Trust Your Eyes

SIXTY-SEVEN

Nicole is doing her dismounts from the uneven bars. A double salto backward tucked with full twist. A double salto backward piked. An underswing with a half turn to salto backward, tucked with a full turn.

She can’t get them right.

She keeps landing on her head.

Time after time. Her head plunges like a missile. Pounds into the mat. She feels her will snap. The pain’s tremendous. Her skull throbs.

It gets worse. An ice pick is sticking up through the mat. After her head hits the mat, her body topples over and the pick plunges into her chest.

It keeps happening over and over again. Letting go of the bar, spinning through the air, twisting and turning, but nothing is going as it should. She tells her body to spin one way and it does the opposite.

This is not happening, she tells herself. This cannot be happening.

Nicole was right. It was not happening. Although it was true that her head was injured, that she had taken a blow to the chest.

Realization was slowly returning to her. Before she had opened her eyes, things began to make sense.

Lewis had shot her.

Yeah.

Just like that. Wanting to make an impression on Morris. She’d figured it was coming, that Lewis would try this sooner or later. She just hadn’t expected it at that moment.

But she’d also known that could happen. That you could be on your guard, and still slip up.

The bullet hit her, hit her hard. Lying there, before she opened her eyes, she wondered whether it had pierced the Kevlar, made it all the way through the formfitting vest, but she did not think so. It felt more like she had been kicked than shot.

It wasn’t the bullet that knocked her out. It was being thrown back, hitting her head on the edge of that goddamn shelf. She was seeing stars before she hit the floor.

But now she was waking up. And she was listening.

Probably best to just stay put for a while.

Linwood Barclay

Trust Your Eyes