Second Shot (40 page)

Horribly vulnerable, and I knew that, too.

I’d told Matt that we could persuade Reynolds to hand over Ella, but that wasn’t true. He had nothing to gain by giving up his last best bargaining tool. In reality, to get Ella back we were going to have to take her. And that could only mean a fight of some kind.

The first time Reynolds and I had clashed—at the Lucases’ house— I’d had the element of surprise and I’d physically overpowered him. I experienced that same tingle of regret, that I’d had his life balanced in my hands, literally, and hadn’t taken it.

The next time—in the apartment—he’d had all the advantages and the fact that I’d escaped relatively unscathed had been down to luck more than anything else.

This time I couldn’t afford to let him get close to me. I couldn’t afford to let
anyone
get close enough to tackle me, or I was going to go down and it was all going to be over. Not just for me, but for Ella as well.

Ella.

I’d killed before, but never in cold blood. The one time I’d set out to deliberately take a life, I’d faced my target and bottled out at the last moment, unable to complete what was, in effect, an execution. And somehow I’d clung to that very hesitation as though it were the final proof that I wasn’t quite the psychopath my father feared I had become.

Ella.

I could only hope that the prospect of saving the child would be the spur I needed now.

I moved forwards cautiously, trying not to let my left foot scuff against the thin carpeting. All the time, I was aware that my heart rate was still too high, the thump of my blood making my hands tremble alarmingly My head was starting to buzz as my system overdosed on adrenaline.

Not good. Not good at all.

We reached the door marked “Staff Only: No Unauthorized Entry.” I pushed it open and we went through.

O
nly about half the lights in the front of the store had been on, and it was dimmer still in the stockroom, with the high storage racks looming off like narrow darkened alleyways to our left, and the row of solid gun safes to our right.

I was leaning heavily on the crutch to counterbalance the weight of the Beretta in my right hand. It was getting heavier all the time and the spare magazine in my pocket bumped annoyingly against my hip. I stopped and fished it out, handing it back to Matt.

He looked at it blankly for a moment. “Are you sure?” he asked in a low voice.

I nodded. I was putting all my energy into focusing on what was to come and I didn’t have anything left over to formulate coherent words. Besides, how could I tell him that I doubted I’d have the strength to fire the rounds I’d got, never mind to reload?

I was going to have to make them count.

And then, from a doorway ahead of us, a man stepped out into view. He was dressed in a dark shirt with an open ski jacket over the top. He wasn’t particularly tall, quite slim, wearing gold-framed glasses. I recognized the size and the shape of him, rather than the face—Reynolds’s partner from the kidnap attempt at the Lucases’ place. The man who’d seen Reynolds captured and who had calmly abandoned him.

Cool, calculating and not to be underestimated.

He came out with purpose, head already turned in our direction, gun in his right hand but held loosely, down by his side. Rosalind had called ahead. He knew we were coming, so we were not a surprise to him.

I saw his eyes flick to the space behind us, to where Rosalind should have been, covering the pair of us, herding us forwards. His eyes flew back to me, startled. He saw the Beretta in my hand and he started to bring his own gun up to fire, diving for the cover of the nearest wall of racking.

I stayed planted lumplike in the middle of the space between the racking and the gun safes. It felt as though I had a bloody great target painted on my chest. I had to stand and fight because I couldn’t run and hide. And I had to be totally ruthless because I couldn’t afford to let him get a second shot.

I swung the Beretta up, using my whole shoulder. The crutch was trapped tight into my armpit. I daren’t let go of it this time, but I released the handle to wrap my left hand round my weakened right, wedging my elbow hard into my ribs to stabilize my aim. As a shooter’s stance went, it wasn’t exactly pretty, but it was the best I could do.

I didn’t wait for the man with the glasses to complete his move, or give him a chance to drop the weapon, or shout a warning. I didn’t attempt to aim for an area of his body where I might wound rather than kill him, either. Most of the time, unless you’re looking at your target through a sniper’s scope, that’s a fallacy anyway. You shoot to stop, and if the other guy dies, well, at least it wasn’t you.

I was vaguely aware of a hot white flare from the end of the gun facing me, and some part of my brain registered the fact that he’d fired fractionally first. I was a stationary target, which was bad, but he was moving, which proved better.

The shot went wide to my left, close enough to my ear that I heard the high-pitched whine as it passed, but that could just have been the outrageous noise of the report, bruising my ears. I sensed Matt flinch down behind me, but I didn’t have the mobility to duck myself.

As soon as I had the sights more or less leveled on the center of my target’s mass, I pulled the Beretta’s trigger twice in quick succession, no finesse, feeling the vicious slap of the recoil through my palm. It exploded along my arm and up into my shoulder, a jolt that took my breath away. If I’d missed I wasn’t certain I could go again so soon.

I hadn’t missed. The man with the glasses stopped moving suddenly as the realization that he’d been shot caught up with him. After the initial shock, the pain hit him hard and fast. He froze, as though by keeping quiet and still he could somehow evade it.

You can’t, friend. Trust me on this….

With a kind of disbelieving grunt, his fingers opened to let go the gun, and he folded both hands almost tenderly across his stomach.

He staggered backwards a pace. Then his knees gave out, twisting him so his back hit the gun safe nearest to him and he slid slowly down the face of it until his rump hit the floor. He was starting to gasp now. He sat there, legs splayed out in front of him, staring at nothing.

I didn’t so much lower the Beretta as simply stop making the effort to keep it raised. Without the support of my left hand, I could barely maintain my hold on the gun. The pistol grip was greasy with sweat. I grabbed the handle of my crutch so I could edge forwards. Matt was behind me like a shadow.

The man with the glasses looked up with difficulty as I reached him, like his head was suddenly too heavy for him to lift his chin. He gave a breathless little laugh.

“Who’d have thought it?” he murmured, wonder in his voice. He let his hands flop to inspect the blood that coated his palms, as though he couldn’t quite work out how it had got there. I saw that I’d managed to place both rounds into his stomach. One had just nicked the belt of his jeans so the leather had split and frayed. The other was slightly lower, and the blood that oozed from it was very dark, almost black.
Probably from his liver,
I noted with detached interest. Without a medic he didn’t have long.

His gun had fallen next to him, less than half a meter away from his thigh. Another Beretta. He seemed to have lost interest in shooting us, but I nudged it farther out of his reach with the rubber tip of my crutch, just in case.

“Where is she?” I said.

The man’s face twisted. “Get me a doctor.”

“Tell me where Ella is and you’ll get one.”

“I need one now!” His voice was scared but there was more to it than that. He had the air of ex-military about him, and I guessed that he’d been around firearms enough to know how badly he was hit. He swallowed, desperate not to plead with me but prepared to do it, all the same. “I-I can’t feel my legs.”

“Where’s Ella?” I repeated, dogged, shutting down the emotion that was struggling to rise, the sharp empathy with what he was going through. Behind me I heard the quiet hiss of Matt’s indrawn breath.

The man with the glasses held out a moment longer, his breathing quick and shallow, then caved. He indicated with a sideways flick of his eyes, farther back into the stockroom. “Range,” he said.

“How many of you are there?”

“Just me and Reynolds.” He was panting now. He made a poor attempt at a smile, but there was a bitter edge to it. “She said that would be enough.”

I didn’t need to ask who “she” was. I straightened, stepping awkwardly over his legs.

“Hey,” he said, wheezy. “What about that doctor?”

I glanced back at him without pity. “When we’ve got Ella, and she’s OK, we’ll call you one,” I said. “And if she’s not OK, you’ll wish you were dead anyway.”

He tried to laugh again, but he was crying at the same time. The pain brought him up short, cut him off. “She should have finished you while she had the chance.”

I gave him a tight little smile of my own.
Had everybody known but me?

“Yeah,” I murmured. “It’s a shame about that, isn’t it?”

As I hobbled away I sensed Matt hesitate next to the wounded man, torn over whether to help him or follow me. Eventually, Matt’s desire to find his daughter won out. He caught up with me within a couple of strides. I glanced at him as he reached me, just to see how he was holding up. He was staring.

“What?”

“How can you just leave him like that?” he demanded in a rough whisper, gesturing backwards. “How can you just… ?” He tailed off, unsure what it was exactly that he wanted to ask.

You think this is easy?

I turned away, limped on. “You want your daughter back? This is the only way I can do it,” I said thickly. “You saw what Reynolds was like with me. What do you think he’ll do to her?”

Matt didn’t answer. We’d reached the door to the range. I paused outside it, swapped the Beretta to my other hand while I wiped my damp palm on my sweatpants. Never was a garment more aptly named. I Youched Matt’s arm. He almost flinched.

“If it all goes bad and you get the chance to grab Ella,” I said, keeping my voice low even though I knew the range was soundproofed, “take her and get out—understand? Don’t wait for me.”
Because if Reynolds gets his hands on me again, I wont
be
getting out… .

Matt nodded, eyes so wide I could see the white of them all the way round the iris. He was scared witless, but he was holding it together for the sake of his child. If she remembered nothing else about him as she grew up, I thought fiercely, she ought to remember this.

The outer door into the range was on a strong self-closer, so nobody could accidentally leave it open. The last time I was there, the day I’d matched against Vaughan, it had just been part of the scenery. I hadn’t even noticed it. Now I could barely get the door open against its mechanical opposition. Matt had to lean in close and lend a hand.

Reynolds was waiting for us inside. How could he not be? As we pushed the inner door open I took in the whole scene in an instant, like the flash of a strobe, a snapshot.

He was standing on the other side of the small room at one of the firing points —the same one, coincidentally, where Vaughan had stood. Blond, good-looking and supremely self-confident, he was dressed in the same three-quarter-length tweed coat he’d worn that day on Boston Common and he was smiling the same friendly, open smile he’d given Si-mone at the Aquarium.

He was holding Ella so she was straddling his left hip with her little hands gripped so tight onto his coat it was like she was making fists in the rough material. He had his left arm around her body, supporting her, keeping her close. The very sight of him with his hands on her threw up a burst of white noise behind my eyes.

As we’d opened the door, Reynolds began to shift his stance, drawing his right foot back to present his left side —the side with Ella—as the target. He, too, had a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand and his grip on it was firm and strong. The gun was aimed at Ella’s head, the muzzle almost Youching her downy cheek.

I lurched a full step into the room and fought my flagging muscles to bring the Beretta up. This time, as I brought my other hand up to grab it, I jettisoned the crutch. One chance, and one chance only. After this, it wouldn’t matter much one way or the other.

I saw him take in my shambling gait, my sweat-stained clothing, the fact that I needed both hands to raise the Beretta at all, and the effort it was causing me to do so. I saw the smile start to widen. I could almost hear the thoughts that rushed through his brain. He held all the cards. No way would I risk a shot when he was holding Ella so close, when I could hardly stand and my aim was likely to be all to hell. He might not have to bargain his way out of this, after all. Might not have to leave witnesses behind …

And he made a snap decision. He took the gun away from Ella’s head and began straightening his arm to aim it at me instead, and I knew this was no idle threat. You only bother to threaten someone with a gun if you’re reluctant to actually use it. Reynolds had no such qualms.

I’d humiliated him at the Lucases’ place, and Matt and I had outma-neuvered him at the apartment. And now he had the opportunity to kill us both and make his escape with a hostage worth millions. There was no contest. His only disappointment would be that he didn’t get to make me suffer first.

His mistake.

The muzzle of my Beretta continued to rise in front of me, slow and ponderous, like the nose of an overladen airliner coming off the runway. It seemed to take forever, but actually it all happened in the blink of an eye. The gun reached cruising altitude and I stared along the barrel at a target so small the sights practically obscured it.

I’m sorry, Ella. I’m so sorry
…

And I took the shot.

The noise in the confined space was monstrous. The round hit Reynolds smack in the center of that smug, self-satisfied smile. It smashed through both his front teeth with hardly a pause, continued its slight upward path grazing across the roof of his mouth, plowed on through the stem of his brain and then removed a good chunk of the back of his skull on the way out. It glanced off the bare concrete ceiling of the range at about the ten-meter mark and must have eventually come to rest somewhere in the thick sand berm at the far end of the elongated room, along with thousands of other spent rounds.