Second Shot

Eighteen

Mr. Reynolds,” I said flatly. “The pleasure is all yours, I assure you.” As snappy comebacks went, I didn’t think it was too bad. Not exactly James Bond, but the best I could manage under the circumstances.

“Oh-ho,” he murmured at my use of his name. “We have been doing our homework, haven’t we?” He came round the sofa, moving easily, in no hurry. I considered rising but knew I couldn’t do it in time, never mind in style.

Reynolds stopped, too close to me. I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He was dressed in jeans and tan boots and a high-tech designer fleece jacket over a T-shirt. “I’ve been doing my homework, too. You’ve got quite a reputation, Charlie.” He smiled. “From what I saw of you in action the other night, you might even have lived up to it-once.”

He was on my left, which I tried to tell myself was good. My left arm had maintained more or less its full strength. His groin was well within striking distance. I was just going to have to be smooth in the delivery-otherwise the resultant shock of the blow was going to do me as much damage as it would him….

And, just as I was contemplating making the first move, Reynolds lifted his foot and, almost casual, nudged my left leg with his boot.

At least, to him it must have seemed no more than a nudge. To me he’d just inserted a molten bayonet into my thigh and twisted it. Blind, I grabbed my leg with both hands, gripping hard as though pressure alone would cut off the nerve impulses that were currently screaming a rampant distress call along my neural pathways. I bit back a cry, knowing that was what he wanted above all, and sat there, panting until the worst of the crisis was over.

Reynolds had moved back a little way, more than an arm’s length, and squatted down on his haunches so he could better study my reaction.

“Through-and-throughs are a doozy, aren’t they?” he said, conversational.

“Remind me to make sure you can speak from personal experience some time soon,” I said, keeping my teeth clenched.

“Well, you see, Charlie, for that you’d need a gun, which I happen to know you don’t have,” Reynolds said, still cheerful. ‘And, unfortunately for you,/do.”

He reached under his jacket and pulled out a semiautomatic from a shoulder rig. Another Beretta M9, minus the suppressor this time. A replacement for the one I’d taken away from him at the Lucases’ house — and which Vaughan’s men had then taken away from me. Or the same gun?

He was carrying the Beretta cocked and locked, first round out of the magazine and in the chamber, hammer back, safety on. Now, he thumbed the safety off and smiled at me.

The action crinkled the skin around his eyes, which were very cold and very blue. A handsome face. One that lent itself easily to charm. Si-mone had certainly been taken in by it, had not seen past the attractive collection of features to what lay beneath.

“So tell me, were you planning on snatching Simone before we left Boston?” I asked. Anything to distract him.

“That would have been the easiest solution,” Reynolds agreed. “I would have gotten her at the Aquarium if you’d been thirty seconds slower.”

“What?” I said. “You think she would have walked out of there with you and left her daughter behind willingly?”

“Willing or not, she would have walked out of there with me,” he said, supremely confident. “Make no mistake about that.”

‘And that would have achieved what, exactly?” I said.

He laughed and shook his head. “No, no, Charlie,” he said, wagging a disapproving finger. “This is not one of those corny old movies where I tell you my whole evil plan and then let you escape moments from death. Let’s face facts — if I wanted you dead, lady, you’d be dead already”

I glanced at Matt, still lying still as a corpse on the floor next to me. I took reassurance from the fact that I’d verified his pulse myself, and that the wound to his head was still bleeding. Just a trickle, but at least that meant his heart was still pumping blood round his system.

“So why are you here?”

“To pass on a message,” he said. “A warning, if you like.”

“Which is?”

“Go home,” Reynolds said. “Simple enough, isn’t it? You and the rest of your crew just pack up and go home. No harm, no foul.”

The same message Vaughan had tried to deliver, right before Simone was killed. But I’d told him we were going. Wasn’t that enough?

“Or … what?”

He laughed. “Quite apart from the obvious threat, here and now, you mean?” he said. “Well, just remember that Ella’s a sweet kid. How old is she now-four? You leave, today, and maybe she’ll get to be five.”

The fear was a sudden starburst rising from my belly, bunched up tight under my ribs, a bright, leaking coldness that froze my heart to the inside of my chest. A cold flame ignited at the base of my right lung.

“That’s it?” I said.

He considered for a moment. “Yup, that’s it,” he said. “That’s the message, from my boss to yours, in full.”

“So you’re nothing more than the messenger boy, is that it?”

He smiled again, almost a grin this time. “Well, it was left to my own judgment how best to deliver the message-how to give it maximum impact, you might say”

He stretched out the Beretta and touched the barrel of the gun to my left leg. It was barely a brush against the fabric of my sweatpants, but I couldn’t control a flinch that had nothing to do with the physical contact.

Almost lazily, like a caress, Reynolds used the gun to trace the indentation where the bullet had exited at the front of my thigh. I compelled myself to sit motionless, to show no response.

“I wonder what will happen,” he said softly, “if I put another round through your leg in just the same place as the last. Will it hurt more or less than the first time?”

“Your message wouldn’t get delivered,” I said with a calm that came from somewhere else, somewhere outside of me.

“No?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No,” I said, firm but matter-of-fact. “Last time, I was lucky. A millimeter or two either way and you’ll hit an artery and I’ll bleed out before the others get back.” The tightness in my chest was making it difficult to get a whole sentence out in one breath. “And if that happens, Sean Meyer will find you and kill you, if he has to go to the ends of the earth to do it.” The utter conviction in my voice didn’t have to be forced.

Reynolds sat back a moment, as if considering. “Your death would be an inconvenience we could do without,” he allowed. “But I still have to persuade you and your boss — and anyone else who’s hanging around- that letting this drop would be in all your best interests. And if I can’t shoot you-” He shrugged, regretful, slid the safety back on and put the Beretta back into its holster, “I guess I’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

I tried to brace myself, brought my arms up to cover as much of my torso as I could, but it didn’t do much good. He hit me a low relatively lightweight punch, almost experimental, somewhere around my kidney on the left side. An incendiary burst of pain exploded inwards and upwards, the shock wave buffeting through my body, robbing me of sight and breath and sanity I screamed.

And then I fainted.

A moment later, or so it seemed, I opened my eyes and found I was sprawled facedown on the sofa with a pulsating white-hot burn going on in my back that lanced straight through to my chest and pinned me there.

For a moment I thought that maybe it was all over, that Reynolds had delivered his message and gone. I should have known I wasn’t that lucky.

“You’re obviously not a party girl, Charlie,” he said, shattering that fragile hope. “Here was I hoping we’d be up all night dancing, and you pass out on me at the first sign of a little trouble.”

I lifted my head-very, very carefully-and turned it so I could see across the room. Reynolds was sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the coffee table.

“I was shot, Reynolds. What did you expect?” I said, my voice thick. I had the hollow bitter taste of bile in the back of my throat and I had to swallow it before I could speak. “I thought your orders weren’t to kill me.”

A mistake to use the word “orders,” I realized, but not until I’d already used it and it was too late to pull it back. Something even colder flashed through his eyes.

“Kill you, no,” he said, getting to his feet with that deadly smile back in place. “Nobody said anything about what else I could do to you, though.” And he reached for the fly of his jeans.

I panicked instantly, flapping like a landed fish. I tried to push myself up off the sofa, but my right arm wouldn’t support my body weight and folded under me, so I nearly rolled over the edge and fell. Reynolds grabbed hold of my shoulders and hoisted me back onto the sofa, shoving my face down hard into the cushion so now I was suffocating as well. The spike of pain was such that I barely felt him tug at the waistband of my sweatpants.

In desperation, I reached my left hand back, clawed at him. My fingers brushed against something leather and he jerked back out of reach so fast that at first I thought I might somehow have hurt him, and then I realized that by chance I’d touched the holstered Beretta.

His weight shifted. Then came the sound of something heavy dropping onto glass. He’d put the gun down over on the coffee table, only a meter or so away. It might as well have been in Diisseldorf.

While he was leaning over I bucked under him, but it was a feeble attempt with no muscle behind it and he regained his balance easily.

“Oh no, you don’t,” he muttered, his voice tight and breathless, and he deliberately shoved one fist into the back of my right shoulder blade and leaned his weight onto it.

The pain was instant, inescapable. Deep inside, I swear I heard my own flesh tearing. I managed half a cry that shrank into a gasp and then I went utterly still. I think my mind detached from my body at that point and began to float. There was no other explanation for the fact that I could see his face clearly, the feral focus in his eyes, the dark primeval glitter. Except for the fact, of course, that it wasn’t the first time I’d seen that look.

Tou can survive this. Tou have survived it before….

Reynolds gave a satisfied grunt at my sudden capitulation. I felt him shift his weight again, positioning himself. I shut my eyes.

I felt the impact, secondhand, and the jerk as his body absorbed the blow and then collapsed sideways, dropping hard onto the floor alongside the sofa.

“Get off her, you bastard, or I will blow your fucking head off!”

I’d forgotten Matt, lying on the floor with a bleeding lump on the back of his head. So had Reynolds, clearly He remembered him now, mainly because Matt had staggered upright, unnoticed until he snatched up the Beretta from the coffee table and smacked Reynolds round the back of his skull with the butt.

As he fell, the pressure lifted off the wound in my back as suddenly as it had landed. On the whole, I’d say it didn’t immediately make things any better. I wanted to shout at Matt that he’d got a gun, not a bloody club, and to pull the trigger and keep pulling it, but I found Reynolds had stolen my voice along with half my self-respect.

Reynolds half-dragged himself upright, dazed from the blow, stumbled and went down again as far as his knees. I rolled onto my side, hauling my sweatpants back up with all the strength I could manage, and kicked him in the groin with my right foot. It wasn’t hard enough to do him any lasting damage, and the resultant jar nearly made me black out, but it was definitely worth it.

Matt was on his feet, blinking, with the gun held stiffly in front of him in both hands now. He was trembling. I had a sudden flash reminder of the way Simone had held a gun, like it had been a living beast that might escape at any moment and devour her.

Matt clearly didn’t know anything about firearms, either, and I noticed that fact at exactly the same time Reynolds did.

He lunged for Matt, making a grab for the gun. I saw Matt’s hands clench as reflex made him jerk at the trigger. The barrel oscillated wildly as he took up the pressure and nothing happened.

“Safety!” I shouted at Matt. “Take the bloody safety off!”

I pivoted onto my side and lashed out at Reynolds again with my foot, catching him on the cheek, just under his eye. He half-fell onto the coffee table, which was made of glass. It should have been safety glass but he hit it hard. It splintered under his weight and he pitched through, tangling himself in the wrought-iron frame.

Matt stared at the gun in alarm. “How?”

“Give it to me!”

Reynolds was fighting out of the wreckage of the table, eyes burning intently into Matt. Matt saw the shark approaching with its mouth open and its teeth exposed, and threw the Beretta in my direction, like that was going to stop him getting his legs bitten off.

The gun landed on the sofa, almost hitting me in the stomach. I snatched it up and flicked the safety off just as Reynolds rolled clear of the debris. I aimed for the center of his body mass and pulled the trigger without a second’s hesitation.

And missed.

The bullet smacked into the body of the chair to his left. My right arm was still so weak that I could barely keep the gun up, never mind hold it steady under fire. The kick of it up through my arm and across my shoulders seemed immense. I jammed my left hand against my right and fired again.

Closer, but no hit.

Reynolds threw himself across the room and dived on Matt, who’d been crouched down with his fingers in his ears from the moment I’d fired the first shot.

He squealed as Reynolds yanked him upright and dragged him backwards towards the door. All the way, Reynolds kept Matt pinioned in front of him as a shield. I could just see Reynolds’s head to one side of Matt’s, one very blue eye watching my every move. As he reached the edge of the living room, I knew Reynolds was smiling through the faint drift of gunsmoke that hung between us.

“Not going to take the shot, Charlie?” he said, jeering. “Looks like that’s getting to be one of your specialties, huh?”

I managed to get the Beretta to point a fraction higher, but the effort made my right arm shake so badly I couldn’t sustain any sort of aim. I lowered the gun until the pistol grip was resting on the sofa.

“Lost another gun, Reynolds?” I said, tiredly. “Looks like that’s getting to be one of yours.”

For a moment I thought he was going to come back and have a go, but he thrust Matt away from him and ran for the door instead. To be honest, if Reynolds had decided on a counterattack, I’m not sure I could have done much about it.

Matt tottered back across the living room and collapsed into one of the armchairs. He dabbed a hand at the back of his head and looked blankly at the blood he found on his fingers.

“Are you OK?” he said. “I mean, did he …?”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t-thanks to you.”

“Thank God for that,” Matt said. “I thought, when I saw-”

“You didn’t see anything, Matt,” I said, fighting to keep my eyes open, fighting to hold back the nausea and the sorrow. The pain was coming in waves on an incoming tide, each one crashing a little farther up the beach. “Reynolds broke in. He beat the pair of us up. We got rid of him. Other than that there was nothing to see. Nothing you need to tell the others about, OK?”

He frowned. “Yes, but-”

“No buts. And if you tell Sean about this I’ll kill you myself,” I said, fierce, then added, with as much dignity as I could muster, “now do me a favor and find me a bucket or something, would you? I think I’m going to throw up.”

I still hadn’t found the strength to move from the sofa by the time Sean and Neagley returned, two hours later. Matt had brought me the plastic liner from the pedal bin in the kitchen in place of a bucket and covered me with a blanket. He’d also found a dustpan and brush from somewhere and had gathered up most of the glass from the coffee table when I heard the key in the front door lock.

I’d been half-dozing, but I snapped awake and brought the Beretta up from under cover, slow and clumsy. I’d got my left hand clamped hard round my right, but if the way the front sights were circling wildly was anything to go by, I don’t think I could have hit an elephant at half a dozen paces. Hell, for that matter, I don’t think I could have hit an elephant if I’d been sitting on its back.

Sean did a fast assessment of the damage and was by my side almost instantly He took the Beretta out of my hands, very gently and carefully. My palms had left clammy marks on either side of the grip.

“What happened?” Neagley demanded, looking at Matt. When I glanced across I saw that she had the short little Smith amp; Wesson out of her bag and in her hands, pointed low, and that she was moving through the living room quiet and careful, like a cop.

“Reynolds,” I said, possessor of a fat tongue. “He came to deliver a message.”

‘And stayed to smash the place up,” Sean murmured. “Well, there goes my security deposit.”

Neagley shot him a fast disapproving glance, missing the wry twist of his lips. Sean didn’t take his eyes off my face.

“Well, that was mainly me,” I admitted, not aware until now how much it had been costing me to hold it together while we waited for them to come back. “Can’t shoot for shit at the moment.”

“You should be in bed,” Sean said. “And I think I should call your father.”

“No.”

Sean silenced me with a single hard stare. “It’s either that or we go back to the hospital in Lewiston,” he said. “Your choice.”

I shut my eyes. “Don’t bully me,” I said weakly. “I’ve had a bad day.”

“Get used to it,” Sean threw back at me. “Can you get up?”

I tried a couple of times, but both legs trembled too violently to be much use, and there was no way I could have leaned on a crutch, in any case.

With a sigh, Sean leaned down and scooped me up off the sofa. He was gentle, but it hurt nevertheless and I didn’t hide that fact well. He carried me through to the bedroom and laid me very carefully on the bed, then pulled the covers over me and sat alongside.

“So, are you going to tell me exactly what happened?”

“Reynolds played rough,” I said. “Maybe I should have broken his neck while I had the chance.”

Sean’s hand feathered in my hair. “No, you shouldn’t,” he said.

I eyed him, a man who’d killed without compunction for lesser reasons than dire necessity. “That’s rich,” I said, “coming from you.”

‘Ah, well, I see the right way and I approve it, but I do the opposite.”

“Who said that?”

“Me, just now,” he said. “Actually, I believe it was Ovid.”

“God save us from philosopher squaddies,” I said, aware that I was starting to slur again. “It’s still rich, coming from you.”

“Well, how about, don’t do as I do, do as I say?” he murmured. “I want you to be with me, Charlie. But I don’t want you to try and feme….”