In the back bedroom, I left the window access to the rickety fire escape open—always good to have an additional egress, especially if neighbors responded to the sounds of gunfire by crowding the inner halls.
Nine oh one. Jittery. Not good. My own anxiety started to piss me off. Nerves? I’d been training and practicing for a fucking year. What good were nerves to me? So sorry, Mr. Killer of My Two Best Friends, but can we hold off on our confrontation for a minute, while I calm myself down? Want a drink? Want a Xanax?
Here, take two.
Fuck nerves.
I was a lean, mean killing machine.
God dammit.
Footsteps. Out in the hallway. Heavy and ringing. Thump. Thump. Thump.
My heart rate spiked. My black turtleneck constricted around my throat, and at the last second, I had to take my shaking left hand off my Taurus to wipe my sweaty palm on the leg of my jeans.
I’d locked the front door. Everyone did in this building. Now I heard the jangle of keys. A rasp of metal teeth engaging the first lock, then the second. Front door flung open.
Two hundred and eighty pounds of Stan Miller loomed in the entryway.
“What’s for dinner, bitch?” Stan boomed across the darkened apartment.
He sounded cavalier, almost like he was in a good mood.
So I shot him.
I PULLED LEFT. Don’t ask me how, don’t ask me why. But I fucking pulled my shot left. Doorjamb exploded, Stan dropped like a rock and rolled toward the kitchen, screaming. I cursed a blue streak and, through my shock and rage, realized now I was in for it, not to mention that if my firearms instructor J.T. ever heard about this, he’d kill me anyway and spare me the miserable pain of the twenty-first.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck!” Stan was yelling. “Where’s Tomika? What’d you do with Tomika?”
“Killed her!” I called back at him. “That’ll teach you not to pay your debts.”
(I was making this up. Precaution built into a precaution, right? Always gotta have plan B, and if I couldn’t kill Stan, plan B was to lead him to think that his family was dead. A man like Stan had to owe somebody something somewhere. It just figured.)
“You’re a girl,” Stan said. And just like that, he stood up in his kitchen. Apparently, being attacked by a girl didn’t scare him nearly so much.
So I shot him again.
This time, I hit his shoulder. He howled, dropped again.
I felt better about things.
Until good ol’ Stan popped back up and fired off four rounds in my general direction. This time, I dove for cover, cursing myself all over again. First two seconds. Battles are won or lost in the first two seconds. He’d been standing right there, lit up beautifully, 280 pounds of target. How the hell had I missed 280 pounds of target?
Dammit!
“Gonna hurt you,” Stan bellowed now. “Gonna find you, gonna hurt you. With a knife. Bad.”
I crawled behind the overstuffed recliner, leading with my gun, and peered out, trying to penetrate the gloom of the kitchen. Couldn’t see a thing.
Shit.
I took a second to get my bearings. Stan seemed to be doing the same, the apartment falling eerily silent. I strained my ears for sounds from the rest of the building. Neighbors yelling about gunshots, or banging the ceiling to say quiet the noise. Police sirens already screeching down the street.
Nothing.
Maybe 9 P.M. was too early for most residents of this building to be home yet. Or maybe, in a building where men routinely spent their evenings shooting beer cans off the fire escape, nobody noticed gunfire anymore.
I did. My ears were ringing, my heart pounding, my hands a shaking mess of adrenaline and fear. Even my stomach felt funny. Hollowed out, queasy, and butterfly-y. Shock, probably. Terror. Rage.
I tried homing in on the rage. Fear would get me killed. Anger was the only hope I had left.