Steven James - The Bishop

“Kill him!” Tessa yelled.

He tightened his grip on her hair. She winced but refused to cry out, denying him the satisfaction of hurting her.

“Now, put down your gun,” he said to me. “Slowly.”

Sight-lines.

Angles.

If I could edge forward, drop to one knee as if I were setting down my SIG, I might be able to make the shot.

Do it.

“Okay.” I eased my finger from the trigger guard, held the gun loosely. “I am. Don’t hurt her. We can talk about this, but just let her-”

“Don’t insult me!” he roared.

He would either die tonight or go to prison for the rest of his life. He had to know this. He had nothing to lose by killing her. And if his goal was to make me suffer, he had everything to gain by squeezing the trigger.

Nothing to lose.

He has nothing to lose.

I paused. Tried another idea. “Stop hiding behind my stepdaughter. If you were half as brave as she is, you’d step out here and face me like a-”

“It’s not going to be that easy, Bowers.”

“It’s over. Let her go. Take me, if that’s what this is about.”

“No!” Tessa screamed.

He spoke to her then, softly, but I heard the words: “It would have saved us all a lot of trouble if your mother had just gone ahead with the abortion.”

“No!” She squeezed her eyes shut, crossed her right arm over her chest, hugged herself.

“Well, Patrick.” Sevren smiled. “Looks like I win.”

And everything that happened next happened all at once.

He jerked the gun from the side of Tessa’s head, angled it backward toward his own face; I swung my SIG into position and fired just as his gun went off.

Tessa’s finger still on the trigger.

Sevren’s body slumped to the ground.

I rushed to Tessa.

She was breathing heavily. Adrenaline. Fear.

The gun was still in her hand; I eased it from her grip, set it on the bed.

Unlike in the movies, people who are shot in real life don’t fly backward, they crumple; and Sevren’s body lay just behind Tessa. One entry wound was through his chin; my bullet had hit his forehead. Both bullets had exited the back of his skull, leaving a fist-sized hole behind. Gray matter and blood were splayed gruesomely across the wall. As I holstered my SIG and took Tessa in my arms I found that the blowback had left her hair damp with a spray of Sevren’s warm blood.

“Don’t turn around.” As I took her in my arms I gently wiped my hand against the back of her head, then onto my other sleeve. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

She stood stone-still. Said nothing.

An officer rushed through the doorway, weapon leveled at us.

“It’s over!” I hollered. “It’s over.”

He saw the wall behind us. The form on the floor. He lowered his gun and edged uneasily toward the body.

In a horror film Sevren might have somehow risen again to attack, to kill, but not here, not now; he was never going to rise again. Not ever.

I wanted to get Tessa out of the house, as far away from this room as possible. I hurried her down the hallway.

“My dad is dead.” The words came out like shards of glass.

“I’m so sorry, Tessa.” All other words escaped me.

We were halfway through the living room when she called to one of the officers entering through the front door. “The woman who was shot. Is she alive?”

He glanced at another officer who’d just arrived. The man shook his head. “I don’t know her condition, ma’am. They have her, though.” He pointed toward the window. “On an ambulance.”

We stepped outside.

One ambulance was pulling away from the house. I guided Tessa toward the other.

I expected her to start trembling, crying, but she did not.

“My ear,” she mumbled. She was shaking her head as if to get water out of her left ear, the one that had been only inches from the gun when it went off. “I can’t hear out of my ear.”

The fact that she was focusing on something relatively insignificant compared to what had just happened told me she was going into shock.

“It’ll be all right,” I said, promising something that was out of my control. A pause, then I went on, “The way I told you about your father. I needed to make you cry out, to distract Sevren. I’m sorry I was so blunt. Will you forgive me?”

She remained silent but nodded.

“Thank you,” I said.

The ambulance was just ahead. I still didn’t know if Ralph had found Chelsea Traye or if the bomb had gone off.

“I killed him.” Tessa’s voice was distant and chilled. It didn’t sound at all like the girl I knew. “I killed Sevren.”

“No. That’s what he wanted you to think. He was trying to shoot himself and make you think you did it, but I shot him. Muscle contraction in his hand made his finger squeeze. That’s what made the gun go off.”

“I killed him.”

“No.”

She shook her head. “I did it.” I wasn’t sure if I heard regret or a dark sense of satisfaction in her words and I didn’t know what to say, but this was clearly not the time to argue. “What matters now is that you’re safe.”

We made it to the ambulance, and two paramedics wheeled a gurney to Tessa for her to sit on. One of the men looked at the welt on her forehead. “We need to get you to the hospital.”

She was quiet as she took a seat, then lay down on her side.

“I’m riding with her,” I said.

He nodded, and as he and his partner rolled Tessa’s gurney into the back of the ambulance, I quietly asked him about Cheyenne. He told me that he’d heard she was in serious condition, but that was all he knew. “As soon as I hear more, I’ll let you know.”

“Quantico? The bomb?”

“It went off. Evidence Room 3a is gone. A few people didn’t quite make it out of that wing. Minor injuries, but I think everyone’s okay.”

I was thankful no one was killed or seriously injured, but if Evidence Room 3a was destroyed, it could negatively affect dozens of cases.

I wondered how Lacey had fared, hoped for Angela’s sake that she was okay.

“Oh,” he said, “they got to Chelsea Traye; she’s in custody. She was about to kill a woman, a prostitute. Agent Hawkins stopped her.”

Well, it was nice to at least hear a little good news.

In the ambulance now, I knelt beside Tessa. The police sirens outside had stopped, but the flashing lights hadn’t, and they twirled and flickered in the window beside me, blurring the night with colors it was never meant to contain.

I held her hand. “You’re going to be okay.”

She said nothing, just stared blankly at the side wall of the ambulance. A single tragic tear fell from her left eye. “My dad is dead.”

And when I saw the brokenness and rage in her eyes, I had a chilling thought.

Maybe Sevren had been right.

Maybe he had won after all.

Eight days later

Tessa and I were staying in the spare bedroom in Ralph and Brineesha’s basement so we wouldn’t have to be near the house where Sevren Adkins and Paul Lansing had died.

Right now Ralph was following up on a lead that Lebreau might be in the DC area, and Brineesha was shopping with their son Tony, so Tessa and I had the house to ourselves.

I checked my watch: 1:22 p.m.

Cheyenne had come home from the hospital at 1:00 and we were leaving in ten minutes to see her.

Tessa was downstairs getting ready.

This would be the first time they were going to see each other since the shooting.

I’d visited Cheyenne every day except for the two days Tessa and I were in Wyoming. Even though Cheyenne had invited Tessa to the hospital and had sent half a dozen notes telling her how sorry she was about her father, my stepdaughter had declined to see her and instead simply requested that I ask Cheyenne to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.