Hugh felt his throat tighten. He did not want George talking about Wren. He didn’t even want himthinkingabout her. He risked a peripheral glance; she was maybe halfway to the command center.
“You keep saying we’re not that different,” George continued. “But you don’t really believe that.”
No matter what Hugh had said to gain George’s trust, he was well aware that there was and always would be a seminal difference between them, and it had to do with morality. Hugh would never take a life because of his own beliefs.
He realized with a tiny shock that exact conviction was what had brought George here today.
“George, this can still end well,” Hugh said. “Think of your daughter.”
“She’ll never look at me the same after this. You don’t get it.”
“Then make me understand.”
He expected George to reach for him, to pull him back into the clinic, where he could barricade the door and use Hugh as a bargaining chip. Or kill him.
“All right,” George said.
The twilight was bleeding, it was the seam between day and night. Hugh saw the gun move. He reached for his pistol, sheer habit, and remembered that he was unarmed.
But George’s gun was no longer pointed at Hugh. It was aimed at Wren—still twenty feet shy of the tent—a moving target Hugh had arrogantly believed he could keep safe.
—
WHEN HIS DAUGHTER WAS YOUNGER,George had read to her from the Bible, instead of fairy tales. Some stories, he knew, just don’t have happy endings. Better for Lil to understand that love was about sacrifice. That what looked like carnage, from a different angle, might be a crusade.
We are all capable of things we never imagined.
Well, Detective,he thought.You asked me to make you understand and I did.You and I, we’re not that different.
Not the hero and the villain, not the pro-life activist and the abortion doctor, not the cop and the killer. We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.
He wished he could tell his daughter that he realized this, now.
He pulled the trigger.
Four p.m.
AFTER HOURS OF TALKING WITH THE SHOOTER OVER A SECURE LINE,Hugh had been lulled into complacency. He had mistakenly assumed that it was possible to reason with a madman.
But then there had been another gunshot, and Hugh’s only thought was of his daughter.
When Wren was two, he had taken her along when he went down to fix a little dock that sat out behind Bex’s property, on the edge of a weed-choked pond. He was hammering treated wood into place while she sat on the grass, playing with a toy her aunt had given her. One minute she had been laughing, chattering to herself, and the next there was a splash.
Hugh hadn’t even thought. He jumped off the dock into the water, which was so murky and clogged that he couldn’t see a foot in front of him. His eyes burned as he struggled to spot anything that might be Wren. He dove over and over, his hands outstretched and spinning through weeds, until finally he brushed against something solid. He broke through the water with Wren wrapped in one arm, laid her on the dock, fitted his mouth against hers, and breathed for her until she choked up the swamp.
Hugh had screamed at Wren, who’d burst into tears. But his anger was misdirected. He was furious at himself, for being stupid enough to take his eyes off of her.
There had been a gunshot, and Hugh was in that muddy pond again, blindly trying to save his daughter, and it was all his fault.
There had been a gunshot, one that struck his sister, and he hadn’t been there.
There was a gunshot, and what if that meant he was too late, again?
Captain Quandt was immediately at his side. “McElroy,” he said. “There’s active gunfire. You know the protocol.”
The protocol was to engage rather than wait and suffer the loss of more victims. It was also risky as hell. When gunmen felt threatened, they started panicking, firing at random.
Had he been Quandt, he might well have made the same call. But Hugh hadn’t yet confessed to Quandt that his own child was inside. That this wasn’t random at all.
