Daniel’s eyes met mine and he shrugged, one eyebrow going up ruefully. He looked lighter and looser than I had ever seen him; he almost looked relieved. We both knew: that bang had flown down the mike straight to Frank and Sam, inside five minutes the house would be surrounded by cops with guns that made Uncle Simon’s banjaxed revolver look like a kid’s toy. There was nothing left to hold onto. Daniel’s hair was falling in his eyes and I swear he was smiling.
“Lexie?” said Justin, a high incredulous breath. I followed his eyes, down to my side. My sweater was rucked up, showing the bandage and the girdle, and I had my gun in my hands. I didn’t remember pulling it out.
“What the hell ?” said Rafe, panting and wild-eyed. “Lexie, what the hell?”
Abby said, “Daniel.”
“Shh,” he said gently. “It’s all right, Abby.”
“Where the hell did you get that? Lexie!”
“Daniel, listen.”
Sirens, somewhere far off in the lanes; more than one.
“The cops,” Abby said. “Daniel, the cops followed you.”
Daniel pushed his hair out of his face with the back of a wrist. “I doubt it’s that simple,” he said. “But yes, they’re on their way. We don’t have long.”
“You need to put that away,” Abby said. “Right now. You too, Lexie. If they see those—”
“Again,” Daniel said, “it’s not that simple.”
He was right behind Justin’s chair, the high-backed armchair. It and Justin—petrified, staring, hands clamped on the armrests—shielded him to chest height. Above them was the barrel of the gun, small and dark and wicked, pointed straight at me. The only clear shot I had was a head shot.
“She’s right, Daniel,” I said. I couldn’t even try to take cover behind a chair, not with all these civilians in the room. As long as he had the gun on me, it wasn’t on them. “Put it away. How do you think this is going to end best? If the police find us all sitting here peacefully waiting for them, or if they have to bring in a full SWAT team?”
Justin tried to get up, feet scrabbling limply at the floorboards. Daniel took a hand off the gun and shoved him down, hard, into the chair. “Stay there,” he said. “You’re not going to get hurt. I got you into this; I’ll get you out.”
"What do you think you’re doing?” Rafe demanded. “If you have some idea about all of us going down in a blaze of glory, you can stick it—”
“Be quiet,” said Daniel.
“Put down yours,” I said, “and I’ll put down mine. OK?”
In the second when Daniel’s attention went to me, Rafe made a grab at his arm. Daniel sidestepped, fast and neatly, and elbowed him in the ribs without ever taking the gun off me. Rafe doubled over with a rough whoosh of breath. “If you do that again,” Daniel said, “I’ll have to shoot you in the leg. I need to get this done and I don’t have time to deal with your distractions. Sit down.”
Rafe collapsed on the sofa. “You’re insane,” he said, between painful wheezes. “You have to know you’re insane.”
“Please,” Abby said. “They’re coming. Daniel, Lexie, please.”
The sirens were getting closer. A dull clang of metal, booming off the hillsides: Daniel had closed the gates, and someone’s car had just rammed them open.
“Lexie,” Daniel said, very clearly, for the mike. His glasses were slipping down his nose, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I was the one who stabbed you. As the others will have told you, it wasn’t premeditated—”
“Daniel,” Abby said, high and twisted and breathless. “Don’t do this.”
I don’t think he heard her. “The argument broke out,” he told me, “it turned into a fight, and . . . honestly, I don’t remember exactly how it happened. I had been doing the washing up, I had a knife in my hand, I was terribly upset at the thought that you wanted to sell your share of the house; I’m sure you can understand that. I wanted to hit you, and I did—with consequences that none of us ever, for one moment, could have foreseen. I’m sorry for any and every wrong I did you. All of you.”
Screech of brakes, rush of pebbles scattering; the sirens, howling and mindless outside.
“Put it down, Daniel,” I said. He had to know: that I only had a head shot, that I couldn’t miss. “It’ll be OK. We’ll sort everything out, I swear we will. Just put it down.”
Daniel looked around at the others: Abby poised ready and helpless, Rafe hunched glaring on the sofa, Justin twisted round to stare up at him with huge frightened eyes. “Shh,” he said to them, and put a finger to his lips. I had never seen that much love and tenderness and incredible urgency in anyone’s face, ever. “Not one word. No matter what.”
They stared at him. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Really, it will. It’s going to be fine.” He was smiling.
Then he turned to me and his head moved, a tiny private nod I’d seen a thousand times before. Me and Rob, eyes catching across a door that wouldn’t open, an interview-room table, and that almost invisible nod passing between us: Go.
It took so long. Daniel’s free hand coming up in slow motion, a long fluid arc, to brace the gun. An immense underwater silence filling the room, all the sirens had fallen away, Justin’s mouth was stretched wide but I couldn’t hear anything coming out; the only sound in the world was the flat click of Daniel cocking the revolver. Abby’s hands going out to him, starfished, her hair swinging up. I had so much time, time to see Justin’s head going towards his knees and to swing my gun down to the chest shot opening up, time to watch Daniel’s hands tightening around the Webley and to remember what they had felt like on my shoulders, those hands, big and warm and capable. I had time to recognize this feeling from so long ago, remember the acrid smell of panic off Dealer Boy, the steady rush of blood between my fingers; the realization of how easy it was, bleeding to death, how simple, how effortless. Then the world exploded.
I read somewhere that the last word on every crashed airplane’s black box, the last thing the pilot says when he knows he’s about to die, is “Mammy.” When all the world and all your life are ripping away from you at the speed of light, that’s the one thing that stays yours. It terrified me, the thought that if someday a suspect got a knife to my throat, if my life shrank to one split second, there might be nothing left inside me to say, no one to call. But what I said, small in the hair-thin silence between Daniel’s shot and mine, was “Sam.”
Daniel didn’t say a word. The impact sent him staggering backwards and the gun dropped from his hand, hit the floor with an ugly thud. Somewhere broken glass was falling, a sweet impervious tinkle. I thought I saw a hole like a cigarette burn, in his white shirt, but I was looking at his face. There was no pain on it, no fear, nothing like that; he didn’t even look startled. His eyes were focused on something—I’ll never know what—behind my shoulder. He looked like a steeplechaser or a gymnast, landing perfectly out of the final death-defying leap: intent, tranquil, gone past every limit, holding back nothing; certain.
“No,” Abby said, flat and final as an order. Her skirt fluttered, gay in the sunlight, as she leaped for him. Then Daniel blinked and crumpled sideways, slowly, and there was nothing behind Justin except a clean white wall.