Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

In moments during which the world turned white for her, three bullets crashed past Grace’s head into the thick wooden door where it stood open behind her. She felt her body turn to water and then become solid again. Her eyes blinked as the scene around her faded, then came back to life. Outside, Harrigan contacted the marksmen and told them to take out Lucy Hurst as soon as they could.

‘Did I frighten you, Grace? Well, look at Graeme,’ Lucy was saying in a half-incredulous, half-laughing voice. ‘Yeah, just look at you, Graeme. You really thought you were going to see blood this time, didn’t you? You’re hanging out for it.’

His expression was open-mouthed and ecstatic, frozen with a smile of pure joy.

‘It wouldn’t just be hers either, it’d be mine too, because the first thing that’d happen is I’d get blown away as well. Get up. You just fucking get up, Graeme. You are a liar. You don’t care about anything.

All you do is get off on killing people. That’s all you do. You sit there and you talk rubbish to me and all the time, you just want to get off on it. And you just want to see me fucking do it for you.’

‘You listen to me, Lucy. All you have seen is righteous joy — ’

‘You shut up!’

‘Don’t do that, Lucy,’ Grace was saying as they scrambled to their feet, ‘leave it. You know what you want to know now. Just leave it.’

‘No, Grace. Don’t you fucking listen? I killed someone. I’ve got to make up for that.’

‘No, you have to leave it — ’

The preacher suddenly screamed and ran at Lucy. She jumped backwards and shouted at him to stop where he was. They froze where they stood, staring at each other. In that instant, a pattern of bullets thudded between them into the floor where Lucy had just been standing. All three of them looked up to a square of grey light where a window above and behind them had been removed. Lucy laughed aloud, dancing back out of range.

‘Too late. Too bad,’ she said.

In that second, the preacher turned and ran for the door. She fired at him repeatedly as he ran, seemingly unaware of the recoil of the gun knocking her backwards. He fell to the floor. Grace cracked Lucy on the wrist with the side of her hand and the gun dropped, crashing onto the wooden floor. Grace kicked it aside as Lucy dived for it, stretching her hand out towards it. They wrestled on the floor, Grace fighting an unexpected strength in Lucy’s thin and wiry body. She heard the glass doors being broken open behind them.

‘Stupid!’ she was shouting, ‘it’s stupid. Why waste your life?’

‘Why do you care? I didn’t want to have to shoot you.’ She heard Lucy’s voice, furious and breathless in her ear. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

Then Grace was bodily lifted up and away as armed police swarmed around them. They held Lucy face down on the floor and retrieved her gun. Grace was on her feet, looking at a hall filled with people and Harrigan standing in front of her.

‘Are you all right?’ he was asking her in his neutral voice.

‘Yes, I’m okay,’ she heard herself say.

‘No injuries?’

He was looking closely at her face.

‘No.’

‘Good. Why don’t you go outside with Trev and get yourself a cigarette? We’ll clean up in here.’

‘Yeah, Gracie.’ Trevor was there behind Harrigan. ‘Just come outside with me and get some fresh air for a moment.’

‘I’m okay,’ she said.

‘Of course you are. Come on,’ he said, in the voice that he always used to organise his friends.

She followed him out, passing the paramedics who had come in behind everyone else and were kneeling beside the preacher.

‘No, he’s gone. There’s nothing we can do here,’ she heard one of them say.

Then she walked out the door and down the steps into the open street.

‘It’s stopped raining,’ she said. ‘Oh, it’s nice to be outside.’

‘Yeah,’ Trevor said, ‘and the sun’s coming out. Have a cigarette.’

She accepted it, shaking her head, light on her feet.

‘I feel really strange, Trev. My head feels about four times the size it should be.’

‘You’re in shock, mate,’ Trevor replied. ‘Just stand there and smoke your cigarette. Don’t do anything.’

‘I’m still alive,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath and laughing, with tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, mate,’ Trevor said, losing it. He shook his head and gave her a bear hug, destroying her unlit cigarette.

In the hall, Harrigan looked down at the preacher. He lay on his side staring up at the ceiling and his blood had spread out over the floor.

Harrigan almost expected to see the man wink at him and hear his voice whispering quietly in his ear, ‘Don’t worry, Paul. Between you and me, this is just a ruse.’ The thought was real enough to be disturbing.

He turned to look at Lucy Hurst where she was being held face down on the floor and motioned to his people to stand her up. This was the girl his son thought he loved, the one who had led him on a dance from one end of the city to the other. She hardly came up to his chin, was barely old enough to be his concern.

‘Lucy Marilyn Hurst,’ he said, ‘I’m going to arrest and charge you with two counts of murder. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’

She looked him directly in the eye, unafraid. Small particles of dust covered her reddish brown hair.

‘Yeah, I understand,’ she said, dismissively. ‘I know all about that stuff.’

He began the ritual, noticing that as he spoke to her she did not once look in the direction of the preacher. She seemed to have erased the fact that he was there.

To Grace’s surprise, people came up to her as she stood outside on the street and congratulated her. She had not expected this to happen. Ian appeared and shook her hand.

‘You were fucking brave, Gracie,’ he said, squeezing her hand before disappearing back into the crowd.

‘I didn’t think about that,’ she said to Trevor, this detail occurring to her for the first time.

‘Yeah, well,’ he replied, ‘a fucking good thing you didn’t.’

While they stood there, Lucy Hurst was escorted out of the hall and placed in a car. She glanced around and saw Grace at a distance but did not acknowledge her. She appeared quite calm. Grace watched her being driven away.

‘I guess I don’t get to see her again,’ Grace said, ‘except in court.’

‘Not unless you want to.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I do.’

Not long afterwards, Harrigan walked up to them slowly.

‘How are you?’ he said to her.

‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘A bit light on my feet.’

He was silent for a few moments, looking at her, shaking his head.

‘You should never have been anywhere near here in the first place.

If I’d known any of that info sooner, you wouldn’t have been.’

‘Well, I’m here. I’m still alive to tell the tale.’

She tried to smile.

‘You were lucky,’ he said. ‘You were lucky but you were brave. You deserved to be lucky. Now you’ve done that once, you don’t ever have to do it again, do you?’

‘No, I guess not,’ she replied.

‘You get debriefed before you do anything else. I’ll need to see you back at the office when you’re finished. And Trev, when you’re ready

— I need you now.’

‘You almost had her shot,’ Grace said after him as he walked away.

He stopped and came back to her.

‘Is that what you’re turning over in your mind? There’s no in-between here. If I was going to finish the day looking at someone’s body, it wasn’t going to be yours. I don’t have an apology for that.’

‘It’s not that. She wouldn’t have cared if you had,’ Grace said. ‘She said to me, she didn’t want to have to shoot me, didn’t I know that?’