Karin Slaughter - Fallen

“What the hell happened?”

Roz Levy was on the other side of the Corvair. He looked under the car and found himself staring at the business end of a bright nickel Colt Python. Will didn’t know how she managed to keep the thing steady. The gun’s barrel was at least six inches long. The .357 magnum load could produce hydrostatic shock, meaning the impact from a chest wound was great enough to cause brain hemorrhaging.

He tried to keep his voice calm. “Could you please point that somewhere else?”

She drew back the gun and uncocked the hammer. “Motherfuck,” she mumbled, pushing herself up. “Here comes Mandy.”

Will saw Amanda running through the backyard. Her shoes were off. She had her walkie-talkie in one hand and her Glock in the other.

“Faith’s okay,” he told her. “She’s still in the house. I don’t know who—”

“Move,” Amanda ordered, darting past the Corvair and into Roz Levy’s house.

Will didn’t follow orders. Instead, he used the scope to check Evelyn’s hallway again. Faith was still standing there. She had her hands out in front of her, palms down, as if she was trying to reason with somebody. Had the flashes been warning shots or kill shots? The drive-by shooter favored two hits, one right after the other. If they’d killed Evelyn, Faith wouldn’t be standing there with her hands out. Will knew in his gut that she’d either be on the floor or on top of the killers if anything happened to her mother.

“Will!” Amanda snarled.

He kept the rifle close to his body as he ran past the car and into the house. The two women were standing in what must’ve been a screened porch at one time but was now a laundry room. Before he could close the door, Roz Levy started yelling at Amanda.

“Give me back that!” the old woman demanded.

Amanda had the Python. “You could’ve killed all of us.” She opened the chamber and ejected the load of .38 Specials onto the dryer. “I should arrest you right now.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Roz Levy wasn’t the only one who was pissed. Will felt his throat clench around the effort to keep from yelling. “You said this would be an easy exchange. You said they’d take the money and give Evelyn—”

“Shut up, Will.” Amanda spun the empty cylinder back into the revolver and tossed it onto the washer.

She must’ve taken Will’s silence as following orders, but the truth was that he was so furious that he didn’t trust himself to speak. Arguing wouldn’t change the fact that Faith was stuck in that house without a clear exit plan. There was nothing they could do now except wait for SWAT to show up and pretend this was a hostage negotiation instead of a suicide mission.

Unless Will went in himself. He gripped his rifle. He should go in there. He should do exactly what Faith had done two days before and bust down the door and start shooting.

Amanda’s hand clamped around his wrist. “Don’t you dare leave this room,” she warned him. “I’ll shoot you myself if I have to.”

Will’s teeth started to ache from grinding together. He pulled away from her, banging into a metal lawn chair in the middle of the room. He couldn’t help but take in his surroundings. A high-speed camera was mounted on a tripod, pointing out the window in the door. Roz Levy had covered the glass with black construction paper, leaving a small hole for the lens to peer through. A shotgun was beside the door. No wonder she hadn’t allowed Will into the house. She didn’t want him obstructing her view.

Will looked into the camera viewfinder. The lens was sharper than his scope. He could see sweat dripping down the side of Faith’s face. She was still talking. She was trying to reason with the shooter.

One shooter. One man left standing.

Two bad guys had gone into that house. Both were dressed in black jackets and hats. One had been shot. Will was certain of that, at least. He had watched both kids forcing Evelyn across the lawn and into the house. The one in back had done all of the heavy lifting. He was expendable, just like Ricardo, just like Hironobu Kwon, just like every other man who’d tried to get his hands on Evelyn Mitchell’s money.

But it had never been about the money. Chuck Finn wasn’t pulling the strings. There was no wizard behind the curtain. Here was the head of Roger Ling’s snake: an angry kid with blue eyes and a Tec-9 and some kind of grudge he was intent on carrying out.

Will spoke through clenched teeth. “It’s just him now. This is what he wanted all along.”

“He’ll never spend a dime of that money.”

He struggled to keep his voice down. “He doesn’t care about the money.”

“Then what does he care about?” She grabbed his shoulder and jerked him away from the camera. “Come on, genius. Tell me what he wants.”

Mrs. Levy mumbled, “You know what he wants.” She was loading the cartridges back into her revolver.

“Zip it, Roz. I’ve had enough of you for one day.” Amanda glared at Will. “Enlighten me, Dr. Trent. I’m all ears.”

“He wants to kill her. He wants to kill both of them.” Will finally dropped the biggest I-told-you-so of his life. “And if you had deigned for once to listen to me, none of this would be happening.”

Anger flared in Amanda’s eyes, but she told him, “Go on. Get it all out.”

In the end, it was her acquiescence that sent him over the edge. “I told you we should slow this down. I told you we should figure out what they really wanted before we sent Faith in there with a target on her back.” He closed the space between them, backing her against the washer. “You were so hell-bent on proving your dick is bigger than mine that you didn’t stop to think that I might be right about something.” Will leaned in close enough to feel her breath on his face. “Any blood spilled is on your hands, Amanda. You did this to Faith. You did this to all of us.”

Amanda turned her head away from him. She didn’t answer Will, but he could see the truth in her eyes. She knew that he was right.

Her silent acceptance was no consolation, but Will backed off anyway. He had been looming over her like a bully, clutching his rifle so hard that his hands were shaking. Shame crowded out his anger. He made his grip loosen, his jaw relax.

“Ha,” Mrs. Levy laughed. “You gonna take that tone from him, Wag?” She had re-loaded the Python. She snapped the cylinder home, telling Will, “That’s what we used to call her—Wag, because she shut up and wagged her tail like a dog every time a man was around.”

Will was shocked by her words, mostly because he couldn’t imagine anything that could be further from the truth.

Mrs. Levy hefted the Python in her hands. She told Amanda, “Talk about swinging your dick around. You could’ve stopped this twenty years ago if you’d’a had the balls to force Ev to—”

Amanda hissed, “Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit, Roz. If it wasn’t for me standing between you and your cookie recipe, you’d be on death row right now.”

“I warned you when it happened. You don’t mix pigeons and bluebirds.”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You never have.” Amanda barked more orders into the walkie-talkie. Her voice shook, which worried Will as much as anything that had happened in the last ten minutes. “Take out that black van. I want all four tires down. Clear out this block as quickly as you can. Call in APD to gumshoe it and give me an ETA on SWAT within the next five minutes or don’t bother showing up for work tomorrow.”

Will put his eye back to the camera. Faith was still talking. At least, her mouth was moving. Her arms were crossed over her chest. Will found his mind working through Roz Levy’s mildly racist choice of words: pigeons and bluebirds. Mrs. Levy was full of old adages, like the one she’d told him two days ago: A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down. It was a strange thing to say about a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl who’d had a baby by the age of fifteen.