Gatac

  It was starting to hurt again.

  Anne had popped some pills on the way ‘home’, two times 400 milligrams of ibuprofen that seemed stuck to the back of her throat because she hadn't dared to take a hand off the wheel and reach for the bottle of water in the center console. Yes, more than Dolr had told her to take, but — she hoped — not so much that it was worse than being unable to stay on the road. She wasn't entirely sure whether they were working, but then it hadn't gotten much worse, though it might have started any moment. She thought about the ice in the freezer at home and how that would help. What hadn’t helped was taking the circuitous route, 495 to 678 to Belt, but she was…what had she been hoping for? To mislead anyone tailing her. To dey arriving at home, because getting home meant packing, meant acknowledging she was done here. She’d managed to wipe off her face and hands and the darkness of her clothes swallowed the drying blood well enough in the twilight. The hand she hadn't dared to take off the wheel snuck its way down to her side as she felt for her bruised rib again, as if ying on hands would fix it. The cuts on her left hands were throbbing with her heartbeat, and moving that arm wasn't helping. She endured this pain because it seemed to promise life had not fully bled out of it yet, and in any event her fingers still moved and she still had feeling in their tips. Lucky. Anne had thought long and hard about how lucky she was, because the stunts she had pulled since Arkady's death sure weren't proof of much in the way of smarts. Was her pride soothed, then? Was there anyone left she hadn’t outsmarted, outfought, outsted? And all for the low, low price of burning down her New York City life of 15 years — was this the bargain she had wished for?

  The insidious thing about not being on top of one's game was the inherent difficulty of recognizing that condition. There was only the fwed tool of self-perception to go on, and — so much worse — the overwhelming desire to disbelieve such signals lest one acknowledge certain basic human frailties. If Anne had been on top of her game, she might have wondered whether her quiet little Staten Isnd neighborhood was not, in fact, too quiet. But it was getting te, and winter besides, and she pushed the thought away. She might have wondered about the blue sedan parked opposite her house, a car she had never seen there before and yet felt intensely familiar. But the only blue sedan she had to be afraid of was not there. It could not be there. Acknowledging the possibility would have required believing that years of being careful to keep her private life private had been undone. She knew the st two days had been full of thoughtless haste. She knew she had showed off in front of a cop who was, she believed, not at all a match for her. But still, she had to be safe now. So she pulled up in front of her house, killed the engine and climbed out. Even the electric feel of the night air was easily dismissed. Aftereffects of the big adrenaline spike back there, a simple and understandable case of her sense of danger misfiring.

  All of that was easy to rationalize. The doors opening on the sedan and producing Sean and Berkovitz, less so. Anne fought everything down while she walked, one step at a time. Don't be startled. Don't be hurt.

  “It's time we talked, Anne," she heard Sean say. Her pn changed from walking into the house to walking to the back of her car. “Or is it Gdys Johnson? She’s on the pink slip for your car. Hannah Bine? She pays the bill for your phone. Separate PO boxes in separate post offices and addresses going nowhere for both, of course. You got your money’s worth with their fake IDs.”1This isn’t fair py mystery, but just in case you weren’t sure how Sean figured those out, remember that he had Captain Whitton run the ptes on her car and had his old friend Ada write down the phone number she got when he used the mobile phone."I am leaving," she said. Didn’t face him, just walked, slowly, to the trunk. "One hour on, I will be out of this city forever.""No, you won't," Sean said. "Jane Schultz.”

  Anne froze. They wouldn’t have tracked down her home without knowing the name on the deed. That was logical. Had she woven her lies with such carelessness that Sean could see a common thread? She wanted to shut down the train of thought right there, though. Wondering how they had found her wouldn’t help her escape.

  “You’ll want to hear how we found you,” Sean said.

  Part of her did, the part of her that was tired and ready to have someone else make sense of everything. This was a story she understood, after all. The wman catches the criminal, but justice is only complete when all has been revealed and expined. It wouldn’t stop here. Sean would find the documents in the house, track down her money and trace it back to the Thieves somehow, bringing them all down with her. He would make it go exactly as the books had promised her. That was a comforting notion, like the creeping cold of the mountain that takes the pain before it takes the breath. But it was still only part of her that wanted this. The other part listened to the devil’s counsel and popped the trunk open.

  “It wasn’t a smart way,” Sean admitted. “Just Joe seeing you on the street after you left me at his pce. You were hard to miss, after all. All he had to do was hang back and follow you here. When you didn’t show at the undry, he told me all about it. I hoped whatever you were gonna do that you didn’t want me around for, you’d be back here at least one more time. Because if you hadn’t…we would’ve had fuck all.” He snorted. “Guess even I get a lucky break once in a while.”

  Anne took a breath because she couldn’t ugh anymore. Last sideways gnce at the two cops, Berkovitz behind the car with his hands out of sight, Sean in the middle of the street, still talking, hands half-raised as if he thought he was a hostage negotiator. Hostages, she thought. She hoped Sean had found the women. Hoped he had done a good deed.

  “See, that’s the thing with hiding, Anne,” Sean finished. “You only have to fuck up once.” He smiled and lowered his hands, returning to whatever neutral gear life had equipped him with.

  She said nothing. Denial cut several ways. She didn't want to believe he had found her and he didn't want to believe she would draw on him, even though he had and she would. She had already drawn on him, way back at the warehouse. She just had to pull the trigger. He took another step toward her. She grabbed the AKM from the trunk. He hit the deck. She raised the gun. One breath ter, everything turned kinetic.

  Not a dull roar. Not a choked firecracker. Just a good, old-fashioned RATATATA.

  The bullets passed over Sean and smashed through the blue sedan's sides, blowing out side windows and stenciling holes in the sheet metal doors. Beyond that they kept going, embedding themselves in the wall of the house behind them. Or worse? For a moment, Anne felt a stab of conscience again. She hadn't considered what was behind her targets, hadn't even thought about considering the background, just grabbed a gun and started shooting up her neighborhood. She was better than this. Had to be better than this. The moment it took her to stop being shocked at herself was one Berkovitz put to good use, sticking his hand out and squeezing off a few shots from his .38. One bullet ricocheted off the open trunk lid, waking Anne from her moral crisis and spurring her to duck down behind her car. Concealment, not cover. She scrambled along the side of the car. Darn it, they had caught her thinking in the middle of a fight. She popped up to shoot over the roof instead, and —

  Sean, now ft against the street, aimed the Beretta at her. She couldn’t have heard the gun click on an empty chamber, but she did see a twitch in his arm, and, well, the gun didn't fire and she wasn't dead. That was not difficult to extrapote. She pulled the trigger on the AKM and it obligingly spat a few more bullets over Sean's head. She stumbled farther forward. Berkovitz, still cowering behind the sedan's rear, stuck his revolver out again and peeled off more shots, but that stopped soon, too. Anne fixed her stance and aimed the AKM just past the windshield over the hood of her car. She had Sean in her sights and he had her. Neither pulled the trigger again. She didn’t know why, but she knew it wasn’t rational and this was not the time to figure things out. This was the time to cut her losses and run.

  Throwing open the passenger-side door, she tossed the AKM onto the backseat and climbed through the car as best she could, where her aim reasserted itself by sticking the key in the ignition first try. The engine roared to life at her prompting, and while the back of her mind tried to work out if she had ever seen Berkovitz use a speed loader, the car already started moving again. With wide eyes, Anne ripped the steering wheel to the left, turning the rear-end collision with Pattie's cream-colored station wagon into a minor scrape. Then, reluctantly, she shifted into Drive and stepped on it. The tires fought for purchase on the slick road, pushing her half forward and half to the side. She wrenched the wheel from one side to the other for a couple of seconds, just trying to find the middle of the road and stay there. Past the worst of the skidding, she looked up at the mirror again. She didn't like what she saw and fixed the position to see the road. She didn't like what she saw there, either. The sedan's headlights came on behind her and it pulled out onto the street. Sean. Had to be Sean. So, good news: he still had his life. Bad news: he wasn't willing to walk away with it.

  She stepped on the gas.

  Sean was missing thirty seconds, give or take a few. He had seen Anne pop the trunk and gotten that sinking feeling. He had seen her face, maybe her real face for the first time. Hard cut to being behind the wheel of the slick top in a no-shit car chase. Thirty seconds had passed. Had to have passed. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead, on Anne’s car in front of him. The engine howled, then the transmission ccked, second to third gear if Sean wasn’t wrong and he wasn’t wrong, because Sean knew the shift points on the slick top’s AOD transmission like other people knew the bark of their first dog.2Of course, with just three forward gears (plus overdrive) avaible to the transmission, this isn’t that difficult. Try that with an 18-speed auto-shift transmission in a semi and we’ll talk. The better trick was hearing it all over the sound of the wind rushing past the shattered side windows.

  They were tearing down the residential road, parked cars and small houses fencing in their racetrack. Well, it wasn’t designed as a racetrack but they were racing on it, and Sean realized a few seconds ter he had no goddamn idea what he was doing other than trying to drive right into the back of Anne’s Nissan, at which point — magic, ticker tape parade, bck out the screen and fsh ‘YOU WIN’ at some integer proportion of 60 Hertz?3Technically 59.94 Hertz since the 1953, when support for color was added to the NTSC system, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. As the thought process wound through Sean’s head, he wasn’t quite sure how to act on all this information, but his foot did lift slightly off the gas pedal.

  Just in time for Anne to pump the brakes and wrench her car into a right turn at the next intersection.

  Sean had preciously few seconds to react and spent some of them mentally fast-forwarding to the moment where he’d plow straight into the gas station on the far corner of the crossing. His back wheels had already crossed the stop line when mind and body got back in total sync and he dedicated his arms to wrestling the steering wheel all the way to the left while he tapped the brakes. The car stepped out, of course, but that was what Sean had expected, and so he steered into the turn and put the pedal to the metal. For one glorious half-second, the car slipped sideways, small pieces of gss floating through the cabin, until Sean found the right angle around the corner and let the car settle. Traction returned to the rear wheels, just enough to accelerate out of the turn and barely missing the curb.4Skill is being able to improvise a Skandinavian flick during a car chase with an 80s RWD sedan, i.e the type of vehicle that just loves to oversteer and step out when cornering at high speed. Wisdom is letting off the gas before the turn instead. Sean brought the steering back to center and fought the osciltion for a moment, but then he was back on the Nissan’s tail, even closer than before.

  Sean Collins: holder of the unofficial two-p speed record at Floyd Benning Field5An old airfield in Brooklyn (just to the east of Brighton Beach, in fact) used by the NYPD’s Driver Education and Training Unit to teach police officers how to handle a variety of vehicles in challenging situations. For obvious reasons, they don’t actually let Academy recruits use the obstacle courses to hold races., Academy Css of ‘84.

  Of course, this wasn’t a race. This was a pursuit, and every time Sean rolled the word ‘pursuit’ around in his head, he eased off the throttle. His right hand kept feeling for the column shifter — why was he searching for that anyway? Fucking automatic! — but wasn’t quite ready to reach for the radio yet. It would have been the smart thing to do, take another five MPH off, stay on the Nissan at a safe distance, radio in for other patrol cars to assist, maybe even consider not getting into a high-speed pursuit through a residential area to begin with. Maybe. But maybe they wouldn’t be able to understand a word over the wind anyway and besides, Sean felt like there were no more branches on this road to the finish line. He had no logical expnation, only the unshakable conviction that if he kept at this, things would work out.

  Two nes now. Sean’s car dodged to the right, threading the needle between a parked delivery truck and oncoming traffic for some reason swerving into his ne after barely not colliding with the Nissan. He had no time to look in the back mirror, but he was pretty sure the freeze-frame picture of Aunt Susan giving him a terror stare through her very much intact driver’s side window meant there was now a car sideways on the road behind him. Another burst of acceleration. The Nissan jumped right, barely overtaking a pale blue subcompact in the left ne, who of course stepped on the brakes because this couldn’t be too easy for Sean, no Sir, so pump the brakes, more swerving and ducking and weaving around people who seemed dedicated to becoming obstacles. As they shot through the underpass beneath Willowbrook6Willowbrook Expressway; incidentally renamed in 1990 to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway., he opened up the throttle again, angling to catch up to the Nissan’s side. But Anne didn’t particurly want to be caught, apparently, and as they thundered down the avenue, her perpetual ‘throttle not all the way down’ driving style couldn’t be beat by Sean, who was — much as he wished he wasn’t — held back by the cop voice in his head telling him they were going too fast and endangering citizens and maybe sirens would help clear the road ahead?

  Wait. That st one, sirens. Sirens he couldn’t do, but lights! Yeah, that sounded like a good idea.

  The test swerve to the right gave Sean just enough of an excuse to reach for the Kojak light7You know the one, the little rotating light with the magnetic basepte that the pinclothes cops on TV in the 70s put on their slicktops whenever shit got real. These days, you’re more likely to have lights hidden behind the front grille of the car, making these kinds of stunts rgely unnecessary.And yeah, this nickname is exactly what you think it is. Who loves ya, baby? instead of the radio. He clenched it between his thighs as he — WOAH! — pick-up truck with a bed full of chicken cages, dodge into the opposite ne, Volvo station wagon with hi-beams — FUCK! — shear back in, close enough he could taste the Scandinavian orange. Behind him, a whole fucking orchestra with an outsize brass section pying first and second and third car horn, fading into the distance way too fast. Way too fast. Sean gnced at the speedometer. 45 MPH. 66 feet every second, 66 feet for every chance he didn’t take. 66 feet every second, full of people who had no idea what was happening and just needed to cross Sean’s path at the exact wrong moment to kill them both.

  Christ.

  Now with his right hand fixed on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the chase, Sean waited for a quiet ‘go straight’ part of the pursuit, then grasped the Kojak tightly and didn’t almost fucking drop it when he stuck his hand out of the window. The wind tried to rip it from his hands and the jagged gss edges of the broken window dug into the sleeves of his jacket, probing it for weakness. Sean fought his heart’s urgent desire to explode until the light’s magnetic basepte THUNKed onto the roof of the car. He thanked all the saints and angels he knew and reached to stretch the light’s cable all the way to the cigarette lighter, where he plugged it in, which was — by comparison — so insultingly fucking easy Sean was pissed he had to bother with it at all. But then it was done, it was all done. He had succeeded at the thing he set out to do. It was a big moment for him.

  And Sean said, let there be light. Now the people would know their hero even from afar.

  Sean tried to figure out his next move as they took a wide turn to the left. Or, rather, her next move: was she just driving away, hoping he’d run out of gas first or —Jersey! Damn it! The 278, that’d either get her stuck in traffic or off the isnd, and Sean wasn’t sure whether he’d prefer to deal with a cornered killer on a highway full of civilians or watch her get away for good. Sean put the pedal down and even the automatic couldn’t do anything more but let the engine revs climb. Here there were no more cars swerving into Sean’s way, no more obstacles, nobody confused about what was happening. A cop was chasing a criminal into the dark. Everyone got out of their goddamn way. He got close, close enough that he considered a PIT8Police Interception Technique, which I’m sure you’ve seen a hundred times before: match speed, come up on the side, then steer into the target vehicle with the goal of putting your front corner into their rear side. Done right, it spins the target vehicle out, but keeps it close to the attacker so it doesn’t go off the road. Done not right…well, let’s just say Sean doesn’t like his chances in this kind of situation., but then he gnced at the speedometer and the narrowing street and before he went through with it, Anne broke off to the right, with Sean coming up behind her again. As they shot out onto Goethals Road, Sean gnced to the left at the elevated interstate — and the onramp well behind them. That was it. That was the check, right there. He had blocked her, no more ramps coming up on this route, only dead ends. They were running out of road, quickly, and with decidedly fewer people around than just moments before. What now, Simmons? Concede the game already.

  Sharp left. Sean lifted off the gas, ready for a proper turn this time. Her Nissan still had him beat on cornering, but she was too slow to take advantage of it. They weaved right to left and back again underneath Goethals Bridge. She lost yet more speed when she threaded her car over a small crossing into the unlit wetnds of Old Pce. Sean followed, keeping up the pressure, his quarry caught in the headlights — road too narrow to get close enough for that PIT, but he stayed glued to her, and as they came up on another little T-intersection way out in the middle of nowhere with both options going nowhere, too, her engine quieted down. It seemed like she had realized the chase was over.

  Sean felt good about that just as long as it took him to realize she was putting down the pedal again just before the turn. Before he could stop himself from instinctively trying to match her, her brake lights fshed and her Nissan stepped out, sliding to a near stop just inside the corner. Sean stomped the brakes and wrenched the wheel to the right, trying not to t-bone her car, but both luck and traction deserted him. His car spun and slid almost all the way around over the mud-slick road, coming to a stop with a good bump of his rear against her passenger side door. Sean’s arms instinctively went sck, letting the seatbelt absorb his forward rebound from the seat. With shivering hands, he fumbled for the seatbelt release, got it after about a second and immediately ducked down, which tangled him for another second or two in the retracting belt before he managed to skedaddle over the center console toward the passenger side. The interior was sprinkled with shattered gss — how was there still shattered gss? He reached past the shards to pop the door, then half crawled, half rolled out of the car, dragging the gss with him. His feet and hands fought the dirt road until his back bumped against the front wheel. Then, and only then, did he start patting himself down, feeling for cuts, feeling for gss stuck to him or inside him, feeling for —

  “Sean?” Anne said, from somewhere on the other side of their two cars. “You shouldn’t” — she coughed — “shouldn’t be here.”

  Sean fingertips reached the Beretta. Hallelujah.

  Buoyed by his recent successes, Sean took stock of the situation.

  The shotgun was still in the car, wrenched under the seat somewhere. He considered it a lost cause. At least he had his Beretta at his fingertips. Considerately enough, the gun had not discharged into his guts during the collision. He wrapped his aching fingers around the pistol grip, then wiggled the gun past his belt and his vest and his everything else a front sight bde could snag on. Weapon in hand, he took a deep breath. That was an awful idea and hurt immediately, but this was, if anything, not the time to stop having awful ideas, not when they were the only ideas he still had, not when he was so close to the finish line.

  Then he had a thought, and that thought was to look at the pistol, cast his mind back to the encounter at the house and figure out the next step. He grabbed the slide by its cocking serrations, pulled it back and let it go. It snapped forward under spring tension. Click. He grabbed the slide again and pulled it back enough to feel into the chamber. Press check. One in the pipe. Good. He let it snap close again. Click. Hammer down? Oh, right, the decocker! Sean thumbed off the safety, exposing the painted red dot under the lever. It shone even in the darkness. There, condition two. Double-action. Just pull the trigger. But finger off the trigger, for now. Sean took a deep breath as he steeled his mind. If Anne had heard all the clicking from him maniputing the gun, she seemed to have done nothing about it. Maybe she didn’t want to fight him after all. Well, too te for second thoughts. Sean resolved to finish things here, one way or another.

  No more fuckups.

  “Sean,” Anne called to him. “Put the gun down.”“What’s your py, Anne?” Sean replied. “Doesn’t matter what you do, doesn’t matter what I do. You’ve got nowhere to run to. They’re locking down all bridges off the isnd right now. Do you want to spend the night cowering in the swamps and waiting for the manhunt to drag you out of the mud? Huh? Is that how you’re going out? Face it, you’re done, Anne! You’re fucking done! It’s over now! You got what you wanted, you — you killed them all, you — you pyed me —”“Did you find the women?” she asked.“Yes!” Sean said. “Yes, I found the damn women.”“Are they alright?” Anne said.“I don’t know,” Sean said to himself, then he repeated it to her. “I don’t know! What do you care? What the hell does it matter? We’re not talking about them, Anne. We’re talking about you!”“Not much left to talk about,” she said.

  At least for once, Sean listened to Captain Whitton’s advice: he fired first, two rounds blind over the hood of his car to keep her head down, then he rose quickly and steadied his arms on the hood, trying to will his eyes to bore through the darkness, trying to hear her shout for mercy. But she wasn’t shouting for mercy, wasn’t shouting at all. No target presented itself, and so Sean crouched down again.

  Think! Think, damn it! What now?

  He swallowed a curse. She had to know where he was after that stunt, but it hadn’t been a mystery before, either. Only the shadows of their respective engines made for viable cover. So, in theory, Sean knew where she was, too. But that was theory, and he didn’t know, and — and he didn’t want this. Didn’t want any of this. But he had come this far and saw no choice but seeing it through.

  Second try, three bullets. First blind, second aimed square in the middle of the darkness, a third just over the hood of her Nissan as he motored, running through the still-shining headlights of his car — move move move SHOOT HER — another round and another round as he pumped lead over and around her position. Pin and fnk. He passed the front of her car, three feet away — never round a corner too close, you don’t know what’s hiding behind it — and ready to do something to her. He was ready because he knew where she was, in her hiding pce, at the front left wheel well behind the engine which was the only logical pce to look at, the only pce she could conceivably have been in the entire observable universe. But Sean wasn’t observing a hell of a lot of the universe in this night. The first quarter moon and the stars were barely visible through the clouds while the lights of cities around him blew out the background. All he could tell for sure was she wasn’t there.

  Well. Shit.

  Sean crouched down and cimed the empty spot for himself, then dropped onto his side, scanning underneath the car. He thought he saw someone receding into the darkness, imagined the shape limping right past his car through the wetnds, fleeing toward — what? His pulse pounded away somewhere inside his skull, like a panicked motorist smashing their way out of a sinking car, and as he crawled back to the crouched position behind the wheel well, he tried to take stock of the situation. Thumb on his wrist, count beats, a little math — he was running hot, 170 BPM, way in the bck. Not good. Very not good. Conscious breathing: in four, hold four, out four, hold four, and so on. None of this was going to work if he couldn’t get back into the red, get that adrenaline under control.9I won’t bore you with Jeff Cooper’s color code system of combat readiness and the various expansions thereof. Just take away from this that Sean thinks his pulse is too fast to shoot steady and he’s engaging in a breathing exercise designed to get back into the ‘optimum’ range of stress. He cupped an unsteady left hand under the grip of the pistol and clicked the magazine release. Check the witness holes10Some metal-bodied magazines include holes in the side so you can see roughly how many rounds are loaded. This is most often done on pistols and other firearms where the magazine inserts into the grip. On a weapon where the magazine is outside the grip, these holes would allow dirt into the feed mechanism, which is never a good idea. But for those types of magazines, most modern weapons can accept magazines made with translucent polymer bodies, which serve the same function. — less than ten rounds, more than five. Great. Sean pushed the mag back in. One final click to confirm he was ready to do this.

  He was, so he did.

  His feet dug into the soft ground, and Sean unched sideways like a sprinter, clutching the pistol into his hand as he ran, ran, ran into the darkness after what he thought he had seen. He ran fast, no doubt, in a proficient left-right-left-right manner and with a steady breath. He ran because running toward danger had, in a way, worked out for him so far, and because tragedies are about people who can’t change.11This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course. The hamartia of a tragic protagonist can just as well be a singur fatal mistake that haunts them rather than an inherent character fw they fail to overcome. (At least that’s how it was told to me; other sources indicate that those are two distinct concepts in Greek tragedy.) Anyway, it is true for Sean and this is my excuse to bring the word hamartia into this story, so there. The running — which sted about three seconds, give or take a moment — wasn’t a particurly glorious thing and it didn’t make him ruefully reflect on his life up to that point. It didn’t make him reflect on anything else, either, ruefully or not. During the run, Sean truly and honestly thought about nothing.

  BANG BANG

  The ground rushed at him. His right arm refused to soften the nding. Sean didn’t topple or stumble so much as he just dropped right into the muck. Bog water spshed into his mouth and ran through the colr of his shirt. He rolled to the side, not by training but by reflexive thrashing, and as he spat and coughed and breathed and shouted all at once, he started thinking again. He thought this was all wrong. He’d been shot and this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He stared, stared at the twisty sideways picture of a figure boriously rising from the ground. And still nothing there! Just grass and snow and dirt and if he had just shot her through the darkness there wouldn’t have been anything to save her and why had she done this12Concealment isn’t cover. But it is concealment., why had she not continued to run through this godforsaken fucking swamp and why had she waited there, there of all the fucking pces where he could’ve shot her but he didn’t? Didn’t matter, he told himself. Didn’t matter at all. No more asking why. No more fuckups.

  Close the case.

  His right arm still refused to move so he patted his left hand over his chest, feeling for where the bullets had struck him. Anne had saved his life thrice over: given him the vest, shot him center mass and done it all with her .45, big and slow and easy to catch, retively. The bullet that would have gone through his heart had cracked his breastbone instead; he felt it stick in the vest. His hand crawled further, toward his right shoulder. He felt the vest give under his touch. Rough fabric turned to slickness. He breathed in. His fingers hurried forward through the blood. The bullet that would have gone through his shoulder bde…

  “Sean?” she called, drawing closer.

  The bullet that would have gone through his shoulder bde had only made it halfway through the tissue. Freak shot, that part of the vest wasn’t thick enough, but everything underneath was still roughly in its pce. He felt the bullet throb in the meat of his pectoralis major with every heartbeat. He was close enough to the end that he heard the devil. The devil told him to forget the pain, just long enough to get this done. The devil told him the bleeding wasn’t enough for a burst subcvian, so he wasn’t dead, not yet. Sean’s hand wandered down his stiff right arm and tried to seize his Beretta from his disobedient right hand. No good — couldn’t reach, couldn’t let go. No matter. The devil told him to forget the Beretta.

  “Sean?” she called again. Called him. All he had to do was hit her, hit her once and hit her good. His left hand went to his crossdraw holster, undid the snap there and finagled the revolver into his hand. Six chambers. Five shots. Sean gritted his teeth and swiveled his arm forward.

  BANG

  She had fired. Had hesitated less than he. But she had missed or maybe a warning shot that sprayed muck next to Sean had been her true aim or SHOOT HER!

  BANG BANG

  So loud right next to him when he pulled the trigger, both times. He wasn’t used to the recoil anymore. The revolver’s fsh was brief and bright. It tried to get away from him, but he wouldn’t let it go, not again. His finger found the trigger again, stiffened against it. He blinked, trying to get the muck or the night or whatever was between him and her out of his eyes.

  BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

  He lost track of what he was shooting and she was shooting, but the silence — the final, blessed silence — was his. He pulled the trigger one st time and it was heavy, a real workout to get it all the way back to the breaking point, and all that effort for a click. Silence from the other side. He looked for her, saw her…slumped over? Kneeling? Praying?

  “Sean?” she called one more time.

  What should he say? He said it by rolling onto his belly, pushing his gun hand against the marsh. With one good arm and his left foot dug deep enough into the muck for purchase, he got up to a knee. In response, Anne got to her feet, then Sean got to his feet, and they trundled through the dark toward each other like that. By the time they were ten paces apart, the darkness had welcomed them and let them see each other at their most pitiable. Sean looked on in disbelief to see no fresh bullet wounds on her. Maybe a hit on her vest, but nothing that would bring her down. Had the devil betrayed him or had he let the devil down? But then again, the way she stood — or rather, didn’t — made it all too clear that another injury would have hardly pushed the needle. She didn’t need to be killed, she needed to be persuaded she was already dead. And Sean? Well, he’d caught up to her sorry state in a hurry. Hot blood from his shoulder wound snaked its way underneath his vest and along his limp right arm. Breathing didn’t hurt because nothing did.

  “…draw?” Anne said. Every letter of the word rattled in her chest.“Fuck you,” Sean coughed. His sense of humor was as spent as his wheelgun. Fuck that, too. Lot of good that piece of shit did him. “You’re…you’re…come with me,” he said.“No,” Anne said. She swayed a bit, then a bit more, then she caught herself, bought another few seconds of standing steady on credit. Sean spat. No blood in his mouth, just mud and salt. It didn’t clear his lips, dribbling down his chin and onto the vest.“Come with me,” Sean said. “Come with me. I beat you. Come with…me.” He felt a shiver run over his neck, not quite all the way down his spine. A small shiver, he told himself.“No,” Anne said. She heaved and hacked, then sucked in new air. Tears ran through the muck on her face. “No!” she said. The bckened bde of the knife in her left hand wouldn’t have glinted, even if there was light. “Not…you. Not…anyone.” She heaved again. The only thing that came up was “Never.”

  Another shiver went up Sean’s neck. His right arm spasmed. He smiled like a winner.

  Sean and Anne didn’t end up standing opposite each other for much longer. The devil promised them both victory and they both rushed to cim it.

  She flung herself at him, only fumes left in the tank but still not stopping. Her left arm was raised, bde forward. His right came up with the Beretta and fired. Solid hit, center mass. Should have stopped her. Didn’t. If she was going to drop and die, it wouldn’t be alone. In her stumble, her knife sunk into his side and connected them. She pulled them both down into the mire. He pulled the trigger twice.

  The first was when he was going down. Just reflex. That bullet went into the swamp and sprayed them both with a little bckwater, no more. She rolled on top and pressed her elbow against his face. He swung the revolver in his off-hand. Nothing left there except its weight. He clubbed her across the face, pushed her back, came up gasping. Bright, fresh blood on her face, glinting in the sparse starlight. His Beretta went past her defense just as her Colt pressed against his ribs. Her trigger refused to budge.13Firearms are not close-range weapons and particurly not contact-range weapons. Put a semi-auto pistol right up against a target, chances are pretty decent that’s gonna push the slide out of battery — which should engage a safety in the gun and prevent it from firing. Should be pretty obvious why you don’t want guns firing out of battery, yeah?Anyway, if you still think you need your gun to fire even when you’re at point bnk, you can install what’s called a standoff device on your gun. This is a pte with a hole to accommodate the muzzle and an angled bracket that mounts to the frame. Once installed, it is physically impossible for the front of the slide to contact the target, thus solving the issue. A match-style compensator or other frame-mounted muzzle device will serve the same purpose. Either way, I expect its primary effects will be to a) serve as an uncalibrated barrel weight, b) make concealment more difficult and c) drain your bank account. But hey, it does look pretty cool. His trigger didn’t, but he hadn’t put the muzzle against her side. Another bang, another miss. She pressed down on him, her breath hot upon his cheek.14Old enough to remember Max Payne 2, young enough to think a reference is appropriate, that’s me. Sean gnced at her, searching for her. If all they had gone through those st few days together had changed her —

  It had.

  She reared up and drew her left hand close to her chest, then plunged the dark bde into him again. The metal went through his vest like a knife through Kevr15Most ballistic vests offer very little protection against bded or pointed weapons. For that, you want an anti-stab vest. Some vests do combine those functions, but at additional weight and bulk, of course., slipping between his ribs and puncturing his lung. Her knife had nowhere else to go with her weight on top of it. His mouth was open wide like a fish out of water, gasping without breathing. His arms spped against her burning sides, then fell into the muck.

  The echoes of the gunshots had faded, leaving only her behind.

  After a minute’s rest, Anne forced herself to look down. The muscles of Sean’s lips still twitched, eyes turning to follow her face even as his head turned, inexorably, to where gravity guided it, but none of that mattered anymore. Sean was dead and if not, as good as. Dying was easy. All you had to do was stop and Anne quite felt like stopping here. But instead she wished for the strength to pull the knife free and cut his throat, to end him decently, even if she could barely even raise herself off him. Where could she find that strength, though? He had taken everything from her. Before, when she was still on her feet, she had been clever enough to bme herself, but down here in the muck the only way was to look at him and hate him. No more thoughts to be wasted on how fair or unfair that was! No more justifications, no more debates, just the devil in her ear. The devil tore the knife free for her and the devil guided the knife as it plunged one st time, sinking into his neck. The devil smiled when more blood spurted on her hands. The devil bent her low, forced her so close to Sean that even dead, he might still hear her.

  “To hell with you,” she whispered in his ear.16Yeah, that was a ‘Fuck you’ until I realized that damning him would be so much worse coming from her, because she’d mean it.

  Then she crawled off him. Spent, bleeding and all alone, she no longer trusted herself to get to her feet without fainting. But she could drag her leaden body still and every inch forward was proof she would get though this, too. Had to be. Everything hurt and she told herself that was good, too. The bleeding in her side? She had bled plenty and made it this far. This cop couldn’t hold her. This swamp couldn’t hold her. This city couldn’t hold her. Yet the stars grew dimmer, the distant highway quieter. The headlights of her car, shining in the distance, cast the only light she could still see.

  She crawled toward that light and hoped the devil would show his own some kindness.