“I shot Brandon Vargas thirteen months ago,” he said quietly, “behind a biker bar in Reno. We talked first. He smoked a cigarette, a Dunhill Red. Then he made a run for it, a reckless one. Tell you the truth, I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he wanted me to end things. Wanted me to stop him.”
A spectrum of emotions rolled across her face. The detail about the cigarette had been the clincher. Had Brandon been friend, family, or lover? If it was the former, he might be able to talk her down. If it was one of the latter two…
“I remember everyone I’ve killed,” Cooper said. “I didn’t go after Brandon because he wouldn’t join the DAR. I went after him because he started robbing banks and shooting people. In the last one it was a woman and her two-year-old daughter. The girl was in a stroller. It was an accident, but she’s still dead.” There was motion in his peripheral vision. People coming onto the platform. He desperately wanted to turn and look, but didn’t dare. “Yes, his childhood sucked. But I don’t think that buys him a license to shoot two-year-olds. Do you?”
Her eyes were large to begin with, and the mascara made them huge. He stared at them, trying to read her thoughts, and more than that, her next move, whether she was going to pull the trigger just because that was the plan. He could feel the seconds ticking away, and the motion in his periphery drawing closer, and then he could no longer take it, and he turned and looked at the steps.
Just as he had expected. Zane, thank you for being the traitorous opportunistic piece of weasel shit I thought you were.
He turned back to the Girl Who Walks Through Walls. She was on the train side of the platform. The roof would cover her from one direction, but not both. “Listen to me,” he said. “Take exactly two steps forward and face east. Do it now, or they’ll kill you.”
“Who?”
“Do it now.” She would listen or she wouldn’t. Either way, he had to focus. He turned.
Pouring out of both entrances to the east were men and women with neat hair and good shoes and the chest bulk of people wearing body armor. They carried shotguns and SMGs and pistols, carried them properly, aimed down and left, safeties off but fingers outside trigger guards. Three at the far stair and five at the near. Agents from Equitable Services. His former colleagues. There would be dozens more nearby, scores, covering every block. And for a little salt in the wound, both Roger Dickinson and Bobby Quinn were among them.
Ah well.
They were yelling, telling him not to move, standard law enforcement technique, disorient and overwhelm. Their guns coming up. The handful of civilians on the platform had turned to stone. Slowly, palms out to show he meant no threat, he raised his hands. Showed that he was complying. They fanned out in a precise tactical arc, giving every agent a clean shot. The barrels of eight guns were locked on his chest. No one pointing at his head, no hotshots. If he so much as twitched his finger, they would blow his chest across the platform. He could see it in the white tension of a forefinger curled on a trigger; in the unblinking fish stare framed by submachine gun sights; in the locked shoulder muscles and flared nostrils. Roger Dickinson’s lips were twisted into a snarl that looked almost like a smile. They wanted to shoot. They hated him, and they feared him.
All but Quinn. Quinn wasn’t sure. Cooper locked eyes with his friend and partner. Let the sounds wash over him, their yells and howls and the rumble of an incoming train, all of it static, like the burbling of a river, out of sync with the motion of their lips.
And then he used his toe to trigger the remote he’d jammed into the front of his shoe, and the flashbangs in the plastic shopping bag turned the world into a blazing roar.
Even facing east, with his back to them, the glare left spots in his eyes, and now static really was all he could hear. All of the agents in their textbook-perfect arc had been staring directly into eight million candelas worth of white-hot flare. They reeled back, hands going to eyes, weapons flailing.