3
She shook Peter’s hand. It was big and warm and strong, and he didn’t squeeze too hard like some men. She wanted to crawl into the safety and shelter of that hand for the rest of her life.
Now he was half-turned away, eyes flicking from her to the line of traffic and back. “We should go. If he circles, we don’t want to be here.” He reached out and opened the passenger door of his truck. Heated air wafted out.
Suddenly she realized she was shivering. “What about my car?”
He looked at her orange Honda. “Easy to spot, easy to follow.” He gave her a diplomatic smile. “We’ll come back for it.”
She pointed at his truck. It was deep green with some kind of large wooden box built onto the back instead of the usual metal pickup bed. “That’s not exactly anonymous.”
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to grab a rental first thing.”
Eleanor, she thought. “I have to pick up my daughter.”
“June told me.” He put out a hand to help her into the truck. “We’ll talk on the way.”
He put on his blinker and pulled into traffic, then a moment later made a crisp U-turn and headed the opposite direction. “If your guy is circling back, he’ll be expecting us to go the other way.”
“He’s not my guy.” She put on her seat belt. The truck was cleaner inside than she’d expected. The seat cover was new and the painted metal was polished to a high shine. “How did you know he wouldn’t shoot?”
“I didn’t.” He unzipped his jacket and rapped his knuckles on his chest. “June bought me a top-quality ballistic vest a few years back. If your guy pulled the trigger, it would hurt like hell, but it wouldn’t kill me. Unless he was firing armor-piercing rounds, which civilians can’t get. And the odds are that most people would miss, even at that range. Adrenaline really winds you up, makes your hands shake. Takes a lot of practice to get past that.”
She noticed his hands weren’t shaking. He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pistol, then set it on the bench seat between them.
“You had a gun? Why didn’t you take it out and point it at him?”
He turned left on Lenora. “It would’ve made him feel threatened,” Peter said. “If somebody’s coming at you with a gun, and you’ve got a gun yourself, there’s really only one way that’s going to end. Besides, I could tell he wasn’t a pro.”
The shivering got worse. She wanted to curl up into a ball. But she was a journalist. She had questions. “How could you tell that?”
“The clown mask is an attention-grabber, totally amateur. And his sneakers wrapped in duct tape to keep the sole from flapping? Not the footwear of a professional.”
“And what kind of person would be a professional?” She needed him to keep talking, to keep her mind off what had just happened.
Peter’s eyes moved from the road to his side mirrors, then back to the road. “The pros are either former military or police, or someone who learned it on the street, like a gangbanger or cartel guy. Either way, an experienced killer would have been prepared for opposition. He wouldn’t have hesitated. The second I got out of the truck, he’d have pulled the trigger to put me down. That done, he’d have shot you. Instead, your guy was surprised. Then he backed up and ran.” He shook his head. “I’m just sorry he got away from me.”
Ever the journalist, she said, “You told him you’d killed a whole bunch of people. Is that true?”
He glanced at her. An emotion playing on his face that she couldn’t quite name. “I was a Marine lieutenant in Iraq and Afghanistan. For eight years, my job description was killing bad guys and protecting my people.”
She couldn’t stop shivering. He turned up the heater. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “You’ve had a bad moment. It’ll pass.”
She wrapped her arms around her knees, pulling them to her chest. Only the seat belt held her upright. She kept seeing the gunman’s strange, watery eyes above the fanged clown mask. The pistol in his hand. And she was frozen, defenseless. As if, in that moment, the veneer of civilization had been peeled away and she saw a different reality. For reasons she didn’t begin to understand, somebody wanted to kill her. And he’d come very close to doing it.
“Where’s your daughter’s school?” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Katelyn. Take a deep breath. Your daughter needs you. Where’s her school?”
That got her mind working again. “McClure Middle School. Queen Anne, First Ave West, between Crockett and Howe. Do you need directions?”
“No. Can you call your daughter and tell her to stay inside, somewhere safe, until we get there?”
She blinked. “Yes.” She uncurled herself and found her phone, then had an unpleasant thought. “You think that guy’s still out there.”
“Better to assume so.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirrors again. “I don’t see his car behind us, but we should still take steps to prevent him from harming your daughter.”
Her whole body clenched. Her voice sounded strangled, even to her. “You think he knows where she goes to school.”
He glanced at her, impossibly calm and steady. “I was trying not to say that out loud, but it’s possible. He knows where you live, right?”
