Fuck, fuck, fuck, why couldn’t this have stayed boring?
Embarrassingly, David didn’t have to try too hard to look alarmed for Prentiss’s benefit. He hoped the shock on his face would make up for the fact that he wasn’t raising his hands. Harold followed his lead and didn’t either, which was good. McCormick should have this family give their other clients lessons.
“What can we do to end this peacefully?” David asked in a calm voice.
“Please, Prentiss,” Harold added, “we can talk about this.”
Prentiss didn’t waver.
“How about you put the gun down,” David said, “and we can all walk out of here.”
“Boston PD! Drop the weapon and put your hands up!”
David sighed and lifted his arms. So much for that plan.
Prentiss glanced nervously over his shoulder, where David’s former coworkers were helping the last of the scream-and-run crowd from the room. As soon as they were gone, the officers pointed their guns at Prentiss. Too bad they’d hit David, and possibly Harold, if they missed.
A bead of sweat rolled down Prentiss’s cheek, and David hoped like hell the dumb kid didn’t get himself killed. He needed help, and possibly life-long supervision, but not death.
David didn’t know what he’d do if he had to witness the life drain out of another body. Another kid. The idea scared him. The idea of what he might become absolutely terrified him.
The next time Prentiss glanced over his shoulder at the cops, David took advantage of his mistake. He ran straight at the kid, shoving the gun toward the empty half of the ballroom and wrapping Prentiss’s wrist in a death grip as David crashed into him.
They fell into a table with a jarring thud and the gun went off. David didn’t look to see where the shot had gone, didn’t shake his head to rid his ears of the ringing. He focused on getting Prentiss to the ground and the gun from his grasp. It took a matter of seconds, but David’s heart didn’t beat for any of them, only exploding back into a gallop when the police took over.
David rolled off Prentiss and sat on the floor for a minute, trying to catch his breath.
Fucking hell, that sucked.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, but Harold, of all people, crouched at his side and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. His client forced him up and into a chair and handed him someone’s glass of ice water. David drank it.
His former colleagues congratulated him on a job well done, and he nodded vaguely, wishing he was still standing at the side of the ballroom, bored witless.
The process that played out over the next few hours was familiar, but there was no comfort in it. He should have been separating curds from whey and stretching mozzarella, but he was stuck in the hotel ballroom, and then down at the station, in an endless reaffirmation that he’d made the right choice to leave all the goddamn paperwork behind. That shit was the wrong kind of boring.
Hopefully, his new gig would go back to being the right kind of boring really fucking soon.
Chapter Three
As much as Reese loved to travel and still had dreams of seeing more of the world, he fuckinghatedto fly. Just seeing the tiny airplane on the tarmac had been enough to tie his stomach into knots.
It wasn’t rational, it wasn’t sensible, it wasn’t helpful or reasonable, and god knew it wasn’t convenient, but it also wasn’t something he could control.
He and Hodges were the only passengers on the flight they’d chartered out of Moncton, jammed into seats that were clearly designed for people with far shorter legs. Reese owned at least three cars with larger interiors than this glorified tin can. And if that weren’t bad enough, Hodges passed most of the flight watching Reese with increasing alarm. Reese was ignoring him, perfectly aware that it couldn’t be good for his heart to beat this hard for so long. Sweat trickled down his face and stuck his shirt to his back, but he wasn’t flapping his arms to help keep the plane in the air, so as far as he was concerned, he was doing a fucking awesome job.
The plane dipped and juddered in another gust of wind, and Reese foolishly looked out the window.
Why were they so close to the ground?
The pilot’s shout answered that. “We’ll be landing in a few. It’s going to be a rough one—the wind is bad today.”
Reese could feel the blood draining from his face. He jumped when Hodges curled a hand over the fist he had clenched on his leg.
“I’m fine.”
Hodges nodded. “You are.”
“I’m not freaking out.”
