Just as she positioned herself, resting the rifle on the top of the wall, almost braced for her holding action, a blur of two figures moved into the woods, fleeing.
Nikki’s body began to tremble but she kept close watch. Only when the sirens grew loud and she could see flashing lights did she let down. Still clutching her weapon, Heat leaned back against the wall, looking upward at the castle that had been her salvation.
* * *
Time had first slowed down and then stood still for Nikki. The ensuing minutes had no definition. And strangely, no sequence. A psychologist might say she didn’t shut down, she surrendered. After the tense ordeal of being hunted, shot at, evading, and then doing some hunting and killing of her own, Heat released control. For her it was the greatest luxury of survival.
Events lost their connective tissue and for Nikki Heat they kaleidoscoped. One moment, a face swam into view, reassuring her. Next, latex-gloved hands pried the rifle from her grip and slid it into plastic. Her own leather gloves came off, revealing palms wet with ice melt and blood. She found herself sitting in the back of an ambulance without recalling the journey. Did she walk there? Bushes parted in slow motion as her two assailants fled. Wait, that was before . . . She hallucinated Elmer Fudd standing there. Elmer Fudd with earflaps and jumbo binoculars hanging from his neck and snowflakes collecting on his eyebrows. Coffee in a cup rippled from her quaking hands. An EMT shined her penlight across her eyes and nodded, pleased. She pulled the blanket snug around her shoulders. Where did the blanket come from?
When the two shooting investigators from downtown joined her in the rear of the ambulance, Heat tossed back the rest of her coffee to spike her sharpness. She willed herself into the moment and walked them through the whole damn deal. They took notes and asked questions. Questions for clarification at first, and then the same questions asked a different way to see if her answers matched. She had been through this waltz before and so had they. Her answers were clear; they danced politely. But their goal was different than hers. They wanted to determine if she had killed according to policy. She wanted to capture the bastards, and this interview was something to get through so she could get back to work and do just that.
Elmer Fudd wasn’t a hallucination, after all—although he had a different name. The old man wearing the binoculars and the L.L.Bean hunter’s cap was actually Theodore Hobart. A birder who had spent the morning in the castle tower waiting for an eastern screech owl to return to its cavity in a tree near the Turtle Pond, Hobart witnessed the siege below and called 911 on his cell phone. Heat thanked him for saving her. He blushed and plucked the feather of a red-tailed hawk from the breast pocket of his Barbour coat and gave it to her. To Nikki it felt like a rose.
Zach Hamner pulled up in a black Crown Vic and strode to the suits from downtown. Heat watched them confer briefly, one of the detectives gesturing toward the pavilion and the other to the woods where a K-9 dog was leading his partner into the brush. On The Hammer’s walk to the rear of the ambulance he stared over at the body under the tarp. “Nice to see you made it, Detective,” he said, standing on the bricks and looking up to her.
“Feeling good about it myself.” Nikki folded her arms tightly inside the blanket, not much up for a handshake with the lawyer.
“The boys say it’s going to go down as a righteous kill. Your story checks out with the bird-watcher, too.”
Heat tried to like him but wasn’t having much success. She said, “So you can relax. No liability for the department?”
“None so far,” he replied, not reading any of her subtext. Nikki wondered where all the men with a sense of irony had gone in this city. “Sounds like you were quite the hero. That’s not going to hurt things for your promotion.”
“Given the choice, I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way,” said Heat.
He said, “I hear ya,” but he was looking away as he did, more interested in the form under the tarp.