Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“Catherine, go out to the Rover. You’re in the way in here.” Renee stepped down to point her gun at me. “You! Drop your gun! Now! Kick it under the table!”

I couldn’t risk a shot at her without hitting Catherine. I dropped my gun and kicked it under the kitchen table.

Catherine’s eyes were black holes in her white face. “Granny. You don’t understand. VI. came here to help me. She’s a friend.”

“And you don’t understand, Catherine. You’ve gotten involved in something too big for you right now.”

Catherine ducked under Renee’s arm and ran up the stairs. Her grandmother fired at me, a reckless shot that made me hit the floor. She ran after her granddaughter. By the time I had crawled under the table for my own gun and gotten back on my feet, Renee and Catherine were both at the top of the stairs.

I heard Benji scream, “No, I doing nothing, nothing to Catterine, not touching, you not shoot,” and Catherine shouting, “You mustn’t, you mustn’t shoot him, he’s my friend. Granny, no!” and then the gun sounded again.

I pelted up the stairs, but before I reached the top, Renee appeared in the stairwell head and shot down at me. Plaster fell on me, blinding me, and I flattened myself against the side of the stairwell. Squinting through the plaster dust, I could just make out Renee’s legs and the motion of her hand. I tried a shot. Her legs moved back, but she fired again. Crouching down, hugging the wall, I ran up the stairs, shooting twice to back her away.

Renee’s legs suddenly crumpled. Her gun clattered past me on the stairs. I climbed the last three steps uncertainly. On the upper landing, Geraldine Graham was standing over Renee, the Gabonese mask clutched in her arthritic hands. She was trembling, and blood oozed through the towel on her left foot, but she was smiling grimly.

“Look to the children,” she said.

Benji and Catherine lay in a heap of coats and blood. Flowers of blood spread petals around them. I didn’t know at first which one was wounded, so closely were they entwined, but when I knelt to feel them, Catherine was warm and Benji’s fingers were ice, his pulse a thread. He opened his eyes, said something in Arabic, and then, in English, added, “I seeing Granny before one week. She driving thing like tonight, thing not car, like tonight I seeing from window, she putting man in water.”

“Hush. I know you did. You hush now. Catherine, let go of him, I’m going to carry him downstairs and take him to the hospital.”

I pried her fingers from his cold side. “You bring the coats so we can keep him warm.”

I picked him up, a slight youth, a feather in my arms. “Hold on. You hold on to me, Benji.”

Catherine followed me, leaning against me so she could keep her good hand on Benji’s body. In the kitchen, I kicked Renee’s gun in front of me, tipping it into the snow on my way out. Before we reached the Rover, Benji was dead in my arms.

I longed for sleep more than I had wanted anything my whole life. I wanted a bath and a bed and oblivion, but instead I had the Eagle River cops and the Vilas County sheriff, as they tried to make sense of the senseless.

When Catherine and I returned to the house with Benji’s body, I laid him on the dining room table, a catafalque of sorts, a laying out in state. Catherine refused to leave him, even though she was shivering so violently that her hand couldn’t stay in place on Benji’s head.

I went to the living room for the blankets we’d wrapped Geraldine in earlier. When I brought them back to the dining room, Catherine had climbed up on the table beside Benji. She was cradling his head in her lap. I swathed her in blankets, but her shivering wouldn’t stop.

I took my cell phone from my bag and looped the mike around my neck. While I tracked down the local emergency services, I folded my arms around Catherine, trying to rub some warmth into her. By the time I was finally connected to the county dispatcher, the worst of her shaking had eased, but the room was filled with the sickly sweet scent of her fear, and her urine.

A shadow in the living room made me let go of her and run to the arched doorway. It was Geraldine, not Renee, drawing on her own formidable will to hobble down the stairs on her wounded foot. She looked from

me to Catherine shivering in her blankets, then limped over and draped her sable coat across the girl’s shoulders. I tucked it around Catherine as best I could. She wouldn’t move or look at me, but stared straight ahead, Benji’s head in her lap.

I’d seen a set of wicker chairs in one corner of the living room. I brought two of them over to the arch connecting living and dining rooms, so we could sit but still keep an eye on Catherine. I pulled over a coffee table for Geraldine to prop her foot on. She’d lost the towels I’d tied around her wound; blood oozed onto the glass tabletop.

“That was a terrible deed, shooting the boy in front of her own granddaughter,” Geraldine said, adding in a conversational tone, “I wasn’t able to kill Renee. What are we going to do with her when she revives?”

“Try to get our story in first,” I said grimly. “The law will be here soon, and she’s going to be spinning her line about Benji as a terrorist kidnapper.” “Was he a terrorist?” Geraldine asked.

“I think he was an orphan boy far from home who got caught in a war he didn’t know was going on. All he wanted to do was make money to help his mother and his sisters.” Tears pricked the back of my lids. I shook them off angrily-I needed my wits, not my emotions, for whatever lay ahead.

Geraldine and I sat silent, both of us exhausted. At one point, she said, “How odd Darraugh and Edwards will find it, to know their mothers have been fighting.”

I grunted, but didn’t move or speak until I heard Renee stirring on the upper landing. I got up, gun out, as she staggered down the front stairs, disheveled but haughty.

She looked past me to Geraldine. “You have a knack for hovering around my family when you are least wanted, Geraldine. You may leave my granddaughter to me now”

I felt my temper rising. “Renee, I don’t know if you’re insane or just giving a good impersonation, but a high-handed act isn’t going to work tonight. Catherine is in shock because she saw you murder Benjamin Sadawi in cold blood. We will not leave you alone with her.”

Renee looked at me loftily. “I thought you and that terrorist had kidnapped her; I shot him in the belief I was protecting her.”

“I should have hit you harder, Renee,” Geraldine said in her flutey

voice. “It brought me such satisfaction, I should have hit you forty years ago. Perhaps I could have beaten some sense into you. I understand what you’re doing; I understand you believe you can persuade a policeman and a judge of what you are saying, because you have the power and position of the Bayard name behind you. You think Victoria is a servant of no account who can be belittled and discounted the way my mother treated detectives forty years ago. But times have changed; detectives are sophisticated nowadays, and Victoria stands high in my son’s and my estimation. Very high. We are prepared to support her version of tonight’s events.”

“You can’t forgive me for marrying Calvin, can you?” Renee said, amused contempt in her voice. “After all this time, you still don’t understand that he was weary of your posturing and your neediness-and your aging body; he turned to me for relief from all those things.”

Geraldine smiled. “I’m the one he calls for when he’s frightened, Renee. Not you nor Kylie nor any of the others. Your staff may think he means you when he cries `Deenie,’ but I was always Deenie to him, from the time we first tried swimming together in the Larchmont pool when we were four.”