Gregg Hurwitz - Last shot

He was breathing so heavily he had to pause at the base of the stairs. Each jarring step caused the vest to scrape over the wound. Putting his head down, he almost collided with someone midway up. Kaitlin. She'd made herself up a bit with mascara and a touch of eyeliner. Sam stood at her side, looking bemused and slightly scared by her evident anger.

She said, "The least you could do if you drag us to a dirt fucking lot is show up. I would've left, but Sam insisted we-"

"You shouldn't be here." Walker sagged against the railing. Kaitlin saw the blood and scrambled to his side, purse slapping against her hip, her shoes clattering on the stairs. She fought the apartment key out of Walker's pocket and fumbled it toward Sam, who took it calmly. "Go get the door open. Go on."

She helped Walker upstairs and in. Sam locked the door behind them, then gave a dramatic glance through the closed blinds of the front window. The bed bowed under Walker's weight when he sat. He used his right hand to dig his Spyderco knife out of a pocket. Flipping it open with a jerk, he ran the blade under the front of his T-shirt. Kaitlin helped peel it off.

About four inches down from his armpit, a quarter-size entry hole marred the meat of his lat. The blood welling inside looked like black ink. The bullet had missed the protective ballistic composite by a thumb's width. There was no way, in the nighttime pivot-and-shoot, that Rackley could have seen he was wearing a vest. The bullet had sought flesh as lead often seemed to do.

Kaitlin helped him unsnap the vest. He'd hoped the back fabric would have caught the slug, but no such luck. There was no exit wound.

Hurwitz, Gregg — Rackley 04

Last Shot (2006)

Kaitlin got a ratty towel from the bathroom, wiped off the blood, and applied pressure. Sam watched with wide eyes.

She seemed light-headed. "This doesn't look good, Walk."

"Seen worse."

Walker took up the pressure so she could sit down. When he withdrew a tweezers from the medic kit in his duffel, she flattened herself over her knees. "I don't think I can."

He inserted the tweezers into the hole but had a tough time getting an angle. The metal tips digging around the swollen flesh was unpleasant. He said, "Kaitlin, just gimme a sec here."

Kaitlin started to stand up but fainted and fell back on the bed.

Walker said, "Well, there you go."

Sam said, "I'll do it."

"I don't think so."

"I hit level forty-four on Champions of Norrath. I think I can find a stupid bullet in a cut." His stomach looked more distended than before, bulging over his thin little-boy belt. He returned Walker's gaze, playing up the apathy.

Walker said, "God, you've got your mother in you."

"And you."

"Nah, not me."

The kid's face went slack with hurt-not an expression Walker had expected. He'd meant it as a compliment, but it was too thorny to explain, and he had a mushroom of lead grinding in his side. He offered Sam the blood-tipped tweezers, and Sam took them. He raised his arm, and the kid went to work with an impressive scientific detachment.

Kaitlin stirred, propped herself on her elbows to take in the tableau, and said, nauseously, "There goes my spot on the PTA."

She rose, keeping her eyes averted, and disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later Walker heard the sink running. Inside him metal clinked against metal-he wasn't sure if he heard it or just felt the timbre of the vibration.

Sam said, "Doesn't that hurt?"

"This? Nah." Walker braced himself as the tweezers made another pass at the embedded slug. "Pain's got fear, too. You can scare it outta you."

The bullet came slowly and not without friction. Sam dropped it in Walker's palm. A Troubleshooter special, served hot from a Smith amp; Wesson.

Sam stared at him with those crazy yellow eyes. "I know about pain."

"I figure. You're smart for an eight-year-old."

"Seven."

"Whatever."

Walker rotated his arm once, testing it. He leaned against the pillows and blinked once, slowly. Sam watched him intently.

Walker said, "I got nothing to offer you. I guess only the example I didn't set. But I can tell you this: Your mom didn't kill herself. Some men had her killed."

All the lines seemed to smooth out of Sam's face, and then tears were on his cheeks, though he didn't seem to be crying. Anger, sure, and some fear, but mostly relief. He sat down, head bowed, scratching at the dry patches on his bruised arms. "So you're gonna what? Kill them all?"

The toilet flushed, and then the sink water turned on again.

"Yup," Walker said.

Dolan had spent the last hour pacing laps around the pool table, his agitation sprouting more hydra heads than he could keep in sight. His momentum finally flung him off the table on a turn, propelling him through the double doors. A security man wordlessly stood his post outside. He shadowed Dolan down the hall like a bodyguard, his finger raised to his ear, seating the transmitter. His orders being updated? After a few paces, Dolan grew uncomfortable. When he glanced back, the guard dropped his gaze as if granting Dolan privacy. On the way down the stairs, it struck Dolan that the man now seemed more like a stalker than a bodyguard. He tried to convince himself that he was manufacturing the guard's tacit menace, transferring his anxiety onto something concrete.

Dolan stopped short when he entered his father's office and found it blanketed with open manila folders, Dean shoving papers through a shredder with uncharacteristic haste. Edwin abided Dean's pointing finger, retrieving and filing with a stiff-backed posture that infused each menial task with elegant rectitude.

Dean paused, then shot an accusatory glare at the guard, as if he were responsible for Dolan's appearance. Dolan made out the label on the report in his father's hands: X4-AAT SAFETY STUDY. Dean lowered it to the blades. A chuffing disintegrated it into snowflakes.

Dolan moistened his lips, looking around in bewilderment.

Dean said briskly, "Nothing untoward is going on here. There are confidential documents that I don't feel comfortable having at the house. Not with the fallout from this afternoon and the investigation that's grinding forward. Your company's been set back enough by recent events." Dean handed off an expurgated folder to Edwin, who promptly returned it to the file cabinet. "Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to."

"Sir, I do want answers. I'm entitled to know what's going on with Xedral. I've given seven years of my life to this."

"And I devoted thirty-five years to building the business that under-wrote the lab in which you were working. So why don't we leave entitlement out of this? Every test tube you've touched since you were six, I bought."

Dolan felt his outrage transmogrify into adolescent defensiveness. "Not at school."

"Right. A multiyear, seven-figure pledge to UCLA's biology department that commenced the day you matriculated. But the test tubes came out of the professor's pocket."

"I got into UCLA on my grades, not your money." Dolan picked up an empty folder, turned it inside out, and dropped it on the floor. "What happened during the Xedral safety studies?"

A disgusted exhale. "Nothing. Huang spoke to you. He told you himself nothing was out of the ordinary."

"You own Huang."

"I own everyone. Including you. Every lab station, every microfuge, every pencil."

Dolan felt beaten down, diminished. "You don't. Not me."

"Oh? Your corporation is behind on its rent, Dolan. Or do you recall that your lease specifies a dollar a year?" Dean scowled at him, a rosy flush rouging his pallid cheeks. "I can have Bernie retroaccount so hard and fast you'll be in debt to Beacon-Kagan until your children's children have children. I will ruin you."