Canfield tumbled backward, crashing into Carli’s cot and falling onto her side, grabbing reflexively at the wound in her neck. Krall’s gun flew from her live hand and his dead one, skittering across the floor through his pool of rapidly cooling blood, coming to rest almost directly between the wounded FBI agent and the wounded father.
Bill stumbled to his knees as the momentum from his adrenaline-fueled thrust caused his makeshift sword to smash onto the cement floor and clatter away. He scrabbled on his hands and knees toward Canfield’s gun, desperately trying to reverse direction before she could recover and lunge for the weapon.
Bill watched in something resembling slow motion as Canfield rolled off her side and moved toward her gun. She slipped and slid in the spilled blood of the I-90 Killer as her own blood spurted between the fingers of her left hand, which was clamped firmly but ineffectively over the massive wound in her neck. She was injured grievously, maybe mortally, but like Bill, was still operating under the anesthetic effects of adrenaline.
She was going to get there first. He had been marginally closer, the gun laying on the floor maybe a couple of inches nearer his body than hers, but his momentum was carrying him away from the weapon while hers, after bouncing off Carli’s cot, had propelled her toward it.
She dived through the blood on the floor, like Rickey Henderson stealing second base. The gash in her neck began hemorrhaging the moment she removed her hand to lift her weapon into a two-handed shooter’s grip, again, exactly as she had been taught.
Rolling onto her back, Canfield lifted the pistol and once again took aim at Bill Ferguson’s body, the body she had so recently caressed and pulled into her own. For the second time, she aimed center-mass and squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER 58
May 28, 4:31 p.m.
CARLI WATCHED THE WHOLE catastrophe develop with the dispassionate detachment of a shell-shocked war vet. She had lived through unspeakable horror in the last twenty-seven hours, and most especially in the last twenty minutes. Her head throbbed from the gash Krall had opened in it with the dirty steak knife. Her underwear was still damp after being pissed in several times, and her pants smelled like a baby’s diaper. The pee stains on her jeans were covered up by a new addition: blood stains, first from Krall’s obliterated skull, and now from the wound her dad had opened up on this crazy chick’s neck.
And now, she had to lie here on this disgusting mattress on top of this lumpy, uncomfortable bed that had to be fifty years old, and witness her dad’s murder, an act which would be followed, undoubtedly, by her own execution. Her dad had somehow found her, just as she had known he would, and had nearly rescued her, too, against all odds, turning the tables on the FBI woman, who he had thought was one of the good guys.
Her father struggled for the I-90 Killer’s gun, which lay on the floor of the basement like some kind of treasure. The idea that the fate of her dad and herself—whether they lived or died—rested entirely on who would be the first to reach a lump of metal not much bigger than her hand was absurd, but, of course, it was no more absurd than everything else that had taken place over the last day-plus.
Carli could see that her dad was not going to make it. He turned his big body, struggling against the effects of momentum, which had been his ally when he was swinging the stick, but which was now, most definitely, his enemy, and the woman was smaller and quicker despite being so badly injured.
The agent reached the gun first as Carli had known she would, blood spurting wildly from her neck, shooting out like a geyser an impressive distance before splattering to the floor. She rolled onto her back and sighted down the barrel at Carli’s dad, and Carli knew he was going to die. And then she was going to die.
And that was unacceptable. This whole impossible nightmare was unacceptable. Carli Ferguson bellowed, the sound rising from deep inside her chest where all the hurt and fear and especially anger were stored. She roared and yanked hard on the handcuffs, pulling them against the metal bed frame with all the strength she could muster from her 105-pound frame.
The pain exploded in her wrist from where the skin had been rubbed raw and the bones bruised by the handcuffs and by Martin Krall during their fight over the steak knife, and still she pulled. The bracelet had been weakened by Carli’s near-obsessive scraping against the cement wall behind her prison bed. She pulled, and it finally snapped.
Carli let out a guttural shriek of pain and rage and spun on her mattress—there was no time to get up—and swung her arm at Angela Canfield as the FBI agent pulled the trigger on Martin Krall’s gun. The razor-sharp edge on the broken, silver handcuff glittered menacingly as it sliced into Canfield’s throat, opening another gash to complement the one she had already suffered. Fresh blood immediately splattered from the new wound, an amazing amount of blood, joining its sister injury in spilling Canfield’s precious fluid, covering Carli, but this time Carli didn’t notice.
She watched in transfixed horror as her dad dove to the right, over her cot and onto the floor, at the exact moment the gun roared; he looked like an Olympic swimmer flying gracefully into the water to begin a race. Except there was no water on the other side, only concrete, and she could see his blood begin to flow as a bullet ripped into his leg.
The Glock bucked in Agent Canfield’s hand, and fire ripped from the barrel. She fell back against the cement basement wall next to the metal bed frame that had been Carli Ferguson’s prison until seconds ago. The agent’s left hand waved in the air, reaching up to stanch the new wound on her neck, but not making it that far. It fell to the floor with an audible thud as she lurched sideways and lay still.
Bill hit the floor on the far side of Carli’s cot and bounced once, his head striking the concrete wall with a sickening thud. His limp body came to rest in the corner. He kicked his legs once and was still. Blood oozed from the fresh bullet wound in his left leg.
And Carli screamed.
CHAPTER 59