“Pull the trigger and find out,” he urged.
Pull the trigger and she’d lose her soul. Finally. Irrevocably. That’s what Cameron had wanted her to learn.
Bud read the thought on her face and allowed the tiniest of smiles to form on his lips. A triumphant glitter sparked his eyes. “You can’t do it, Max.”
“Won’t do it.” The difference of choice. She pulled in her aching arms, cradled the loaded gun against her breast like a child. “You aren’t worth it.” His cold flesh brushed her cheek. “Get your hand off me. And get out.”
He tacitly agreed to the first by dropping his hand to his side. “The win is too easy, Max. Will you shoot me in the back?”
“I’m going to let you think about it while you walk away.”
Tell him to take my gun with him.
“Are you crazy?” she snapped without thinking.
The air moved as Bud backed away, beyond the beam of the flashlight. He was nothing more than a dark shadow, a voice. “Maybe I am crazy, Max.”
Trust me. Make him take the gun.
Trust me. The same words she used on Witt, the same he’d used on her. She tried to grasp all the ramifications, but couldn’t. Her head ached, and her eyes teared with indecision.
Karma, Max. There’s a plan for BJ, too. God’s plan.
God hadn’t been doing so hot in a while and certainly not for her. She opened her mouth, snapped it shut, then open again.
Bud still held his hands stiff and away from his sides, like a scarecrow. “You look like a fish, Max. Get whatever it is off your chest, and I’ll be on my way.”
It started with a splutter, as if the words were forced from her lips. “T ... take the gun with you.”
He raised one brow and gave her a delighted smile. Bending at the knees to search the concrete floor with his hand, his gaze never left her face. “What if I turn the gun back on you, Max?”
She trained hers on him once more. “Then it’s self-defense when I shoot you. A whole new ballgame.”
His fingers found the metal barrel. “I can still pin Dennis’s death on you. I can still bring you down another day.”
She didn’t refute it. She repeated Cameron’s words. “Karma. What goes around, comes around. In the end, you’ll get yours.”
He rose, keeping the gun down. “I doubt it. You’ve foiled me again, Max. We’ll live to play the game tomorrow.”
“Go,” she whispered, the temptation to shoot gnawing at her.
“I’d salute you, Max, but you might think I’m pointing the gun at you and shoot.”
“Get out,” she told him. “While you still can.”
She turned slightly, reached back for the flashlight and pointed it at the floor beside him. Bud followed the trail of it amongst the dead machinery. Max’s heart pounded with the need to run after him, to end it no matter what the cost, even if it meant her soul.
When he was at the edge of the entryway, she clicked the light off and stood frozen in the darkness. He turned, silhouetted in the light of the moon, for a last lingering look.
Then he was gone.
Christ, she was a fucking idiot. The flashlight flew from her fingers as she ran for the door. Tripping without falling, she slammed her knee into metal, forcing herself on despite the pain.
A shot rang out before she made it to the doorway.
Without caution, she flung herself out into the night.
Bud Traynor lay on the ground beside the Rolls, a dark stain on the concrete beneath him. Cameron’s gun rested in his hand.
Bootman stood beside him, the gun he’d used to kill Bud now aimed at Max’s forehead.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was too damn anti-climatic, even with a gun in her face.
Bud Traynor was dead. His eyes wide and staring, blood seeped into the cracks in the concrete beneath him. She didn’t need to touch him to know. She didn’t need to hold a mirror in front of his face to make sure he wasn’t breathing.
Dead.
Max stared at Cameron’s killer, at both his killers, and the gun. She was less than five feet from them, and her world view narrowed to those five feet.
She should have been scared, but numbness dulled everything beyond her physical senses.
The scent of coppery blood at Bootman’s feet and old blood on his hands. An acrid odor, the spent bullet. The stench of unwashed clothes, an unwashed body, decaying leather boots, Cameron’s blood still marking them. Moonlight or streetlight gleamed on Bootman’s now bald head and on the barrel of his gun. His breath rattled in his throat as if he’d smoked too many cigarettes or he was dying of cancer. Two years of dissipation had destroyed his angel’s face. A rock dug into her soul, bitterness swelled her tongue, the inside of her cheek stung with her bite, and the gun she held two-handed, pointed at Bootman’s chest, weighted her down like lead.
She thought of his cold, barren eyes when he’d shot Cameron in the head, the rabid glitter of them as he’d dragged her from that last glimpse of her husband.