He was holding Ella so she was straddling his left hip with her little hands gripped so tight onto his coat it was like she was making fists in the rough material. He had his left arm around her body, supporting her, keeping her close. The very sight of him with his hands on her threw up a burst of white noise behind my eyes.
As we’d opened the door, Reynolds began to shift his stance, drawing his right foot back to present his left side — the side with Ella-as the target. He, too, had a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand and his grip on it was firm and strong. The gun was aimed at Ella’s head, the muzzle almost Youching her downy cheek.
I lurched a full step into the room and fought my flagging muscles to bring the Beretta up. This time, as I brought my other hand up to grab it, I jettisoned the crutch. One chance, and one chance only. After this, it wouldn’t matter much one way or the other.
I saw him take in my shambling gait, my sweat-stained clothing, the fact that I needed both hands to raise the Beretta at all, and the effort it was causing me to do so. I saw the smile start to widen. I could almost hear the thoughts that rushed through his brain. He held all the cards. No way would I risk a shot when he was holding Ella so close, when I could hardly stand and my aim was likely to be all to hell. He might not have to bargain his way out of this, after all. Might not have to leave witnesses behind …
And he made a snap decision. He took the gun away from Ella’s head and began straightening his arm to aim it at me instead, and I knew this was no idle threat. You only bother to threaten someone with a gun if you’re reluctant to actually use it. Reynolds had no such qualms.
I’d humiliated him at the Lucases’ place, and Matt and I had outma-neuvered him at the apartment. And now he had the opportunity to kill us both and make his escape with a hostage worth millions. There was no contest. His only disappointment would be that he didn’t get to make me suffer first.
His mistake.
The muzzle of my Beretta continued to rise in front of me, slow and ponderous, like the nose of an overladen airliner coming off the runway. It seemed to take forever, but actually it all happened in the blink of an eye. The gun reached cruising altitude and I stared along the barrel at a target so small the sights practically obscured it.
I’m sorry, Ella. I’m so sorry …
And I took the shot.
The noise in the confined space was monstrous. The round hit Reynolds smack in the center of that smug, self-satisfied smile. It smashed through both his front teeth with hardly a pause, continued its slight upward path grazing across the roof of his mouth, plowed on through the stem of his brain and then removed a good chunk of the back of his skull on the way out. It glanced off the bare concrete ceiling of the range at about the ten-meter mark and must have eventually come to rest somewhere in the thick sand berm at the far end of the elongated room, along with thousands of other spent rounds.
Reynolds’s body jerked as if on a wire. It might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn he just had time for the shock and the anger to register. I saw it on his face and was triumphant. He fell back, cannoned off the firing point and started to rebound forwards, with Ella still clutched to his body as he went down.
Matt unfroze and darted past me to grab his daughter before she would have gone crashing into the floor, snatching her from Reynolds’s dying grip.
Ella, who’d been quietly terrified to this point, broke her silence with a vengeance. She screamed and screamed, on and on so the world didn’t seem a big enough place to contain her anguish. She’d seen too much and it had finally broken her. Matt threw me a single desperate accusing glance and hurried out with his blood-spattered daughter in his arms.
I could hear Ella still howling as he ran with her through the stock room and out into the front of the store. The sound faded like a passing train, dropping another level as the outer door from the range swung slowly closed behind them.
Dazed, with the aftereffects of the shots still sending up a muffled buzzing in my ears, I let my hands drop to my sides and stared dumbly at Reynolds’s body in front of me.
At least he’d fallen half on his side with his face tilted away from me, so I didn’t have to look at it. His heart had ceased to pump fluids round his system, but the damage to his skull was sufficient that gravity ensured they continued to leak out of the entry wound anyway. A dark pool was seeping into the concrete around his head.
It was suddenly very quiet in there, and very cold. My crutch had fallen too far away for me to reach and I found I couldn’t move in any case. I’d overstressed just about everything to make this last effort for Ella. Now it was done there was nothing left inside. I could almost feel my mind begin to drift. I remembered her screams. We’d saved her life, yes, but at what cost?
Somewhere in the far distance, I heard voices and shouting, but I didn’t call out. My only action was to relax the fingers of my right hand enough for the Beretta to fall to the floor next to my foot. If it was the police, I didn’t want there to be any more misunderstandings. And if it was anyone else, well, I simply didn’t have it in me to do any more. Not when the only person at risk now was myself.
The door to the range crashed open behind me, but everything had taken on a surreal, oneiric quality, nothing was quite true anymore. I didn’t jump, couldn’t turn my head as a figure moved round in front of me from the right. I wasn’t even surprised when I saw who it was.
Felix Vaughan was carrying his favorite.45 H amp;K pistol in a double-handed grip and this time he had the suppressor attached to the end of the barrel. He approached Reynolds with soft-footed caution until he saw the gaping head wound. He paused a moment, staring at the body without expression. Then he straightened, shrugged out of his soldier’s skin and let some pretense of civility cloak him again.
“You?” he asked calmly.
“Yes,” I said in a remote voice. Staying upright was becoming an effort now. My right leg had begun to shake from the strain of taking all my weight. My vision was tunneling down, prickling at the edges. For the first time since I’d entered the range, I realized that every breath burned a dark molten hole in the bottom of my lung.
“I assume the one in the stockroom is yours, also?”
Ah. Too late to call that doctor now, then….
I didn’t answer, but he nodded as though I had. He looked at me for a moment longer, a hard penetrating stare that stripped away the outer layers and laid me bare. I slid my gaze away, ashamed, and he crouched to better inspect Reynolds’s face.
“Good shot,” he said at last, with quiet intensity “Well done.”
And getting praise from him brought the whole of my revulsion for the actions I’d just taken bubbling to the surface. My stomach heaved. I whirled away from him and put too much weight through my injured leg. It collapsed under me.
Vaughan caught me with surprising speed before I hit the floor. I should have been grateful but instead I fought against him, ineffectually and without technique, until I was utterly exhausted. It didn’t cause him much difficulty, nor did it take long.
I leaned against the rough fabric of his coat and shut my eyes. He smelt of wood smoke and wintergreen. Anything was better than the dull coppery odor of Reynolds’s blood.
In the periphery of my awareness, I heard more footsteps, running this time. Vaughan leaned back from me and called out to whoever was approaching. A second later the door crashed open again and then it was Sean who was in front of me, lifting me out of Vaughan’s arms and up into his own as though I weighed nothing. I let him do it. The fight had gone out of me now and I doubt I could have made it out under my own steam.