Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

“Hi, Boone,” he said.

The voice was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Youthful but with a lilt to it, a thread of taunt, that evoked someone she’d once known.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Call me Hobo.” His hand moved in the darkness, and on the west bank of the river, bushes shook. He had some sort of a line attached to them, designed to draw her attention. An amateur’s gambit, one that she should have spotted immediately, but she’d been so certain she was out in front that she hadn’t feared the trap. How did he know the dog’s name? Who was he, and how had he known that she would arrive in this place, on this mission?

“Who’s your client?” he said.

Boone didn’t respond.

The man shifted, his shadow unspooling like a piece of the bridge coming to life, and the bushes shook once more. He thought that was cute. Boone was pleased to see it. He had one hand busy with that trick. That he would face her down with one hand occupied told her that she didn’t need to worry about placing that voice; he was a stranger. He knew her name, but he did not truly know Boone.

“My client is an Israeli,” she said, turning her body to him and squaring her shoulders. “But I don’t know his name.”

He moved farther out on the steel beam, and she saw that there was a gun in his right hand but that it was held down against his leg. How foolish was he? How did one come to know Lisa Boone’s name and not know enough to keep one’s gun pointed at her heart? She was almost insulted.

He stood there watching her from what he thought was a clever hiding spot but was really just a convenient place for him to die. The dark river below waited to carry his body away when he fell. His left hand still held the cord that he’d tied to the bushes, and his right hand held the gun with its muzzle pointed at the river. He was out on the center of the beam now. It couldn’t have been much more than ten inches wide, and yet he never looked down, had moved with smoothness in the night. What he lacked in brains he made up for in composure and balance. It was a dangerous high-wire act out there. Boone’s own balance was also perfect, though, and she had a stable platform beneath her. She would have to throw the knife left-handed, but this was why you practiced with your left hand and in the dark. She was not worried about accuracy.

“You’d better remember the client’s name,” he said, “because Tara Beckley can’t blink that one out for me.”

Again, the voice sounded familiar, and Boone probably could have made the connection if she’d allowed her focus to drift. But she wouldn’t. Not as she slowly, almost motionlessly, thumbed the knife blade open in her cupped left hand.

“I don’t have names,” she said. “I only have phone numbers.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Deal,” Boone said, and when she threw the knife, she was almost sad that he’d end up in the river, because she wanted to see his face.

She was down on her back before she understood that she’d been shot.

How? How did he beat me? Did I miss? I’ve never missed.

Her knife was gone, but where was her gun? Somewhere below her and to the left. She told herself to reach for it, but the command couldn’t bring strength. She lay there tasting her own blood and watched her killer jump nimbly from the railroad bridge span down to the footbridge, a treacherous leap in the dark but one he made without hesitation. He caught the railing on the footbridge with his left hand, then swung himself up and over.

She saw then that she had not missed with the knife. The blade was embedded in the back of his right hand. His shooting hand. He’d brought the gun up just fast enough. Fraction-of-a-blink speed. That was the separation between life and death. Before this, Boone had always been the winner in this contest.

Who are you? She tried to ask it but couldn’t. No words came. She watched him advance, and her vision grayed out, and she hoped that she would last long enough to know who it was.

He’ll get the phone, Boone thought numbly, aware that it was no longer a concern to her yet still disappointed. It had been worth so much.

He came on patiently, without firing again even though that would have been the smart play, and Boone had the sense that he wanted her to know him too. When he was close enough to be seen, though, she realized something was wrong. In the confusion brought on by darkness and imminent death, he looked like a child.

He’d shot like a pro, though. Boone’s knife was still embedded in the back of his right hand, blood running down his fingers and falling to the pavement in fat drips. He hadn’t paused to address the knife yet, and Boone knew that he wouldn’t until he was certain that she was dead. There weren’t many in her business with that level of focus.

So who had gotten her?

She blinked and studied him. The boyish face was a lie; she knew his voice, knew his motions, knew his pale hair in the moonlight. Knew him because he’d shot fast and straight even with a knife embedded in his gun hand.

“Hello, Boone,” he said. He blurred before her eyes, and in the moment of double vision, she seemed to see two of him smiling down at her, and then she knew them. They came in a pair, always. Her brain whispered that this was impossible, but she couldn’t remember why. She squinted up at her killer.

“Jack?” she whispered.

“No,” the boy said, “but close enough.”

Then came the fulfillment of a promise that Boone had understood for many years now: the last thing she saw was the muzzle of a gun.

Abby was halfway down the hill, moving quietly but awkwardly, still trying to get her circulation flowing, when she heard the clap of the gunshot.

The sound came from the far side of the bridge, close to the western shore. She had no idea if Dax had killed or been killed.

She also knew that it didn’t matter. She’d escaped the car, the headrest coming free with one spine-popping twist, but Shannon Beckley was, presumably, still trapped in hers. Abby stopped in the blackness beneath a twisting oak limb and took gasping breaths of the chilled autumn air. She looked behind her, out to where the woods promised cover and the houses promised help, and then back down at the Jeep, where Shannon waited alone for whoever had survived the shooting on the bridge.

Abby’s hands were still bound at the wrists. She could run but not fight. They wouldn’t pursue her. Dax wouldn’t, at least, and the woman he’d called Lisa Boone was of his breed. They’d calculate risk and reward, and they’d run.

But they wouldn’t leave Shannon Beckley behind. The witness who couldn’t run or hide was the witness who would be eliminated.

Abby started downhill again, moving quietly, chasing the shadows. The bridge was bathed in blackness, but as she watched, a figure leaped from the upper bridge, beneath the railroad tracks, and landed on the footbridge, catching the rail with his left hand. In that moment when he flickered through the night, Abby knew who’d come out victorious in the showdown between assassins.

Dax hadn’t wasted his advantage. Those early minutes in the darkness, all-seeing and all-knowing as he waited for an unprepared adversary, had been put to good use.

His attention was diverted from the car now, though. The bridge crowned above the river, and the shooting had taken place near the opposite shore, which meant his view of the parking lot would be minimal. Abby stayed as low as she could, approaching the Jeep, and just before she reached for the door handle, she felt the overwhelming certainty that it would be locked and she would have come down here for no reason but to guarantee her death.