Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

If Shanker had heard the few words he’d just spoken, he ought to be able to figure out what was going on-and to do something about it.

All that was needed was a momentary distraction. Reynolds leaned forward in the driver’s seat and felt the comforting weight of the gun under his jacket, the gun he had taken from the wall safe in his home office before driving to L.A.

He only had to get the pistol out of Andrea’s hands, or pin her down so she couldn’t fire. Then with her gun or with his own, he could take her out. One bullet to the head, and that would be the end of Andrea, formerly Bethany, the mother of two of his children, and the bane of his life.

And the beauty of it was, no one would blame him. The angry altercation in the lobby would actually work to his advantage. He had multiple witnesses to testify that the woman had been behaving in an irrational and violent manner, that she had held a gun on him and marched him into an elevator. He had the wound in his thigh to prove she was serious.

He was a victim, for God’s sake. Andrea Lowry was a crazy woman with a history of mental illness, institutionalization, and violence. She had been stalking him. She had finally tracked him down in the Brayton-he could invent a convincing reason for being there. Fortunately he’d been able to defend himself.

She wouldn’t be around to tell her side of the story. Only Abby remained to be dealt with, and she was already in trouble with the law, or so she claimed. Even if her story had been bullshit, there was a fair chance he could get to her before she could do him any harm. With both women out of the way, there would be no one to refute his version of events.

He could make it work. Hell, he could come out of this a hero. The crusading D.A. would now be a fighting congressman who’d taken on a stalker and won. He might be able to parlay this into a run for the senate. And for a senator from California, a slot on a presidential ticket was not an impossibility.

Or he might just be getting lightheaded from blood loss. But one thing was certain. If he had a chance to finish Andrea, he would take it. He would do the job his hired thugs had botched twenty years ago. He would kill the bitch at last.

The Man was in trouble. That much was obvious.

Shanker put the van into gear and barreled out of his parking spot.

The voices on the phone had been faint and slightly garbled, but he’d made out enough to know that Reynolds was being forced to drive out of the hotel garage, and that he had been shot or at least shot at, and that the shooter was a woman.

Abby, of course. It had to be. The bitch had pulled off another double cross.

But this one would be her last.

Reynolds was pulling close to the exit ramp when he saw the gray blur of Shanker’s van in his rearview mirror. The van was gaining fast.

Things were about to get interesting.

He tightened his grip on the wheel. A trickle of perspiration oozed down his neck. It was cold, as cold as the muzzle of the pistol still pressed against his skin.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” Andrea was looking at him with a suspicious, quizzical eye. “What’s going on?”

He didn’t have to answer. Shanker answered for him.

The van swung out from behind the car, pulling alongside like a wall of gray metal looming out of nowhere.

Andrea saw it. Her mouth opened in the beginning of a shout.

With a scream of tires, the van veered sideways, slamming solidly into the Mustang’s front end.

Instinctively Reynolds hit the brakes.

Too late.

The Mustang folded up against the van’s backside, rocking Reynolds and his passenger in their seats.

Neither of them was strapped in. Reynolds hit the steering wheel as the airbag deployed, smacking him in the face and retracting instantly. He was dazed momentarily but shook it off and spun in his seat to face Andrea. The passenger side airbag had crumpled in her lap, and the gun once held to his head was dangling from limp fingers.

He grabbed for it. She snapped alert and threw a clawing hand at his face, but he wedged himself closer, ignoring the shout of pain from his leg, and wrapped his fingers around the hand holding the gun.

Their eyes met, and he saw hopelessness and resignation in hers, submission before a superior adversary, acquiescence to the essential injustice of the world.

That was when he knew he had won. Prizing the pistol out of her grip was only an afterthought to his triumph. He pulled it free and jammed his forefinger between the trigger guard and the trigger, the barrel arrowed at her face.

To Andrea it was all strangely familiar, the gun in her face and the certainty of death-but really there was nothing strange about it, because she had died like this once before, hadn’t she? The memory was suddenly keen and sharp-the explosion behind her ear, the rush of white light that surprised her because it wasn’t darkness.

And her last thought-Jack did this.

That thought came back to her now, and with it came a surge of furious indignation at this man who had already taken everything from her, and who dared to take even more.

She twisted away from him as the gun went off, a purplish blast clouding her vision, the shot missing her and tearing through the headrest of the passenger seat.

“Fuck you, Jack!” She heard a crazy woman screaming and realized it was her. “Fuck you!”

She lashed out with her fists. She beat him in the face. The gun lurched toward her but she batted it away and flailed at him, and one of her swinging blows caught him in the thigh where the bullet had struck.

Then he was the one screaming.

His cries brought her back to herself. She had to get out of this car. She had to get away.

She flung open the door and clambered out into the ugly fluorescent glow, the word ugly beating like a flap of wings in her mind-this basement world, like catacombs, an ugly place to die, all concrete and shadows.

She fell on the floor-more concrete-and threw herself upright, staggering toward the nearest row of columns, where cars were parked, and beyond the cars there was a door marked STAIRS, an escape route, if she could get there, but she couldn’t, of course. Reynolds would kill her first, gun her down.

She heard the crack of a gunshot. Another. Another. But she wasn’t hit. Somehow she was alive.

She stumbled between the pillars, half running, half crawling, her legs not working right, and by some inexplicable miracle she reached the shelter of a parked car and scurried behind it as the gun rang out again and again.

From her position of relative safety she risked a glance back, and then she understood. It wasn’t Reynolds who was shooting.

Abby was there, gun in hand, crouching behind another column yards away, snapping off shots at the Mustang.

This probably made some kind of sense, but Andrea couldn’t put it together, and she had no time to think about it.

She ran for the door to the stairs.

Abby had pounded up the stairs and was running for the garage exit, meaning to retrieve her Miata from the alley, when she heard the crash.

It had to be Reynolds’ car. He’d wrecked it somehow. And she had no doubt he would use the diversion to gain the upper hand.

She hadn’t been far from the collision. She reached it in time to see Andrea emerge. When Reynolds leaned out, Abby snapped off a series of rounds, not expecting to hit him, just laying down covering fire so Andrea could escape.

It worked. Reynolds ducked back inside the car, and Andrea was gone, and everything was hunky-dory.

From the wrecked van, a volley of shots.

Okay, not so hunky-dory, after all.

Abby threw herself flat on the concrete and rolled to a new position. Evidently the van driver hadn’t been an innocent victim in all this. He was one of Reynolds’ buddies, trying to protect his boss by taking her out.