"He's wearing her like a shield," she says finally.
"Or like a crown. The department's already closing ranks around him. I have a funny feeling the town will too. By tomorrow, he might be untouchable."
"He was always untouchable." Her voice hardens. "That's the whole point of him. That's what he does. He makes himself the thing you can't question, can't accuse, can't touch."
"I know. We just need the evidence to point in his direction. He has a motive, the means, the opportunity, and a wife who filed for divorce and knew things a man like Vincent couldn't afford to have said under oath."
"Come home," she says.
"I will, but I need to stop—”
A shadow moves at the edge of my vision.
Not the living, sentient dark that breathes and watches and knows my name, but another kind. The human kind. The kind that means someone is standing in the narrow alley between my building and the adjacent laundromat, partially concealed by the dumpster, and they just shifted their weight.
I grab for my service weapon.
The sound reaches me before the pain does—a silenced crack, muffled but distinct, the particular flat bark of a round punching through a suppressor. The driver's side window explodes inward. Glass peppers my face, my neck, my hands. Something punches through my left shoulder with a force that slams me sideways against the center console, the impact so sudden and so total that for one surreal moment I think I've been hit by a car.
My mind disconnects, but I’m also aware of everything: the smell of copper, the way the shattered glass catches the streetlight, the wet heat spreading down my arm and across my chest, the burner phone sliding out of my hand, and Sera’s voice calling my name.
The second shot hits the headrest where my skull was a half second ago. I'm already falling sideways, not by choice but bygravity and the sudden inability to hold myself upright. I find the door handle and pull. The door swings open, and I spill out onto the asphalt, landing hard on my side, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a grunt that tastes like blood.
The parking lot is very bright. The asphalt is cold and wet under my cheek and smells like motor oil and rain.
I try to reach for my gun again, but my arm doesn't respond. My shoulder is a white-hot void where sensation should be, radiating wrongness in every direction. I reach across my body with my right hand instead, fingers scrabbling at the holster, but my fine motor control is dissolving, the adrenaline flooding my system making everything clumsy and loud and too fast.
Footsteps. Unhurried. The sound of someone who has all the time in the world walking across a parking lot toward a man bleeding on the ground.
A pair of boots stops three feet from my head.
I look up. The streetlight halos him from behind, turning his face into shadow, but I don't need to see his face. I know the silhouette. I know the posture. It’s the stance of a man who's spent most of his life wearing a badge and a gun and has never once doubted his right to use either.
"You should have left it alone, Eddie." Vincent's voice. "You should have just let it be Red Hands, but I can tell by the look in your eyes that you can’t."
I try to speak. What comes out is a wet gurgling sound.
He levels his gun at my chest, a silencer attached to the tip. He fires a third shot.
Pain ignites and turns the night sky white.
The boots turn and walk away. An engine starts somewhere behind me and pulls out of the lot. The sound of it fades down Birch Street.
“Eddie!” Sera shouts from my phone, which is inside my car. “EDDIE!”
Distantly, I wonder if my phone is capturing the sound of my breathing as it slows, and slows, and—
Chapter 16
Sera
"Eddie!"
His name leaves my mouth before my brain has processed the strange sound I just heard. It sounded like a gunshot.
The phone is pressed so hard against my ear that the speaker digs into cartilage.
I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing.
