, but I’d never expected to be faced with the prospect of going on so totally alone. Not like this. A great keening sob welled in my chest and wailed inside my mind. All I could hear was the sound of my heart tearing.
Perhaps this is the answer.
‘You can’t do it, Charlie.’
I opened my eyes and found Bane had joined the others, outside the circle of the SWAT team, with their M16s all pointed at me. I glanced at Sagar’s bulging face. He’d begun to gag as the blood from the roof of his mouth trickled into his throat. His tongue fought convulsively against the intrusion of the barrel, bloodied saliva stringing from his mouth.
In that second I not only hated but also despised him. For Sean to go down to an amateur blind-luck shot seemed the ultimate insult, somehow.
‘Trust me,’ I said acidly, ‘I can hardly miss.’
Bane shook his head, almost sadly. ‘You are not a killer without consequence, Charlie, you never have been,’ he said with utter certainty. ‘You will never shy away from what needs to be done, but this…does not. If he was still fleeing, you would not hesitate, but you have him at your mercy.’
He tilted his head and looked down into me, the way he had done when I’d first arrived at Fourth Day, when he’d said that all he saw in me was rage and sorrow, and without them I’d have nothing to sustain me.
I eyed him bitterly. ‘Sure of that now, are you?’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Bane said calmly. ‘Your only reason for killing this man would be revenge. Parker, here, is afraid you will take that path, but I know you will not. It would go against everything you are, everything you have made of yourself.’
I was silent. In the distance I heard the steady chop of rotor blades, coming in fast and low. Afterwards, I told myself it was the possible arrival of a medevac helicopter that swayed it for me. That what Parker had said might be true.
That Sean might not be dead.
A tiny sliver of doubt crept in, hope hitching along for the ride.
I looked down again, dispassionate, at Sagar. The blood from the wound in his back had leached out to halo his body, so my knees were soaked in it. He was weeping, eyes squeezed shut as if to stem the flow.
His left arm thrashed weakly. The right flopped, disengaged from the broken elbow downwards. The gun he’d taken from the technician lay within a finger’s length of the useless hand. A part of me willed him to find the strength to pick it up, just to make the decision for me.
‘It’s all about choices, Charlie,’ Bane said softly, as if he could read my swirling thoughts. ‘And if Sean chooses to live, why shouldn’t you?’
The noise of the helicopter grew louder, almost on top of us now, the downwash from the rotor blades blasting grit and gravel across the parking ar
ea in a sudden surge as the air ambulance pilot saw the stand-off on the ground and put the machine into a reflexive hover. He was not combat-trained, I realised, was not going to risk his life to come into a hot zone to drag out casualties, however seriously they might be injured.
I dragged the Glock out of Sagar’s mouth, chipping his teeth, brought both hands up in a gesture of surrender that could not be mistaken from the air. The SWAT team converged, whipped the gun out of my grasp and lifted me bodily away from Sagar, hauling me back a few metres. Hands on my shoulders forced me, unresisting, onto my face with a knee rammed into my back until they had the PlastiCuffs zipped tight around my wrists.
I just managed to turn my head in time to see another two of Epps’s men haul Sagar up and cuff him, too, careless of the gunshot injury that made him squeal. I waited until he met my eyes, until I had him.
‘If he dies,’ I said, loud enough to be heard over the increased thrust of the landing heli, ‘you’ll wish I’d pulled that bloody trigger.’
And after that? Who knows?
Sometimes, living is harder than dying, but I never did take the easy path, did I?
EPILOGUE
Hospitals smell the same and look the same everywhere in the world, and the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center was no exception. The sharp tang of antiseptic and disinfectant overlying the faintest trace of fear.
I’d been told that County General, as it was known, was one of the finest teaching hospitals in California, that its Level One trauma centre was second to none. That it provided immediate treatment for more than a quarter of all serious emergency cases in the city and the southern half of the state.
But none of this excellent pedigree could alter the fact that Sean had nearly died on the flight in, and again on the table during the seven hours of surgery to remove the shattered fragments of bone from his brain.
The 9 mm Hydra-Shok round had entered his forehead just above the outside corner of his left eyebrow, and ploughed a destructive deadly furrow rearwards through his temple before exiting just above his ear. Along the way it had cleaved a path through the side of his skull like an ice-breaker, scattering deadly shrapnel as it went.
The damage, the surgeons told us in sombre tones, was confined to the left frontal and parietal lobes. If the shock of the injury itself didn’t kill him, then some level of brain damage was almost a certainty. It was not their business to give us false hope.
They used a confusing mixture of technical medical phraseology interspersed with oversimplified terms, as if speaking to children. In the glazed eye of my mind, it sounded like another language altogether, where only some of the words were familiar and others were completely incomprehensible.
No doubt my father would have been able to translate their prognosis into simple, logical, and unflinching terms. Just one of the many reasons I did not call him. I did not call anyone. As if by not telling them what had happened, I could make it all go away.
Of course, there was a slim chance Sean would awaken and be almost normal, but the odds were not in favour. It was far more likely, the doctors announced, taking the areas of injury into account, that he would have significant cognitive, memory, movement and coordination problems. We should prepare ourselves. They would not know more until he woke from his coma.
If he woke.
Until then, I lived in twenty-minute snatches, three times a day, which was as long as they’d let me into Intensive Care to sit by his bedside and listen to the ventilator pushing air in and out of his lungs, and to clutch at his waxy fingers. As if by doing so I could physically pull him back into this world.
The rest of the time I haunted the waiting area, dead-eyed. As much in limbo, in my way, as Sean.
* * *
Detective Gardner came in, sat with me in the waiting area and told me, in hushed tones, how the siege of Fourth Day had ended before it had begun, with no casualties except for Tony. She’d been informed, unofficially, that his death would be judged a good shooting and she was in the clear. If I read the hand of Conrad Epps behind the suspicious speed with which the incident had been laid to rest, I didn’t say so.
‘It’s Beatrice, by the way,’ she said as she was leaving.
Foggy, distracted, I could only stare at her.
‘The “B” on my card.’
‘Oh, right.’ I paused. ‘Does this mean you have to kill me now?’
She smiled, told me to look after myself, and departed.
Randall Bane paid me a visit, seeming to bring with him a little oasis of calm. He was treated with a reverence by the staff that I could not initially understand, until they explained, shocked by my ignorance, that he was a considerable benefactor.
Bane thanked me gravely for my part in proceedings, only too aware of the cost. He told me that, miraculously, by the time the police did finally start taking statements from the members of Fourth Day, Dexter and the remaining Debacle crew had slipped away like they’d never been.
Maria was still shaken from the attack by Nu and disturbed by the upheaval. She had her good days and bad days, he said. Being with Billy helped. Being close to her father helped. He hoped, in time, she would be able to put it all behind her and move on.
Just as, he hoped, I would be able to do the same.
‘That’s not up to me,’ I said, eyes drifting along the corridor in the direction of the ICU.
‘For the moment, just try to think of the reasons to stay, Charlie,’ he said, deep as a winter lake, ‘rather than the reasons to leave.’
Conrad Epps never put in an appearance. I would have been more surprised if he had. But I learnt from Parker that Chris Sagar had been spirited away somewhere, as had Yancy. I guessed their debriefing would not be as passive as my own.
I was briefly assailed by fears that Sagar would manage to strike some kind of deal, end up with his freedom and a new identity, but I reassured myself with the knowledge that he had caused the deaths of three of Epps’s people. Not only the two men guarding Thomas Witney, but the technician from the mobile command post. He’d been airlifted out on the same helicopter flight as Sean, but massive internal injuries saw him dead on arrival.
I clung to the tenacity that had kept Sean alive through that same short flight, as if proof of his determination to survive.
Parker Armstrong took complete charge of me, offering neither questions nor condemnation. He arranged somewhere close by to sleep and shower, and brought me food I didn’t want at regular intervals, which he then coaxed me into eating.
On the fourth day, in a nearby diner, he said, ‘Sean wanted you back, you know. He thought he’d blown his chances after we had to debrief you and then you bailed. It was like you’d chosen Bane over him.’
I pushed away my half-eaten omelette and sat back. ‘I didn’t want to accept it, but Sean did the right thing – the only thing – he could do,’ I said dully. ‘I put you in an impossible situation and, knowing Epps, he gave you no choice.’
Parker nodded. ‘Either Sean did the interrogation, or Epps let his own people handle it. No way was Sean going to let anyone else in there with you. He knew you’d go crazy when you realised what had been done, but he also knew it was better than the alternative.’ He went quiet, settling his fork on his empty plate very precisely, as if he was looking for a way into what he had to say and was totally at a loss how to begin.
‘What else, Parker?’
His eyes flicked to mine, troubled. ‘Apparently, when they were almost done, he told Epps’s guys to turn off the recorders and he sent everyone out.’
The unease formed a lump behind my breastbone. ‘What for?’ I asked. ‘What else did he want out of me that he didn’t want the rest to hear?’ But I already knew.
‘I would guess it was about the baby,’ Parker said. ‘How you really felt about the pregnancy. What you were planning to do, if you hadn’t miscarried.’
The lump began to thunder, as if trying to hammer its way to freedom or escape. I had to swallow before I c
ould speak. ‘And what did I say?’
He shook his head. ‘Sean never told me,’ he said. ‘That was private between you and him. I don’t know.’
‘That makes two of us,’ I muttered.
‘Well, whatever it was, it must have been the right answer. Last thing he did before we went out to wait for you and Bane was ask for leave so he could take you away for a while, after this was over. Do some talking, he said, get things straightened out.’
I clutched gratefully at the consolation his words offered with a fervour that was almost pathetic in its intensity.
His voice softened. ‘Soulmates come along once in a lifetime, Charlie, if that. You find one, you’d be a fool to let them slip away. And Sean is no fool.’
His face dissolved suddenly in front of me. I ducked my head sharply, blinked a few times and gazed out through the tinted glass to the traffic running past outside, the shadows knife-edged and defined in the California sunshine.
But sitting there, I was overcome with a sense of utter desolation. Who knew what Sean would be, if and when he woke? In the meantime, I was told not to hope, yet robbed of the freedom to grieve. Stuck in the No Man’s Land between holding on and letting go.
And a part of me began to wish, when I’d had the chance to do so, that I’d pulled the trigger and saved myself this pain.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, there are a lot of people without whom this book would not have made it into print. The following folk provided the usual help, inspiration and advice, some of which I took on board absolutely, and some of which I ignored at my peril, or twisted for my own sinister ends. The facts are probably theirs – the mistakes are undoubtedly my own.