Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘You can sit down, Grace. Why don’t you sit just there? Next to Graeme, where I can see you. You can sit up now, Graeme.’

The preacher rolled over with agility. He looked at Grace with revulsion but this did not touch her. They were almost side by side, a V shape with Lucy at the apex. Once they were in position, Lucy pushed the child towards his mother, who scooped him up and ran for the door. She was gone in an instant, the glass door clicking shut on its automatic lock behind her.

‘It’s just us now. Isn’t that nice?’ Lucy said. ‘You’re Grace?’

‘Yes,’ Grace said, looking at a small girl with a square and pretty, almost innocent, face and clear eyes. Her pale skin was delicate next to her reddish hair. She held her gun unselfconsciously, apparently unafraid of what it could do.

‘Are you wired for sound?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I am. Everyone can hear.’

‘Yeah, I want people to hear. I want them to know what I’m going to say. You know what I want you to do first? I want you to sit on your hands.’

‘Why, Lucy?’

‘I just do. I want to touch your face. Now you be careful. You just have to look at this gun and it goes off. Remember that, Graeme. Because if you move, it’s Grace first and then you. And I’m faster than you.’

Grace leaned forward, hard on her hands, and felt the gun barrel pressed in her stomach as Lucy stroked first one cheek and then the other. Her touch was cold and smooth. They were eyeball to eyeball.

Grace, chilled to the base of her spine, controlled panic by staring into the rage mirrored in Lucy’s eyes. She told herself, meet it full on. That’s the only way you can know what there is to fear.

Outside, the marksman contacted Harrigan.

‘She’s got them in a position where I have to shoot one of them to get to her. And if I did do that, I couldn’t get her before she got your officer.’

‘Wait your chance,’ Harrigan replied.

‘That is you, isn’t it? That face, it’s you,’ Lucy was saying, her voice thin and metallic over the communication device.

She drew back, the gun ready to fire at a breath. Grace reconnected to the possibility of staying alive a little longer.

‘Yes, this is me. Is it okay if I get off my hands now?’

‘Yeah, you can do that. You’ve got a nice face.’

‘Why is that important, Lucy?’

‘Because it’s who you are. I need to see who you are,’ Lucy said. ‘You see, when I shot that woman and that man, I got blood all across my forehead. Some of it got up into my hair. I don’t even know whose it was.

It just hit me. I can feel it all over me again now. And that man, he didn’t have a face left. He wasn’t anything any more. Nothing. I never should have shot him. But you know one of the things that really bothers me?’

‘No, Lucy,’ Grace replied. ‘You tell me.’

‘I didn’t let that doctor see all my face. She had a right to know who I was. That’s why I wanted to see you.’

‘You want me to be looking at you when you do whatever you’re going to do?’

Oh Christ, Harrigan thought.

‘I don’t want to hide from you the way I did from her,’ Lucy said.

As Lucy spoke, Grace felt a movement beside her. She glanced at the preacher. He had leaned forward and was staring at Lucy with a hungry expression. Lucy looked at him at the same time.

‘Don’t you move, Graeme, and don’t you talk. Not till I tell you to,’

she said. ‘Because if you do, I’ll get you before you can do anything.’

He sat back, his expression unchanged.

‘Do you think a lot about what happened that morning, Lucy? Is that what you’re telling me, that it’s always on your mind?’ Grace asked.

‘Yes, it is. But I don’t know what to think about it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I think about it and I get lost.’

‘You’re walking in the dark again,’ Grace said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Walking around in the dark. But something else bothers you about that morning. You said that — that it was just one thing.’

‘Yeah. Do you want to know what it is?’

‘You tell me, Lucy.’

‘I should never have done it at all.’ She sounded like a small child.

‘That’s how I feel now. I should never have done it, it was such a bad thing to do. Really bad. But that’s it, you see. How do I deal with that?

I know that because I feel it. But what if it wasn’t such a bad thing to do, the way Graeme says it wasn’t? And then if shooting that doctor was the right thing to do, I should do what Graeme wants me to do right now. I should shoot you as well. And that’s what I’ve got to know.’

‘Why do you have to shoot me?’

‘Because you killed your baby. Graeme knows that about you, everyone does. And he says that’s what I should do.’

‘You don’t have to do any of this, Lucy,’ Grace said. ‘You can put your gun down and just walk out of here. And that’s it. You can walk out of here with me and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to do anything.’

‘No, I do. That’s the point. I killed someone. I’m stuck here. I am.’

‘No, Lucy, you’re not — ’

‘ I am!’

‘Don’t argue with her,’ the negotiator said quietly, close beside Harrigan. ‘Whatever you do, don’t argue with her.’

There was silence. Lucy’s hand tightened on the gun and then relaxed a little again. Grace breathed.

‘I am, Grace,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Now I’ve got to solve this. I’ve got to solve it.’

There was silence. Lucy sat gathering her breath, taking courage.

She looked from Grace to the preacher.

‘All right, Graeme. Talk. What do I do now?’

He seemed to subside with relief when she said this.

‘Whatever your conscience tells you to do, Lucy,’ he replied easily, as though he was sitting at his desk in a counselling session. ‘You must know in your heart what’s right.’

‘What do you think is right?’

‘I’m not the actor here,’ he replied. ‘I can’t take the place of your own conscience.’

‘But what would you do? You said that Grace here walks blood through the city streets. She deserves to die. You said that to me last night. You said to me: you can get rid of the evil she is, you can wash it clean. That’s what you said. So what would you do? If you had to.’

You fucking bastard, Harrigan thought. You fucking, fucking bastard.

‘I would leave her to answer to God,’ the preacher said.

‘Well, what does that mean? Does that mean it happens the way it did last time? I shoot her for you and you get to hear about it on the radio?’

‘No, Lucy. It means we all have a role to play and mine is different to yours,’ he said. ‘If I am not here, how can anything be accomplished? It is my work to lead, to organise. There are a great many sacrifices in that.’

Lucy looked away from the preacher and back to Grace.

‘You killed your baby. Why did you do that?’ she asked her. ‘You think what I did was wrong, don’t you? You do, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Grace said.

‘But how can what I did be wrong if you can go and do that? It’s just as bad, isn’t it?’

In the few short seconds before she replied, Grace thought she was gone.

‘I don’t know if there’s any way I can tell it to you so you’d understand me, Lucy. I’m just going to say to you that that’s what I chose to do, it’s what I felt I had to do. I don’t see it the way you do.’

‘You chose to?’ Lucy asked. ‘You did? On your own?’

‘Yes.’

Lucy raised her gun.

‘I still think that’s murder, Grace, whatever you want to say,’ she said, and fired three times.