Shadow Man (22 page)

I was the one who shot my daughter.

I hear the sound and marvel at it, before I realize that it is coming from me. It is a shriek, beginning low in the throat and then climbing, octave after octave, until it seems high enough to break glass. There it hangs, like an opera singer’s vibrato. It seems to go on forever. Everything is going black now. Thank God.

19

I
WAKE UP
in a hospital bed to Callie hovering above me. There is no one else here. When I look at Callie’s face, I know why.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“Yes, love,” she says. “I knew.”

I turn my face away from her. I have not felt so listless, so drained of life, since I woke in the hospital after that night with Sands. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I don’t know if there’s any anger in my voice. Don’t care.

“Dr. Hillstead asked me not to. He didn’t think you were ready. And I agreed. Still do.”

“Really? You think you know so goddamn much about me?” My voice sounds raw to me. The anger is there now, hot and poisonous. Callie doesn’t even flinch. “I know this: You’re still alive. You didn’t put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. I have no regrets, honeylove.” She says the next in a whisper. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, Smoky. I loved Alexa, you know I did.”

I snap around at this, look at her, and the anger drains away. Just like that. “I don’t blame you. Or him. And maybe he was right, after all.”

“Why do you say that, love?”

I shrug. I’m tired, so tired. “Because I remember everything now. But I still don’t want to die.” I hunch into myself for a moment as pain
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shoots through me. “Which feels like such a betrayal, Callie. I feel like, if I want to live, then I didn’t love them enough.”

I look over at her, and I see that she is stricken by my words. My Callie, my happy-go-lucky Queen-Hell-on-Wheels, looks like I just punched her in the face. Or maybe the heart.

“Well,” she says after a long moment, “that’s not true. Going on after they’re dead, Smoky—that doesn’t mean you didn’t love them. All it means is that they died and you didn’t.”

I file this profundity away for future thought; I can feel its merit.

“Funny, isn’t it? I’ve always been able to hit what I want with a gun. It’s always come naturally to me. I remember aiming at his head, and then he was so damn fast. I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. He yanked Alexa off the bed and made her take the bullet for him. She was looking right into my eyes when it happened.” My face twists. “You know, he almost looked surprised. With everything he’d done, he still had this look on his face, like for just a moment he thought he’d gone too far. And then I shot him.”

“Do you remember that part, Smoky?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

Callie smiles. It’s a sad smile. “You didn’t just shoot him, honey-love. You filled him up with bullets. You emptied four clips into him, and you were about to reload when I stopped you.”

And just like that, I am there and I do remember.

He’d raped me, cut on me. Matt was dead. I was coasting on waves of pain, surfing in and out of consciousness. Everything was slightly surreal. Like being a little bit drugged. Or the hungover feeling you can get when you take an afternoon nap that’s just a half hour too long. There was a sense of urgency, I could feel it. But it was far away. I was feeling it through soft gauze. I’d have to wade through syrup to get to it.

Sands leaned forward, putting his face close to mine. I could feel his breath on my cheek. It was unnaturally hot. A flash of something sticky—I realized it was his spit, drying on my chest. I shivered once, a full-body shiver. A long, rolling shake.

“I’m going to undo your hands and feet now, sweet Smoky,” he whispered in my ear. “I want you to touch my face before you die.”

My eyes roll toward him, and then roll up into my head. I lose time.
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129

I coast back into awareness and feel him at my hands, loosening them. Coast back out, into the black. Surf in again, he’s at my feet. Cowabunga. Light to shadow, shadow to light. I come to again, and he’s next to me, spooned into my side. He’s naked, and I can feel that he’s hard. His left hand is fisted into my hair, bending my head back. The right is draped over my stomach, and I can feel the knife in it. That breath again, sour and hot.

“Time to go, sweet Smoky,” Sands whispers. “I know you’re tired. You just have one more thing to do before you sleep.” His breathing quickens. His erection stirs at my side, poking into my hip. “Touch my face.”

And he’s right. I am tired. So damn tired. I just want to coast into the black, have it all be done and gone and over. I feel my hand coming up, to do this last thing he wants—and then it happens.

“MOMMY!” I hear Alexa scream. It is a scream of full-throated terror.

It’s a backhanded, bone-rattling slap across my face.

“He told us Alexa was dead, Callie,” I whisper in the hospital room.

“Said he killed her first. I heard her scream, and I realized that he’d lied to me, and I knew—I KNEW—he was going to see her next!” I clench my fist as I remember, and feel my body trembling in anger and terror, all over again.

It was as though someone had detonated a bomb inside me. I did not just come awake, I exploded. The dragon crawled up from inside my belly, and she roared, and roared, and roared.

I smashed Sands’s face, felt his nose crunch under the heel of my hand. He grunted, and I was off the bed and heading for the nightstand where I kept my gun, but he was like an animal. Feral and oh-so-fast. No hesitation. He rolled onto the floor and was sprinting out the bedroom door. I heard his feet pounding on the hardwood floors of the hallway, heading toward Alexa.

And I began to scream. I felt like I was on fire. Everything was turning white hot, adrenaline was burning me up, and the intensity of it was excruciating. Time had changed. It hadn’t slowed down, just the opposite. It sped up. Faster than thought.

I had my gun and was not so much
running
down the hallway as
tele-
porting
down it, moving toward Alexa’s room in flashes rather than steps. And I was fast, damn fast, because he was only just turning into
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her doorway, and then I was there too, and I saw her. On the bed, the gag he had placed around her mouth now loosened. Good girl, I remember thinking.

“MOMMY!” she screamed again, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, rivers of tears. And now I was the animal, no hesitation, raising my gun, aiming for his head . . .

Then horror. Horror, horror, horror, going on forever, never ending, hell on earth.

Then me, screaming. Screaming, screaming, screaming, going on forever, never ending, hell on earth. Me, shooting Sands, over and over and over, determined to shoot him till I was out of ammo, and then—

“Oh Jesus, Callie.” Tears fill my eyes. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I’m so sorry.”

She takes my hand, shakes her head once. “Don’t worry about it, Smoky.” She squeezes my hand, a fierce squeeze. It almost hurts. “I mean it. You weren’t in your right mind.”

Because I remember hearing Callie bust in through my front door, seeing her appear, weapon drawn. I remember her moving toward me with exaggerated caution, telling me to put down my gun. Me screaming at her. Her moving toward me. I knew she wanted to take it away from me, and I knew I just couldn’t let her do that. I still needed to put it to my head, to shoot myself, to die. I deserved to die for killing my child. So I did the only thing that seemed to make sense to me. I pointed the gun at Callie, and I fired.

It’s pure luck that the chamber was empty. Thinking of it now, I remember that she didn’t even slow down, just kept moving toward me until she got close enough to take away the gun, which she tossed to one side. After that I don’t remember very much at all.

“I could’ve killed you,” I whisper.

“Naw.” She smiles again. It’s still a little bit sad, but some of the mischievous Callie shines through. “You were aiming at my leg.”

“Callie.” I say it as a reprimand, albeit a gentle one. “I remember.” I hadn’t been aiming at her leg. I’d been aiming at her heart. She leans forward and looks me right in the eyes. “Smoky, I trust you more than I trust anybody in this world. And that hasn’t changed. I don’t know what else to tell you. Except that I’ll never talk about it with you again.”

I close my eyes. “Who else knows?”

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Silence. “Me. The team. AD Jones. Dr. Hillstead. That’s it. Jones clamped down on it pretty hard.”

Except that’s not it, I think.
They
know. I can tell she has something else to say.

“What?”

“Well . . . you should know: Dr. Hillstead is the only person who knows about your reaction to finding out today. Aside from Jenny and the rest of the team.”

“You didn’t tell AD Jones?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

Callie lets go of my hand. She looks uneasy, a rare thing for her. She stands up and paces a little. “I’m afraid—we’re afraid—if we do, then that’s it. He’ll decide you can never go back to work. Ever. We know you may decide that, anyway. But we wanted to leave the options open.”

“Everyone agreed to this?”

She’s hesitant. “Everyone but James. He says he wants to speak to you first.”

I close my eyes. Right now, James is the last person I want to talk to. The very last.

I sigh. “Fine. Send him in. I don’t know what I’m going to decide just yet, Callie. I do know this—I want to go home. I want to get Bonnie and go home, and try to figure this out. I need to get my head straight, once and for all, or I’m done. You guys can follow up on AFIS and the rest of it. I need to go home.”

She looks down at the floor, then back up at me. “I understand. I’ll get it all into motion.”

She walks toward the door. Stops and turns back to me as she gets to it. “One thing you should think about, honey-love. You know guns better than anyone I’ve ever met. Maybe when you pointed your gun at me, you pulled the trigger because you knew it was empty.” She winks, opens the door, and walks out.

“Maybe,” I whisper to myself.

But I don’t think so.

I think I pulled the trigger because, at that moment, I wanted the whole world to die.