Steven James - The Bishop

Saturday, May 17

Patuxent River State Park

Southwest Maryland

53 miles north of Washington DC

Spring, but still cold.

9:42 p.m.

Officers Craig Walker and Trevor Meyers rolled to a stop in front of the squat, paint-peeled home of Philip and Jeanne Styles, the only house on the vacant county road winding around the state park.

They exited the cruiser.

A few dogs barked in the distance, but the forest behind the house swallowed most of the night noise, so apart from the muffled shouting coming from inside the home, the evening was silent and dewy and still.

Craig ascended the porch’s crumbling steps, Trevor at his heels. He tried to distinguish the words of the people hollering inside. Tried to catch the gist of the argument.

After a moment Trevor cleared his throat. “Aren’t you gonna knock?” He’d told Craig earlier in the day that he liked to be called Trev, of all things. How nice.

“Easy, Tonto.” Even though Craig had only been on the force five years, he’d already dealt with more than his share of drunk husbands and battered wives. “Domestic disturbance calls are the worst.”

The voices inside were loud but indistinct.

“You been called out here before?”

“No.”

Craig almost told him that he’d heard this guy, Styles, had a history of spousal abuse but then remembered that Trevor-wait, Trev -had been in the car with him when the dispatch call came through.

More shouting from inside the home. Two voices: one male, one female.

Craig opened the screen door and rapped on the wooden one. “Mr. Styles.” He made sure he called loud enough so that anyone in the house would be able to hear. “Sir, open the door. It’s the police.”

“Is that him?” the man inside the house shouted. “That the guy you’ve been-”

“Stop it!” Her voice was shrill, frantic, filled with fear. “Get away from me!”

Craig shouted, louder this time. “Mr. Styles, open the door!”

The man: “Put that down, you-”

Craig Walker unsnapped the leather holster holding his weapon and gave one final warning. “Open the door or we’re coming in!”

The man: “Gimme that thing.”

“Stop!”

And then.

A shotgun blast.

Splitting open the night.

Craig yelled for Trevor to cover the back of the house, cover it now! But then the words were mist and memory and he was only aware of the doorknob in one hand and the familiar feel of his Glock in the other as he threw open the door and swung his gun in front of him.

Stepped inside.

No overhead light, one lamp in the corner. A smoldering fireplace. A plaid couch, a green recliner.

And a woman on the other side of the room, trembling, shaking. A Stoeger 12-gauge over-under shotgun in her hands.

Craig leveled his weapon at her. “Put down the gun!”

A man was lying on the floor six feet from her, his chest soaked with blood, his feet twitching sporadically. He coughed and then tried to speak, but the words were garbled and moist and Craig knew what that meant.

“Ma’am! Put down the shotgun!” Craig had never drawn on a woman before and felt his hands shake slightly.

She wore a pink housecoat. Her face was smeared with tears. She did not lower the gun.

“He was gonna kill me.” They were frantic, breathless words. “I know he was this time-he said he was gonna kill me.”

The man on the floor sputtered something unintelligible and then stopped making sounds altogether.

Where’s Trevor!

“Put it on the floor, Mrs. Styles. Slowly. Do it now.”

At last, staring at the man she’d shot, she began to lower the shotgun. “He hit me. He was gonna kill me.”

“Okay,” Craig said, “now set down the gun.”

She bent over, a shiver running through her. “This wasn’t the first time.” She let the gun slip from her hands. It dropped with an uneven thud onto the brown, threadbare carpet. “He liked to hit me. He said he was gonna kill me this time. I know…” Her words seemed to come from someplace far away. Shock. Already washing through her.

“Ma’am, you need to step away from the gun.”

“The gun went off.” She stood slowly. “I didn’t want to hurt him, but it just went off.” She took two unsteady steps backward.

“Is there anyone else in the house?”

She shook her head.

As she backed up, Craig, weapon still drawn, carefully approached the gunshot victim to see if the man still had a pulse.

But as he bent down, the woman shrieked and he glanced at her for a fraction of a second, only that much-a tiny instant-but that was all it took.

By the time he’d looked back at the body, the man had rolled toward the shotgun, snatched it from the floor, and aimed it at his chest.

And fired.

The impact of the bird shot sent Craig reeling, tumbling against the couch. He tried to raise his hand to fire his own weapon, but his arm wouldn’t obey. The room dimmed, and for one thin moment he was aware of all of his dreams and memories, running together, merging, collecting, descending into one final regret for all the things that he would leave forever undone.

And then, all of his thoughts folded in on themselves, dropping into a deep and final oblivion, and Officer Craig Walker crumpled motionless and dead onto the tattered carpet beside the plaid sofa in Philip and Jeanne Styles’s living room.

She saw the man she’d fallen in love with, the man she’d stuck with through everything, the man whose baby she was carrying, pull the trigger.

Shoot the officer.

Rise to his feet.

Swing the gun to his hip.

Then she heard the smack of the back door banging open and saw him pivot and fire at a second cop.

This cop managed to pull the trigger and shoot a hole in the floor beside his foot as he dropped in an awkward heap against the wall, dead by the time he landed. The pellets had hit him in the face, but you couldn’t tell it had ever been a face. All that remained was a blur of blood and tooth and splintered bone.

She looked away.

And into the eyes of the man who had just murdered the two police officers. She hadn’t told him about the baby yet; for some reason that was what she thought of at that moment. The tiny life growing inside her.

Her heart hammered. The colors of everything in the room seemed to cut through the air with a distinctiveness she could barely understand.

He hadn’t bothered to lower the barrel, and it was pointed at her stomach. At the baby.

“So,” he said softly.

She took a ragged breath. “So.”

And then.

He set down the gun.

She stared at it for a long moment, then spoke unsteadily, with words brushed bright with adrenaline, “That was close. The second one almost had time to aim.”

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

Then the man, who was most certainly not Philip Styles, and had not been shot in the chest at all, began to wipe his prints from the gun’s stock, forestock, and trigger.

And Astrid, the name she’d chosen for herself when she’d started this hobby, shed the housecoat and stuffed it into the duffel bag she’d hidden earlier in the front closet.

“You did well,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She was wearing only a bra and panties now. And as she bent over, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed her man, who called himself Brad, watching her. Even though she was about thirteen weeks along, she hadn’t really begun to show, and she’d kept herself in shape, so at twenty-nine it felt good to still be able to distract him while she was changing. She took her time rummaging through the bag, then slowly stood and pulled on her jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of latex gloves.