Emma’s mouth twists. ‘You need that “special someone”.’
Kirke blinks, looks suddenly younger than his age. ‘That’s right. Someone who will take away all your pain, who’ll be beside you always. Someone just for you.’ Kirke’s lips quiver, but he resurrects his smile. ‘And you are that person for me. Although your hair is very short now. That’s not right. We’ll let it grow for a while. You’ll be back to yourself in no time.’
Emma looks at him, at this man they’ve chased all over Pittsburgh. This man who is the root of all this death and horror. She feels overcome with a new weariness. There’s a seemingly bottomless reserve of these grasping, hungry men. These pathetic, selfish men, who feel entitled to take what they want with no regard for anyone else, and without consequences.
She knows them so well, and she doesn’t want to anymore.Doesn’t want to listen to their bullshit. Doesn’t care about their psychology and their monologues, their histories or excuses. Like Linda, she just wants them gone.
And she remembers: like Linda, she has survived. Sometimes she thinks her survival has been the result of strength, and courage, and tenacity – all the good, virtuous foundations for survival. But now she thinks maybe she has survived out of pure spite. Becausefuck Huxton. Fuck him. He doesn’t get to dictate to her from the fuckinggrave. She can be happy if she wants to be. She can live. She can be free.
Travis was right – she is a fucking force of nature. She is the maelstrom. And she is mighty.
‘Actually, Peter,’ Emma says, ‘I think I’m back to myself already.’
And she steps forward and swings left fast and hard, with her entire body weight, smashing the videotape in her hand into Kirke’s gun.
His arm goes wide, knocked away as the tape’s plastic guts splinter. Kirke cries out as his hand loosens on the gun, looks horrified as the tape flies, smacks into the mezzanine railing, falls to the floor in a tangle of magnetic spool.
Emma reacts on instinct sharpened by adrenaline. She grabs his shoulders, knees him hard in the balls. Kirke makes a strangled cry, drops his gun, and doubles over. Emma spins and does something she’s had a lot of practice at – sheruns.
Downstairs – find the revolver – shoot this bastard.Her feet clatter on the wide wooden stairs. The sound of Kirke cursing. She jumps a step. His voice gets louder. A booming shot over her head, and sheducks, screams a little.Okay – so his gunisloaded.She keeps going, almost tripping, moving fast.
She leaps down the last steps to the concrete, careens around the banister. There, ahead – the canvas pile, beside a rolled-up carpet. She stumbles onto the pile, stamps on the canvas, scanning for the Model 13 in the gloom.Where is it? Where is it?Not here.
She hears a roar from above, Kirke staggering to the stairs. He might not aim to kill, if he wants her that bad. Does she want to take that bet, though? There’s not much time.
She drops to her knees, digs between the canvas and the carpet roll, fingers scraping on concrete.Down here? Oh my fucking god, WHERE IS IT?Nothing, nothing. She gets up and spins in place, hands wide and desperate.
Out of the darkness, a new voice. ‘Are you looking for this?’
Emma’s head jerks up.
Simon Gutmunsson is leaning on a mezzanine support pole, tall in his blood-spattered blue scrubs and white long-sleeved shirt, holding her gun.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Her mind skids to a stop.
She stumbles back, her mouth open on a gasping inhale. She is dreaming with her eyes open. She is having a psychotic break. Simon Gutmunsson is in Allegheny County Jail, not standing real in front of her, dangling her gun by the trigger guard.
‘Hello, Emma.’ He grins.
The sights and sounds and smells of the building around her fade out to nothing. All Emma can see is Simon Gutmunsson’s terrifying blue eyes, the spill of his white hair, his crisp jawline lit by the moon through the skylight high above, the rest of him in shadow.
Emma feels her eyes go round. And she does what any startled prey animal would do.
She pivots on the spot andbolts.
Heedless of what she’s running back into, every atom caught up in a blind shriek of panicked horror, she doesn’t even see Peter Kirke in front of her. He doesn’t have a chance to raise his gun and aim before she barrels into him, she’s on top of him, crying out, pushing him to the floor.
Kirke falls backward with a yell, and Emma doesn’t hear that either. She climbs over him, the soft give of his flesh only vaguely registering in her senses as she scrambles over him, and off, and she’s gone.
Cawing in her head and a great clanging of bells –Simon Gutmunsson, Simon Gutmunsson. She needs toget away, get awaynow, she’ll plunge through brick walls if she has to, the obstacles in the shed are nothing, nothing. She’s bouncing off them, tripping over them, her breaths panting loud, her skin alight.
Two cracking booms inside the shed and Emma doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter, she’s sprinting for the front exit. Then her left leg collapses under her and she sprawls, slides on concrete, colliding with a box near a stack of bricks and spinning in the dust.
Even then, the pain doesn’t sink in. Her arms still scrabble on grit, she still tries to heave herself up, she’s gasping, her heart pounding out of her chest. But her leg doesn’t work at all, and she’s reduced to crawling to the bricks. The fire that started in her skin is spreading, whirling, concentrating in her thigh. She feels it now like the aftermath of a punch.
Kirke shot me. That stupid asshole shot me.The awareness arrives like an echo of the shot itself, peaking and reverberating. Emma grabs her leg and it’s sticky under her hands, warm liquid flowing over her fingers. The wound is a long, open gouge on her outside thigh – she presses her hand against it. That’s not going to work. She rips off her belt and cinches it around her thigh. The pain makes her hands shake. Slumped against the bricks, she can see the two figures by the mezzanine pole only twenty feet away.
