IF SHE RAN

by Blake Pierce

  “Oh, I know. And I hate to even mention it. But it’s unfair to me, too. You have to see that, right?”

  She figured he had a point. She felt a little self-involved not to have realized it before. “So what do we do?”

  “For starters, I’m going to stay here tonight. I think it might do me some good to not come running at your beck and call.”

  “Allen, I never meant for it to sound like that.”

  “I know that, too. And that’s why I think maybe we cool it for a while. Take some time, Kate. Figure out what it is you really want. When you think you have an actual answer, please do call me. Because I’ll be honest with you…I think I was starting to fall pretty hard.”

  “Yeah, me too.” A flush of heat raced through her as she admitted this to him.

  “Let’s check back in later. As selfish as it might sound, I don’t think I’m emotionally prepared to be second to work…especially in a new relationship. Especially at this age.”

  “Allen…I can’t…”

  He gave her a moment and then asked: “You can’t what?”

  But she wasn’t sure how to respond. How should she explain the sense of failure and worthlessness she was feeling? How could she explain the feeling of being haunted by a case—by two men who had been killed in the same way, their killer eluding her completely?

  “I can’t make that decision right now,” she said. She hated the feeling of the words in her mouth but knew that they were absolutely true.

  “It’s okay. I’m serious. Let’s check back in later. You reach out to me when you’re ready. I’ll be here, though I can’t promise for how long.” He paused, cleared his throat to shove aside the emotion that was trying to climb into his voice, and then ended the conversation with a simple “Bye.”

  He ended the call, leaving Kate with a dead line in her hand. The feeling that swept through her was far too similar to what she had felt when Duran had ended their call yesterday. Disappointment. Sadness. The feeling of not being good enough.

  As much as she loathed doing it, she felt herself starting to cry. First, realizing that she was slowly starting to drift away from Melissa, and now Allen had apparently had enough. Jesus, was she really that divided when it came to her personal life and her new situation within the bureau? Rogue tears cascaded down her cheeks. In that moment, her world felt entirely empty and void. Just her and a stupid tuna sandwich.

  And somewhere out there, a killer who had shot two men in the back of the head, execution style.

  ***

  When her phone rang just after six that afternoon, she was hoping it would be Melissa. She was almost equally as pleased to find that it was not her daughter, but DeMarco.

  “You feeling like a total fuck-up today, too?” DeMarco asked her.

  “A bit. But you shouldn’t. I think you were removed just because you were paired with me. If anything, I think I need to offer you an apology.”

  “Don’t you dare,” DeMarco said with a laugh. “You probably can’t tell because of my cool and icy demeanor, but I’ve learned a lot from you. I was excited when they paired me with you seven months ago and I’m still excited. I’m just as frustrated as you about being pulled from the case, though.”

  Kate thought about venting to her about the call she’d had with Allen earlier in the day but decided against it. Yes, they needed to become closer to one another, but that didn’t necessarily mean they needed to fill any down time or silence with relationship grievances.

  “Any idea what Duran is going to assign you to now that you’re off of the Jack Tucker case?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m going to make a push to dig into the Adler and Johnson stuff you were requesting. I’m sure it’ll be better than whatever surveillance detail he’ll stick me on until something better comes along.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to. A well-to-do man working with people who are that filthy rich and connected to nuclear decommissioning…I don’t know. It sounds rife with possible scenarios.”

  Kate thought so, too. But she also knew that Duran had been right yesterday. Pulling those kinds of details would take months, and they’d be bogged down in paperwork and legalities the entire time.

  “Well, let me know when you have a free weekend. I’d love to have you down here for a day out on the town.”

  “Include that cute grandbaby of yours in the deal, and I’ll see what I can do. Later, Kate.”

  Kate ended the call, warmed by the gesture DeMarco had made by calling. It was a little unlike her and, Kate thought, was probably an attempt at putting the final touches on their attempt at patching up the tension that had been between them for most of their visit to New York.

  It was even more depressing to realize that she had somehow managed to grow more attached to DeMarco, a representation of work, than she had with her family and personal life over the last half a year or so.

  Then just quit, she thought. The FBI will be just fine without you. Do you really think that highly of yourself?

  Again, she knew it would be easy. Just one phone call. But she knew she couldn’t. Especially right now. If it had come on the heels of a successfully closed case, that would be one thing. But to quit now, right after yet another case in Ashton had managed to slip through her hands, it would be too much like admitting defeat—too much like giving up.

  Feeling somewhere between melancholy and defeated, Kate changed into pajamas and sat idly in front of the television with a cup of decaf coffee. She stared at the television screen, tuned to one of those generic HTV home and garden shows, but she was not truly watching it. Her mind was elsewhere, as was usually the case.

  Her mind wandered, running around the mental maze that was the Jack Tucker case as if she were stuck in some weird hedge maze. And before she could allow herself to get trapped in it, she cut the TV off and went upstairs into the guest bedroom. There, she walked into the closet and opened the door in the back, the only entryway into the house’s attic. She climbed the wooden stairs and entered the attic, a space that was always at least ten to fifteen degrees cooler than the rest of the house.

  She turned on the light—a simple overhead bulb without a casing or shield. She and Michael had always planned on finishing the space off but had kept delaying it, waiting until they had more than enough money so they could make it really nice space. But after Michael died, she forgot all about it, not even thinking about finishing it until the random and rare moments she found herself walking into the space. The floor was solid, though it was nothing more than overlapped sheets of plywood that had been nailed into the underlying beams. She walked across this thin excuse for a floor toward an old beaten and worn miniature filing cabinet that she had shoved in the far corner many years ago.

  There was also an old lawn chair propped against it, for use on the few times she had come up here. She unfolded it and sat down in it as she opened up the top of the three drawers of the cabinet. Inside, there were a few old folders and albums—all related to work. There were newspaper clippings of cases she had knocked out of the park, old awards and certificates for her successes, copies of closed cases she had used for reference materials, and on and on.

  She skipped to the section she knew she was looking for: her handwritten and printed out personal notes on the Frank Nobilini case. They were paperclipped to Xeroxed copies of the actual case files, along with the handful of police reports she had accumulated regarding people in Ashton.

  She had poured over these notes for more nights than she cared to admit. As she took the notes out and started to read them, a vibrant memory of Michael coming into the attic just after midnight popped into her head.

  “We have a king-sized bed,” he had said. “It gets awful big when you’re not in it.”

  “Sorry,” she had said, putting the folders back.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I know that I’m but a second fiddle to your work.” He’d smiled here and then kissed her lightly on the back o
f the neck. “But if you come to bed with me right now, I promise to make it worth your while.”

  He had taken her hand and pulled her up out of the seat…

  She grew a little teary-eyed at that. That memory was a fresh one—maybe three years before he had died. It was so fresh that she could nearly feel his breath on her neck.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” she said.

  And with that, she turned her full attention to the files in her hands. And this time, without anyone to come pull her away, she fell completely into them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She had the dream again.

  Frank Nobilini had been walking toward her, stepping in the blood that had seeped out of the bathroom. Only this time, instead of his wife following after him, he was accompanied by Jack Tucker. They both held handguns, offering them to her.

  “Here,” Frank said. “Do it. Shoot us. Kill us. It’s just the same as not finding who put these holes in the back of our heads.”

  He turned to show her the hole he was referencing. Jack did the same. As they turned their backs to her, the holes in the backs of their heads started to grow in size, eating away the rest of the heads like some strange fungus.

  Kate sat up with a start, her heart surging in her chest. She felt her stomach lurching at that last image from the dream and for a moment, she thought she might need to rush to the bathroom to throw up. But she took a moment to steady her breathing and managed to fight the urge away.

  She felt a little out of sorts as she readied herself for the day. By seven, she had the coffee brewing and some soft ’70s rock playing on Spotify. She dressed for the day and ate breakfast at the kitchen bar. If not for the music playing, the house would have felt very much like a crypt or tomb. She’d been alone in this house a considerable amount of time ever since Michael died and Melissa had moved out but now, knowing that Allen wanted a break and that Melissa seemed too busy to spend time with her, it made it feel like some remote, ancient land where she was stranded and alone.

  She needed to get out. She needed to get away from this unhealthy tension. She needed to work off her frustration, nerves, and feeling of loss. She wondered if she could call someone at the gym to have someone to spar with later today. A few rounds in the ring would certainly do her a world of good.

  And while that was indeed a promising thought, another thought came to mind right behind it. Even the mere thought if it made her heart lighten a bit. She thought of a place that had felt like home ever since her first year with the bureau, a place that, whether it was sacrilegious or not, had nearly felt like a church experience to her when her career and life had seemed out of sorts.

  Kate finished up her breakfast, went to the closet to grab her sidearm, and headed for the firing range.

  ***

  While she would much prefer the more aesthetically pleasing shooting range at the bureau in Washington, there was something to be said for a locally owned shooting range. The people who owned and operated it—as well as the people who paid money to use the range—were not there because of training or necessity. No, they visited the range for the love of the sport, for their appreciation of firearms. Nearly every time she had been to her range of choice in Richmond—a place called Scope Skills, she had seen at least one person taking training courses for a conceal and carry permit.

  As she walked through the entrance that morning, though, she was not at all surprised to see that she was the only one there. It was, after all, a little shy of ten o’clock on a Monday morning. She carried a bag in over her shoulder, containing her bureau-issued Glock 19M. She had no magazines on her, but she knew that Scope Skills carried the kind she needed.

  She checked in at the front desk, where the owner, Jerry—a butch and well-rounded guy who could have been a stand-in for a WWE wrestler—greeted her with a smile.

  “Agent Wise,” he said. It was a running joke among them, as she had teased him before about how having a retired agent frequent your range meant that your range had better be following every law known to man with a scrupulous eye. He also thought it was awesome that a fifty-six-year-old woman rocked the gun range the way she did. “How’s the morning treating you?”

  “Not as well as I’d like,” she said.

  “Practicing for some big case or something?”

  “Nah,” Kate said. “Just letting off some steam.”

  “I hear that.”

  Kate booked a kiosk, purchased two magazines of ammo for her Glock, and then headed to the back. The smell of the place instantly calmed her. It was not necessarily the smell of expelled rounds that had somehow sunk into every corner and crack of the place. It was the smell of guns finely polished, of a slight tinge in the air that she liked to think was the expelled excitement and concentration of a shooter with a keen eye.

  She loaded up the Glock, sent the first target out—a basic black-and-white representation of a human figure placed against a black background—and assumed a shooter’s stance. She breathed in deeply, as if resetting herself, and felt her muscles settle into a groove.

  She opened her eyes and fired. And fired again.

  The next ten minutes were almost Zen-like for her. She’d always found this odd because at no point in her training had she ever truly become enamored with firearms. She knew the basics, plus enough to be able to participate in a mid-tier conversation about them, but she was far from what someone might describe as a “gun nut.” She just knew that firing them at targets in a safe and secure environment was calming to her in the same way some people enjoyed fishing or baking. She wasn’t the type of agent that could name each and every gun by simply looking at it, nor did she know much military weaponry history. She had always kept it fairly simple, using whatever the bureau’s current issue was, with the exception of the Sig Sauer she had received as a gift from Agent Greene, her first partner.

  She stopped firing suddenly, a thought dawning on her out of nowhere.

  I’ve always used whatever the bureau has issued because I’ve been comfortable with it. I love this 19M because I am familiar with it and know it well. Before this, I felt comfortable with the standard-issue 9mm they sent some of us into the field with. I’ve always been comfortable with these more compact and easy-to-carry weapons because it’s what I know.

  She thought of the gun that had been sued to kill Frank Nobilini and Jack Tucker. She thought of the shell casings, identified pretty quickly by law enforcement as having come from a Ruger Hunter Mark IV.

  The same gun on both men, eight years apart. Apparently, that’s a gun the killer was comfortable with…

  Kate cleaned up the little bit of mess at her station and left the kiosk. As she headed for the front of the building where Jerry was currently arranging his accessory counter, he gave her a strange look.

  “You’ve got sixteen minutes left for what you paid,” he said.

  “I know. But I was wondering if you could maybe help me out with something. You’re fairly knowledgeable on guns, right?”

  “Sure. And by the way, I prefer fairly knowledgeable over some of the descriptors my wife chooses to use when it comes to me and guns.”

  “What do you know about the Ruger Hunter Mark IV?”

  Jerry thought for a moment, his arms crossed over his massive chest. “Well, I know that I don’t have one here. I’ve never fired one, actually. But I’ve seen some at gun shows and what-not. Some of them come with a threaded barrel for suppressors. I guess in your line of work, it would be a pretty good choice for someone wanting to stealthily take someone out. It’s a rimfire pistol and I think the newer ones can be taken apart really quickly. It’s because of a really cool takedown mechanism.”

  “Have you yourself ever had someone ask if you could get one in for them?”

  “No. While it’s not a specialty gun or particularly hard to find, it’s also not very popular.”

  “So it’s also not considered a standard enough gun to be used haphazardly by just about anyone wanting something to protec
t their homes, right?”

  “No.”

  She thought about this for a minute, feeling a trail start to assemble itself in her head. “With the suppressor, it would make the shot a little cleaner, too, right?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the shooter and what they’re shooting at. It’s a sleek gun, though.”

  “It sounds like it would be a perfect choice for someone who might want to quietly kill someone and leave no trace, right?”

  “Except for the shell casings, yes, I suppose. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’m starting to wonder what sort of person would be comfortable enough to use such a gun on a regular basis.”

  Jerry grinned uncomfortably here and leaned forward on the counter. “Yeah, I think it would be a pretty good choice for someone that needed to kill quickly and quietly. I’m pretty sure I remember reading something about it not too long ago, how there are some people rumored to be working with the mob that use weapons just like that. Or maybe it was one of my military-style documentaries that I’m always watching—which my wife also hates, by the way.”

  Kate knew exactly where she needed to go, what she needed to do. She started for the door quickly, the trail in her head now complete.

  “Thanks, Jerry,” she called on her way out. “This was a huge help!”

  He said something to her, but she was already outside. Yes, she knew what the next step was, even though Duran would tar her a new one if he found out. Still, she had to…to keep herself sane and to feel like she had not given up.

  There was a downside, though. Wasn’t there always?

  While she knew the step she needed to take, it was a backward one. Once again, she was going to have to take a big step back into her past. And while it was a step in the right direction, she couldn’t help but feel that it seemed more like falling behind than moving forward.

  CHAPTER TWELVE