Макс Коллинз - You Can’t Stop Me

“ That is my message,” Shelton said, his composure back. “Those selfish, evil bastards murdered my family, and left me in a world of pain.”

“ Who murdered your family, Mr. Shelton?”

“Brown, Gibbons, their deputies — the whole wretched lot of them... They’re in it together .”

Carmen’s expression begged Harrow to be careful.

“Mr. Shelton — you need to put the gun down, and talk to me. I promise you will have time in front of my cameras to deliver your complete message to the public.”

“You’ll edit it to—”

“No! You are too important now. You have sent messages that have been heard all over this land, but not understood . This is your chance to correct that. To explain.”

Shelton seemed to be thinking this option over. Harrow couldn’t see much of the man, with Carmen a helpless puppet in front of him; but perhaps Harrow’s words were getting through...

“You know, Mr. Shelton, some say you killed your family.”

“Don’t ever say that!” The one eye visible flared. “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her right now and—”

Carmen was holding her breath, frozen in fear.

“I am not saying that, Mr. Shelton! I am saying that the messages you’ve sent seem to say you’d be capable of such a thing. I know all too well that you have killed other men’s families... why not your own?”

Carmen’s eyes narrowed, questioning Harrow’s tack.

“ Stop saying that! Stop saying that. You’re wrong; you’re misinterpreting everything I’ve meant to say.”

“That, Mr. Shelton, is why you need to put the gun down, and go in front of our cameras and explain yourself to the world. Explain that you would never have harmed your family.”

Almost entirely hidden behind his hostage now, Shelton spoke in a clear but oddly small voice in the quiet night: “How did you feel , Harrow, when they accused you of killing your family?”

“...I felt terrible. It made an unbearable sorrow more unbearable.”

“Well... I’m sorry for that. But you did get the message, didn’t you?”

“I... I did.”

“And now you know that I didn’t kill my family. Because I know you didn’t kill yours.”

This logic was nothing Harrow wished to spend time exploring. All he wanted right now was to talk this pathetic but so very dangerous creature into giving up and letting Carmen go.

A vein twitching in Harrow’s forehead was the only hint that under his calm exterior he was fighting the urge to jump the rail of the porch and shove the nine millimeter in the man’s mouth or maybe just strangle him; the desire to destroy the monster that killed Ellen and David coursed in him like lava, burning through his every capillary, vein, and artery.

“You can take my word,” Shelton said, “as the man who killed your family, I did not kill my own.”

Carmen’s eyes were wide with fear, but managed to convey to Harrow that she didn’t understand this insane reasoning any more than he did.

Only Harrow did understand. It reflected how twisted his own path had been that he knew damn well Shelton confessing the murders of Ellen and David, freely, was a gesture of sorts, a blood-stained olive branch.

They had a bond. And only the lunatic on that porch, and the man below who’d been driven half-mad by the lunatic’s actions, could understand that bond.

“I believe you, Mr. Shelton. Why don’t I come up there, and we’ll discuss this further?”

“I like you where you are.”

“No, you need to meet me halfway. You let me take Carmen’s place, and we can work the rest of it out. It’ll be a show of good faith.”

A bit more of Shelton’s head became visible over Carmen’s shoulder as the killer got a better look at Harrow.

“All right,” Shelton said. “You take a step at a time and wait for me to say take another.”

“Fine.”

“And I want your hands up!”

“Fine.”

Harrow approached the stairs — six of them — and took the first one. Shelton moved back, closer to the front door, but the angle of the moon put him in more light. Carmen’s eyes weren’t so wide now; she seemed almost relaxed, or as relaxed as a person could be with a gun snout to her forehead.

“All right, another step.”

Harrow took it.

“Another.”

Harrow did so.

Then Shelton’s eyes darted right, and Harrow realized the killer had seen something he didn’t like.

“You stay put , Herm!” Shelton yelled. The arm around Carmen’s waist tightened and she made a sound, like a child picked up too roughly. “You stay the hell put! ”

Harrow glanced over and saw Gibbons at the edge of the shadows of the house next door — he was motionless, but for the weapon in his hand, dropping by degrees.

“Back off, Sheriff,” Harrow said, loud, firm. “Mr. Shelton is complying with everything I’m asking. Let me do this.”

Gibbons dissolved into the darkness.

After several long seconds, Shelton said, “Okay, Mr. Harrow. Take another step.”

He stepped, and in the earpiece whose occasional cop chatter he’d been ignoring, Harrow finally heard something worth registering: “Suspect in better light. Still no shot.”

The voice of the deputy, Colby Wilson.

The sniper was probably deep in the shadows of the houses across the street or possibly on a rooftop. Harrow risked a glimpse right, and caught sight of a boom mike peeking out at the back corner of a porch — either Hughes or Ingram had moved in pretty close. Harrow had gotten away with the glance because the killer’s attention was still on Gibbons, or anyway the darkness where the sheriff lurked.

So Harrow risked a quick look in the other direction, and thought he saw a part in the curtains on the first floor of the nearest abandoned house. The sniper? Or the unblinking eye of a camera?

“Mr. Harrow! What are you looking at?”

Harrow’s eyes snapped back to the killer. “I’m just nervous.”

“Don’t con me. You try conning me, and she’s dead and you’re dead. And I’m dead, but I don’t care because I died a long time ago, so don’t you con me.”

Harrow gestured easily with the upraised hands. “I was checking to see if my camera crew was in position and getting this.”

The slice of his face visible behind Carmen’s included an eye that widened. “ Are they? That would be good.”

“Yes, it would. It would get your message out in a much better way.”

“Are they out there?”

“I don’t know. You said, don’t con you . I think so. But I just don’t know.”

Shelton allowed Harrow up the final few steps, and then Harrow was facing Carmen and her captor — perhaps four feet separating them. Ivory washed over Carmen, and she looked fragile and lovely and, of course, terrified.

In Harrow’s ear, the deputy said, “If Harrow’d move a step to his left, I could cap this sumbitch.”

But Harrow moved not an inch, his eyes on the slender wall of flesh that was Carmen, behind which her captor hid, only barely visible there.

What had happened to Jenny Blake? Where was her intel?

Harrow felt the situation slipping like sand through his fingers. Maybe he should dive left and let Gibbons’s man take the shot...

“Okay, Mr. Shelton. Here I am. Let her go, and I’ll be your hostage.”

“I let her go, and a sniper takes me out. Probably that shit Wilson. He’s in on it too, you know!”

“We had a deal...”

“I want a TV camera. You said I could talk to a camera.”

In his left ear, Harrow finally heard Jenny: “Shelton’s wife was named Cathy and his son Mark.”