Evi Burke was sobbing, her hands trembling violently as she held the barrel of the Glock to the temple of the man who held a knife to her daughter’s throat, the man who might have murdered her husband for the sole purpose of getting her to blow his brains out.
Nikki calculated her odds of being able to get her second weapon out of her ankle holster in the split second she would have when he realized the gun to his head wouldn’t fire. She had set the safety.
“Do it!” he screamed. “I’ll kill her!”
“Mommy!”
Evi closed her eyes and braced herself.
WHOP, WHOP, WHOP, WHOP.
The police chopper swung in close and flooded the room with stark white light that struck the assailant in the face, blinding him.
“Evi! Run!”
Head down, Nikki exploded forward. With her left hand she shoved Mia Burke to the side as she brought her right knee up into her tormentor’s face. Momentum carried her forward. She ducked a shoulder and rolled, coming back up to her feet in a crouch, ready to block his attack.
He grabbed the knife off the floor as he turned over and came up onto his knees again, blood gushing from his broken nose.
Expecting him to come at her, Nikki went for the gun strapped to her ankle.
She pulled it free and brought it up, shouting, “Drop the knife! Drop it!”
He didn’t drop the knife.
He didn’t come at her.
He plunged the blade into his own stomach, screaming.
*
“JESUS H. CHRIST, TINKS. I let you out of my sight for five minutes and suddenly you’re freaking Rambo. Or is it Rambette?”
Kovac. Nikki looked up as he came into the bedroom, parting the sea of SWAT uniforms milling around the doorway like some kind of film noir Moses in a trench coat and fedora. Taylor followed him, his handsome face set in stern lines as he scanned the room, zeroing in on the dead guy lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
“That’ll be Wonder Woman to you, Kojak,” Nikki said, ridiculously relieved to see him. It made no sense for him to be here, but she didn’t care.
Her head was spinning. Everything had gone in fast-forward from the moment she moved on the assailant. He had plunged the knife into his stomach and collapsed to the floor, and then SWAT was charging in, and paramedics, and the room was filled with light and noise, and commotion.
“You leave my squad, hijack my suspect, and solve a one-man crime wave while saving a mom and her kid,” Kovac said. “Wonder Woman it is.”
He looked down at the dead man and sighed.
“Your suspect?” Nikki asked, confused. “Who is he?”
“Charlie Chamberlain,” Taylor said, squatting down beside the body.
“He came here to die,” Nikki said. “He wanted Evi Burke to kill him. I don’t understand any of it.”
She heard a little tremor in her voice. The aftermath of the adrenaline dump. Clear as a bell in the midst of the crisis, now she felt the delayed surge of confusion and fear. So many things could have gone wrong. Mia Burke could have been killed. Evi Burke could have been killed. She could have been killed.
“But you’re okay?” Kovac asked.
“Sure,” she said, automatically, as if it was that simple. She looked down at herself. Her hands and clothes were covered in the dead man’s blood. Her hands were trembling. She had gone to him as he lay on the floor, dying. He had bled out before the SWAT team even made it up the stairs. There was nothing left for the paramedics to do but cart his corpse to the morgue.
“He must have hit an artery,” she murmured. “It happened so fast.”
Kovac wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brotherly squeeze. “Let’s get you out of here, Wonder Woman. You’ve got a date with a shitload of paperwork downtown.”
Nikki leaned into him, grateful for his presence and his friendship. “You always know just what to say to a girl. And here I was thinking you didn’t care anymore.”
His mouth turned up on one corner in his trademark sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t let you off that easy, Tinker Bell. Let’s go,” he said, turning her toward the door. “I’ll even buy the coffee.”
48
“I never hated him,” Evi said quietly. “I’ve always been ashamed of that.”
They sat in a private meeting room at the Hennepin County Medical Center, a drab gray room with drab gray modern furniture, and a wall of glass that overlooked a courtyard several stories below, where snow was accumulating on the trees and bushes. Just down the hall in the ICU, Eric lay sleeping. His condition was stable.
“I shouldn’t need to tell you it wasn’t your fault,” Detective Liska said gently. “You were a child. He was an authority figure. Consent was moot.”
“It was nobody’s fault,” Evi said, knowing her colleagues would have pounced on her for her answer.