Blood Redemption hag-1

by Alex Palmer

  ‘You can sit down, Grace. Why don’t you sit just there? Next to Graeme, where I can see you. You can sit up now, Graeme.’

  The preacher rolled over with agility. He looked at Grace with revulsion but this did not touch her. They were almost side by side, a V shape with Lucy at the apex. Once they were in position, Lucy pushed the child towards his mother, who scooped him up and ran for the door. She was gone in an instant, the glass door clicking shut on its automatic lock behind her.

  ‘It’s just us now. Isn’t that nice?’ Lucy said. ‘You’re Grace?’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said, looking at a small girl with a square and pretty, almost innocent, face and clear eyes. Her pale skin was delicate next to her reddish hair. She held her gun unselfconsciously, apparently unafraid of what it could do.

  ‘Are you wired for sound?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I am. Everyone can hear.’

  ‘Yeah, I want people to hear. I want them to know what I’m going to say. You know what I want you to do first? I want you to sit on your hands.’

  ‘Why, Lucy?’

  ‘I just do. I want to touch your face. Now you be careful. You just have to look at this gun and it goes off. Remember that, Graeme. Because if you move, it’s Grace first and then you. And I’m faster than you.’

  Grace leaned forward, hard on her hands, and felt the gun barrel pressed in her stomach as Lucy stroked first one cheek and then the other. Her touch was cold and smooth. They were eyeball to eyeball.

  Grace, chilled to the base of her spine, controlled panic by staring into the rage mirrored in Lucy’s eyes. She told herself, meet it full on. That’s the only way you can know what there is to fear.

  Outside, the marksman contacted Harrigan.

  ‘She’s got them in a position where I have to shoot one of them to get to her. And if I did do that, I couldn’t get her before she got your officer.’

  ‘Wait your chance,’ Harrigan replied.

  ‘That is you, isn’t it? That face, it’s you,’ Lucy was saying, her voice thin and metallic over the communication device.

  She drew back, the gun ready to fire at a breath. Grace reconnected to the possibility of staying alive a little longer.

  ‘Yes, this is me. Is it okay if I get off my hands now?’

  ‘Yeah, you can do that. You’ve got a nice face.’

  ‘Why is that important, Lucy?’

  ‘Because it’s who you are. I need to see who you are,’ Lucy said. ‘You see, when I shot that woman and that man, I got blood all across my forehead. Some of it got up into my hair. I don’t even know whose it was.

  It just hit me. I can feel it all over me again now. And that man, he didn’t have a face left. He wasn’t anything any more. Nothing. I never should have shot him. But you know one of the things that really bothers me?’

  ‘No, Lucy,’ Grace replied. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t let that doctor see all my face. She had a right to know who I was. That’s why I wanted to see you.’

  ‘You want me to be looking at you when you do whatever you’re going to do?’

  Oh Christ, Harrigan thought.

  ‘I don’t want to hide from you the way I did from her,’ Lucy said.

  As Lucy spoke, Grace felt a movement beside her. She glanced at the preacher. He had leaned forward and was staring at Lucy with a hungry expression. Lucy looked at him at the same time.

  ‘Don’t you move, Graeme, and don’t you talk. Not till I tell you to,’

  she said. ‘Because if you do, I’ll get you before you can do anything.’

  He sat back, his expression unchanged.

  ‘Do you think a lot about what happened that morning, Lucy? Is that what you’re telling me, that it’s always on your mind?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Yes, it is. But I don’t know what to think about it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I think about it and I get lost.’

  ‘You’re walking in the dark again,’ Grace said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Walking around in the dark. But something else bothers you about that morning. You said that — that it was just one thing.’

  ‘Yeah. Do you want to know what it is?’

  ‘You tell me, Lucy.’

  ‘I should never have done it at all.’ She sounded like a small child.

  ‘That’s how I feel now. I should never have done it, it was such a bad thing to do. Really bad. But that’s it, you see. How do I deal with that?

  I know that because I feel it. But what if it wasn’t such a bad thing to do, the way Graeme says it wasn’t? And then if shooting that doctor was the right thing to do, I should do what Graeme wants me to do right now. I should shoot you as well. And that’s what I’ve got to know.’

  ‘Why do you have to shoot me?’

  ‘Because you killed your baby. Graeme knows that about you, everyone does. And he says that’s what I should do.’

  ‘You don’t have to do any of this, Lucy,’ Grace said. ‘You can put your gun down and just walk out of here. And that’s it. You can walk out of here with me and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘No, I do. That’s the point. I killed someone. I’m stuck here. I am.’

  ‘No, Lucy, you’re not — ’

  ‘ I am!’

  ‘Don’t argue with her,’ the negotiator said quietly, close beside Harrigan. ‘Whatever you do, don’t argue with her.’

  There was silence. Lucy’s hand tightened on the gun and then relaxed a little again. Grace breathed.

  ‘I am, Grace,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Now I’ve got to solve this. I’ve got to solve it.’

  There was silence. Lucy sat gathering her breath, taking courage.

  She looked from Grace to the preacher.

  ‘All right, Graeme. Talk. What do I do now?’

  He seemed to subside with relief when she said this.

  ‘Whatever your conscience tells you to do, Lucy,’ he replied easily, as though he was sitting at his desk in a counselling session. ‘You must know in your heart what’s right.’

  ‘What do you think is right?’

  ‘I’m not the actor here,’ he replied. ‘I can’t take the place of your own conscience.’

  ‘But what would you do? You said that Grace here walks blood through the city streets. She deserves to die. You said that to me last night. You said to me: you can get rid of the evil she is, you can wash it clean. That’s what you said. So what would you do? If you had to.’

  You fucking bastard, Harrigan thought. You fucking, fucking bastard.

  ‘I would leave her to answer to God,’ the preacher said.

  ‘Well, what does that mean? Does that mean it happens the way it did last time? I shoot her for you and you get to hear about it on the radio?’

  ‘No, Lucy. It means we all have a role to play and mine is different to yours,’ he said. ‘If I am not here, how can anything be accomplished? It is my work to lead, to organise. There are a great many sacrifices in that.’

  Lucy looked away from the preacher and back to Grace.

  ‘You killed your baby. Why did you do that?’ she asked her. ‘You think what I did was wrong, don’t you? You do, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Grace said.

  ‘But how can what I did be wrong if you can go and do that? It’s just as bad, isn’t it?’

  In the few short seconds before she replied, Grace thought she was gone.

  ‘I don’t know if there’s any way I can tell it to you so you’d understand me, Lucy. I’m just going to say to you that that’s what I chose to do, it’s what I felt I had to do. I don’t see it the way you do.’

  ‘You chose to?’ Lucy asked. ‘You did? On your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lucy raised her gun.

  ‘I still think that’s murder, Grace, whatever you want to say,’ she said, and fired three times.

  In moments during which the world turned white for her, three bullets crashed
past Grace’s head into the thick wooden door where it stood open behind her. She felt her body turn to water and then become solid again. Her eyes blinked as the scene around her faded, then came back to life. Outside, Harrigan contacted the marksmen and told them to take out Lucy Hurst as soon as they could.

  ‘Did I frighten you, Grace? Well, look at Graeme,’ Lucy was saying in a half-incredulous, half-laughing voice. ‘Yeah, just look at you, Graeme. You really thought you were going to see blood this time, didn’t you? You’re hanging out for it.’

  His expression was open-mouthed and ecstatic, frozen with a smile of pure joy.

  ‘It wouldn’t just be hers either, it’d be mine too, because the first thing that’d happen is I’d get blown away as well. Get up. You just fucking get up, Graeme. You are a liar. You don’t care about anything.

  All you do is get off on killing people. That’s all you do. You sit there and you talk rubbish to me and all the time, you just want to get off on it. And you just want to see me fucking do it for you.’

  ‘You listen to me, Lucy. All you have seen is righteous joy — ’

  ‘You shut up!’

  ‘Don’t do that, Lucy,’ Grace was saying as they scrambled to their feet, ‘leave it. You know what you want to know now. Just leave it.’

  ‘No, Grace. Don’t you fucking listen? I killed someone. I’ve got to make up for that.’

  ‘No, you have to leave it — ’

  The preacher suddenly screamed and ran at Lucy. She jumped backwards and shouted at him to stop where he was. They froze where they stood, staring at each other. In that instant, a pattern of bullets thudded between them into the floor where Lucy had just been standing. All three of them looked up to a square of grey light where a window above and behind them had been removed. Lucy laughed aloud, dancing back out of range.

  ‘Too late. Too bad,’ she said.

  In that second, the preacher turned and ran for the door. She fired at him repeatedly as he ran, seemingly unaware of the recoil of the gun knocking her backwards. He fell to the floor. Grace cracked Lucy on the wrist with the side of her hand and the gun dropped, crashing onto the wooden floor. Grace kicked it aside as Lucy dived for it, stretching her hand out towards it. They wrestled on the floor, Grace fighting an unexpected strength in Lucy’s thin and wiry body. She heard the glass doors being broken open behind them.

  ‘Stupid!’ she was shouting, ‘it’s stupid. Why waste your life?’

  ‘Why do you care? I didn’t want to have to shoot you.’ She heard Lucy’s voice, furious and breathless in her ear. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  Then Grace was bodily lifted up and away as armed police swarmed around them. They held Lucy face down on the floor and retrieved her gun. Grace was on her feet, looking at a hall filled with people and Harrigan standing in front of her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he was asking her in his neutral voice.

  ‘Yes, I’m okay,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘No injuries?’

  He was looking closely at her face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Why don’t you go outside with Trev and get yourself a cigarette? We’ll clean up in here.’

  ‘Yeah, Gracie.’ Trevor was there behind Harrigan. ‘Just come outside with me and get some fresh air for a moment.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you are. Come on,’ he said, in the voice that he always used to organise his friends.

  She followed him out, passing the paramedics who had come in behind everyone else and were kneeling beside the preacher.

  ‘No, he’s gone. There’s nothing we can do here,’ she heard one of them say.

  Then she walked out the door and down the steps into the open street.

  ‘It’s stopped raining,’ she said. ‘Oh, it’s nice to be outside.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Trevor said, ‘and the sun’s coming out. Have a cigarette.’

  She accepted it, shaking her head, light on her feet.

  ‘I feel really strange, Trev. My head feels about four times the size it should be.’

  ‘You’re in shock, mate,’ Trevor replied. ‘Just stand there and smoke your cigarette. Don’t do anything.’

  ‘I’m still alive,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath and laughing, with tears in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, mate,’ Trevor said, losing it. He shook his head and gave her a bear hug, destroying her unlit cigarette.

  In the hall, Harrigan looked down at the preacher. He lay on his side staring up at the ceiling and his blood had spread out over the floor.

  Harrigan almost expected to see the man wink at him and hear his voice whispering quietly in his ear, ‘Don’t worry, Paul. Between you and me, this is just a ruse.’ The thought was real enough to be disturbing.

  He turned to look at Lucy Hurst where she was being held face down on the floor and motioned to his people to stand her up. This was the girl his son thought he loved, the one who had led him on a dance from one end of the city to the other. She hardly came up to his chin, was barely old enough to be his concern.

  ‘Lucy Marilyn Hurst,’ he said, ‘I’m going to arrest and charge you with two counts of murder. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’

  She looked him directly in the eye, unafraid. Small particles of dust covered her reddish brown hair.

  ‘Yeah, I understand,’ she said, dismissively. ‘I know all about that stuff.’

  He began the ritual, noticing that as he spoke to her she did not once look in the direction of the preacher. She seemed to have erased the fact that he was there.

  To Grace’s surprise, people came up to her as she stood outside on the street and congratulated her. She had not expected this to happen. Ian appeared and shook her hand.

  ‘You were fucking brave, Gracie,’ he said, squeezing her hand before disappearing back into the crowd.

  ‘I didn’t think about that,’ she said to Trevor, this detail occurring to her for the first time.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he replied, ‘a fucking good thing you didn’t.’

  While they stood there, Lucy Hurst was escorted out of the hall and placed in a car. She glanced around and saw Grace at a distance but did not acknowledge her. She appeared quite calm. Grace watched her being driven away.

  ‘I guess I don’t get to see her again,’ Grace said, ‘except in court.’

  ‘Not unless you want to.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I do.’

  Not long afterwards, Harrigan walked up to them slowly.

  ‘How are you?’ he said to her.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘A bit light on my feet.’

  He was silent for a few moments, looking at her, shaking his head.

  ‘You should never have been anywhere near here in the first place.

  If I’d known any of that info sooner, you wouldn’t have been.’

  ‘Well, I’m here. I’m still alive to tell the tale.’

  She tried to smile.

  ‘You were lucky,’ he said. ‘You were lucky but you were brave. You deserved to be lucky. Now you’ve done that once, you don’t ever have to do it again, do you?’

  ‘No, I guess not,’ she replied.

  ‘You get debriefed before you do anything else. I’ll need to see you back at the office when you’re finished. And Trev, when you’re ready

  — I need you now.’

  ‘You almost had her shot,’ Grace said after him as he walked away.

  He stopped and came back to her.

  ‘Is that what you’re turning over in your mind? There’s no in-between here. If I was going to finish the day looking at someone’s body, it wasn’t going to be yours. I don’t have an apology for that.’

  ‘It’s not that. She wouldn’t have cared if you had,’ Grace said. ‘She said to me, she didn’t want to have to shoot me, didn’t I know that?’

  ‘Yeah. She had you on a tightrope. She had us all dancing around.’

  ‘All she wanted to know
was who she should shoot now. Because that was the only thing she had left to do. So what are we doing here?

  Have we solved anything? We’re just playing some kind of game along with her.’

  ‘Right first time, Grace. When you get to this point, it is a game and it’s called survival. And you survived. Go and get debriefed. You need to.’

  She let it go and he walked away.

  ‘Do you always talk to him like that?’ Astounded, Trevor dropped his own cigarette butt on the road beside Grace’s small litter. ‘No one else would fucking dare! You must be sleeping with him, Gracie.’

  ‘No, I’m not. All we ever do is talk,’ she said, watching Harrigan as he went up the steps back into the hall.

  37

  The day was not over yet. After the morning’s proceedings had been wrapped up and he had allowed himself the luxury of a shower and a change of clothes, Harrigan stood at the front of the incident room watching it fill. He saw Grace slip in the door almost last of all, fresh out of her debriefing. People turned to speak to her, to shake her hand. She smiled awkwardly in reply. There was still a buzz from the morning; people did not seem to notice (or perhaps they had, what could he know) that both Trevor and Ian were standing quiet and withdrawn at the back of the room. Harrigan had talked to them a little earlier. He called for quiet just after Dea had walked into the room.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s been a very long day. For some of you it’s been a very long thirty-six hours and more and all you want to do is go home. So I’ll be quick. I’ll say first, briefly — probably too briefly

  — you were brave today, Grace, very brave. Everyone here thinks so.

  I don’t want you to think it hasn’t been noticed.’

  There was some applause, she said ‘Thanks’ in her clear voice. He continued.

  ‘I’m telling you this now because I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else. We might even get bumped to second stop on the news.