First Class Killing

“Oh, baby. You’re telling me a lie now, aren’t you?”

“No. What difference…anyway?” I reached out to her. “I don’t want to die alone.”

It seemed like forever we stayed that way. My arm reaching out, Angel staring in. She took a long, deep breath and held it. As she breathed out, she tipped her head back and looked down at me with half-closed eyes. She let the tip of her tongue glide across her upper lip. Her face contorted with pain as she inched slowly toward me, shortening the grip on her poker so she could keep it aimed at my throat. But her eyes were wild, as if she were on fire, burning from the inside. She could love me or kill me. To her it was the same.

I thought I would smell her perfume as she came closer, but all I could smell was blood, hers and mine. When she was close enough, I lifted my damaged arm and reached behind her head to pull her closer. Her hair was stiff and brittle, not soft the way it looked. My arm began to quiver when I touched her hair. It shook up to my shoulder as I twisted my fingers in it and pulled it taut. Her head slammed back, presenting her throat to me. I flashed on the image of Robin and that pale stretch of undamaged skin, the only part of her that still looked like her. The difference was the artery. Angel’s was pumping as hard as it could, especially after I kicked her in the knee.

She screeched, thrust the poker at my chest, and missed. She tried to twist out of my grip but had no leverage on a broken leg and fell instead into my chest. I held her head all the way back, took the heavy glass shard from the couch, and, with my strong hand, shoved it into that throbbing vein.

Someone floated over me. I heard a voice. I tried to open my eyes, but my lids were too heavy, and it just didn’t seem worth it. I was moving, or being moved. I didn’t have the strength to do anything. I was in a car. Something tight around my arm. It hurt. It was too tight. I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go. I managed to get my eyes barely open and saw the big face under the car’s dome light. This time, he was wearing a mint green sport coat, and my blood was all over it. I put my head back down and went to sleep.

Chapter 45

I CLOSED MY EYES AND TRIED TO FEEL THE STILLNESS in the early-morning air, to pull it inside of me and hold it there. Each time I breathed out, I tried to let go of a little more tension in my shoulders and my neck and my back. I let my arms hang at my sides. And then I tried to do the same with my mind, to let it relax and open up to whatever impulse I wanted to send its way. I wanted to empty it of all the events of the past few weeks, all the emotions save one. I held on to the anger. I let my mind go blank except for a bright, burning red stain that drew my complete focus. I took that stain and projected it out, across the distance from me to the target, and onto the bull’s-eye. The rest of the target fell away.

I picked up the gun. It felt comfortable in my hand. My fingers found their place around the grip, my index finger extended to the trigger. Everything felt right, and all I could see was the bright red target in front of me. As I raised my arm, the target grew larger. They say athletes who get in a zone see the basket or the cup or the baseball grow so big they can’t miss it. That’s how I felt. I was locked in on a target that looked to me as big as the entire wall. I knew I couldn’t miss it. I knew I wouldn’t.

I went through the checklist in my mind, the one Tristan and I had worked on. Arms raised, elbows slightly bent. Feet shoulder-width apart. Headgear and protective glasses in place. I adjusted my sleeve so that it didn’t make the stitches on my arm so uncomfortable. My wounds were almost completely healed.

The legal issues would take longer to sort out, but it looked as though self-defense would hold up. The cops had found enough in the cabin to support my story. What they hadn’t found was the archive. Bo had taken it. He had replaced it in the floorboard hideout with the brick that had killed Robin Sevitch. He had pulled it from the desk, exactly where Monica had told him it would be. The police had considered that a most interesting discovery.

Jamie was working through his issues. When he asked me if I thought he should tell Gina, I remembered the way I had felt the first moment I had seen his face on the screen. I told him I didn’t think she should pay the price for something he had done. We had done. I would keep his secret. I knew he would keep my secrets, too, if ever I had the courage to tell them to him. To anyone. I needed someone to tell my secrets to.

Harvey had come to visit in the hospital, and I had been glad to see him. We had decided to leave things on hold for a while. He was not, I was happy to hear, working for OrangeAir. With the exception of Monica, who had cut a nice deal for herself, neither were thirty hookers from Angel’s ring.

“Fire whenever you’re ready.”

I squeezed off the first round, and the target flinched. I didn’t even need to look to see where the bullet had passed through it. I fired again and again until the.38 was empty. I felt steady. I felt sure. I felt that I was in the right place at the right time, doing what I needed to be doing, and I didn’t even think about whether I would pass or fail. There are worse things in life than flunking a firearms test. I had seen some of them. Seeing them had changed the shape of my life, added corners and edges where there had been none before, and made the path clear.

I knew what I wanted. I knew what I was.

When I finished shooting, I set the gun down. I took off my earphones and my glasses. When I did look up, it wasn’t at the target but at the face of the officer monitoring the test. He looked at the target and back at me, and I knew that I had passed. It felt good.

Ly