He did nothing of the sort. Instead he took two steps closer and pointed the barrel straight at me, lining up his right eye with the sights.
Steffi was shorter than me by a couple of inches so I ducked my head down behind hers so as not to give him a clear target to shoot at.
‘I said drop your gun,’ I repeated. ‘I will cut her if you don’t.’
A strange look came over his face, almost one of indifference to the plight of his mistress. Was he thinking only of his own skin, or had he decided there was another way out of his matrimonial predicament?
He took another step forward and shot Steffi from no more than three feet away in the chest.
The force of the impact threw us both backwards off our feet, Steffi landing heavily on top of me.
My first instinct was that I had also been shot but my mind and body were still operating normally.
For some reason I remembered what Bob himself had said to me on that very first day in the FACSA offices in Arlington. Expanding bullets are less likely to pass right through suspects and into innocent bystanders behind them.
How right he was.
But I feared that my relief was likely to be short-lived. I would be next.
I realised that I had landed on Steffi’s gun. It was sticking into my back. I grabbed it and dived behind the next line of workstations. Now things were a little more even.
But why had he shot Steffi? It didn’t make any sense.
And there was little doubt in my mind that she was dead. She hadn’t been wearing her FACSA bulletproof vest and her chest had been ripped apart by the expanding bullet.
She lay there on the tile floor in front of me, a pool of bright-red blood spreading out beneath her, with non-seeing eyes still wide open as if in surprise.
I crouched behind the workstation, gun at the ready, watching for the moment that Bob appeared.
He didn’t.
Where was he?
I lowered my head down to the floor and looked under the cupboards. All I could see was his ankles and feet. He was standing just the other side of the worktop.
He was a professional marksman, regularly practised, and I had only fired a gun once since I’d left the army, many years before. However, one never forgets how to aim and pull a trigger.
I reached under the cupboard with my arms fully extended, holding the Glock 22C as still as I could. The end of the silencer was only twenty-four inches or so from Bob’s feet. Surely I couldn’t miss from here.
I closed my left eye, looked along the sights with my right, and squeezed the trigger as smoothly as I could manage.
The gun leaped in my hand with the recoil as the round went off. It all seemed a bit surreal without an accompanying deafening bang, the only sound being the mechanic clanging as the gun’s mechanism automatically ejected the empty cartridge and reloaded. However, the scream from Bob was amply loud enough to make up for it.
I hadn’t missed. The bullet appeared to have caught him square on the right ankle bone and its subsequent expansion had almost torn his foot clean off.
I didn’t go to his aid. He still had his gun and I was in no doubt that he’d use it.
Instead, I ran for the door to the restaurant before he too worked out he could also shoot me at floor level.
Logic told me that Bob couldn’t have run after me with only one functioning foot but, nevertheless, I sprinted across the deserted restaurant, through the empty cavernous betting hall beyond, and down the stairway towards the grandstand exits.
Indeed, I didn’t stop running until I reached a lone uniformed guard at the security desk in the main lobby.
‘Call the cops,’ I shouted at him. ‘There’s been a murder.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘And the cops are already here investigating it.’
I stared at him. He knows? How does he know?
‘So where are they then?’
‘With the body,’ the guard said somewhat matter-of-factly.
‘Whose body?’
It was his turn to stare at me, as if I was the idiot.
‘The groom who was murdered. Over in the barns.’
Did you deal with the groom? Steffi had asked.
All done, Bob had replied.
‘No,’ I said to the security guard, finally understanding. ‘There’s been another murder. Here in the grandstand. In one of the kitchens. Call the cops again.’
34
Everything considered, it turned out to be quite a busy night for the Nassau County Police Department. Almost their total on-duty manpower ended up at Belmont Park for one reason or another.
There was considerable confusion and I seemed to be the cause of most of it.
Initially, in spite of my protestations that I was all right, I was dispatched by ambulance to the emergency room of a local hospital to have my arm dealt with. The bleeding had decreased to a mere ooze, but there was still a nasty gash that required treatment.
It was while a doctor was cleaning and stitching the wound under local anaesthetic that more police turned up at the hospital to arrest me for the murder of one federal special agent, namely Stephanie Dean, and for the grievous bodily harm of another, viz Robert Wade.
Try as I might to explain to them that it had been Robert Wade who had killed Stephanie and that I had been the one they had shot at first, I was eventually handcuffed and frogmarched out of the hospital and into a waiting squad car.
At the police station, I was photographed and fingerprinted, plus I had a swab taken of my saliva for DNA. However, it was the discovery in my pocket of a groom’s ID card in the name of Patrick Sean Murphy that caused the greatest excitement, and not only because the photograph on it didn’t resemble me as I now was.
It transpired that the said Patrick Sean Murphy, an Irishman, was being sought as the prime suspect in the murder of the dead groom.
My repeated pleas to the lead detective that I was, in fact, one Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley, an Englishman, on loan from the British Horseracing Authority to the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency, fell on deaf ears.
‘Call the Deputy Director of the agency,’ I told him. ‘He’ll vouch for me.’
But the detective didn’t believe me and the discovery of an United States Permanent Resident Card in my wallet, also in the name of Patrick Sean Murphy and with my matching thumbprint, was all the proof he needed that I was lying.
He kept asking me the same questions over and over again, and I gave him the same answers on each occasion.
‘Why did you kill a federal law-enforcement officer?’
He clearly took a very dim view of that.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Why did you shoot at another?’
The police had already done a powder-residue test on my hands. I was sure it had registered positive. And my prints would be on Steffi’s gun.
‘Because he was trying to kill me.’
‘And why would that be? Was it because you had already killed his colleague?’
I told him the whole story from the beginning at least four times but it was quite clear he didn’t believe me. It sounded too improbable, even to my ears.
‘Go and look in the roof space,’ I said. ‘You’ll find the broken bulbs and a bullet hole in the stepladder. And who do you think shot me?’
I showed him the stitches in my arm, which were now hurting again as the local anaesthetic wore off.
The detective changed tactics.
‘Why did you kill the groom?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t even know which groom has been killed.’
The detective consulted his papers.
‘Mr Ríos, a US citizen from Puerto Rico. Diego Manuel Ríos.’