“I’m not worried about me, Jamie,” she said. “I’m sorry—”
“It’s better like this. You have control over it, this way. I’m sure—you know where to shoot, right? So that it’s over quickly. For Shelby.” I swallowed. “So that—that’s better. It’s better. See?”
“You think I’d let her die.”
“I don’t know what I think, I can’t think—”
“I should have told you to run,” she whispered.
I laughed a little at that. What else was I to do? “I think you did. But I’m kind of stubborn when it comes to you.”
She nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut.
When she opened them again, I could see that she was furious.
“This is as bad as it gets,” she said to me, and it was almost like she was giving me an order. “The hard part’s almost over.”
This is as bad as it gets.
Lucien snorted. “Adorable. Are you finished?”
The hard part’s almost over.
“Just to be clear,” Holmes said, her voice thick, “what exactly will happen when I refuse to shoot her?”
“I’ll take care of you,” he said, his gaze flickering over to her. “Then Shelby. Don’t think I’d be so stupid to keep my eyes off you for a—”
He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. In the second his eyes were off me, I’d grabbed the pistol Holmes had dropped onto my legs and fired off two shots into the darkness.
One went through the door, into the room with all the bicycles. It narrowly missed clipping Shelby’s shoulder. In that final second, kneeling there in the hallway, my world had narrowed to be so small, so claustrophobic, that I’d forgotten she was kneeling there. But she wasn’t hurt. Only startled enough to scream, to drop her phone, to pull the bag off her head.
Because it wasn’t Shelby at all. It was Anna Morgan-Vilk, kneeling there in my sister’s shoes, where her father had just offered her up as an honor killing.
My other bullet went into Lucien Moriarty’s leg.
It was a lucky shot. I had never fired a gun before.
He was screaming. He had gone down, hard, and he was screaming, and God, I couldn’t think. Did he still have his gun? No, I thought, Holmes would have gotten it, and I had gone down to my hands and knees on the linoleum, my stomach heaving, my vision gone. Or was that the lights? I wanted to pass out, and there was so much noise in my ears, maybe from the gunshot—I tried to reorient myself—
Fast footsteps, coming toward me.
I scrabbled back against the wall, put my hands up. Anna? Was it Anna? Was she coming to finish the job?
My eyes focused.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth, in her school blazer.
“Lena called the police,” she said, crouching down beside me. She reached out to take my hand, but I jerked away from her. I couldn’t be touched just then. I couldn’t even look at her—I was staring up into the ceiling, Holmes’s pistol in my hands. Elizabeth reached out and clicked the safety back on. “Jamie, it’s okay. Look. Look, I have Lucien’s gun too. I have them both. See? Do you hear me?”
I nodded.
She kept talking, trying to reassure me. “It’s okay. Anna was supposed to keep an eye on me, that’s why I was down here, but she flipped out when she saw her dad, and I managed to text Lena from my pocket and she said that Shepard’s coming, he should be here any second, she had this plan with pulleys and like a feather duster and I think she’s really mad that she didn’t get to do it? But it’s okay, it’s okay, Shepard I guess said he was waiting to hear that—that—”
She had turned to look at Holmes, who had, for the last few minutes, been quietly bleeding on the ground.
Thirty
Charlotte
TIME HAD GONE FRAGMENTED, STRANGE. IT STAYED THAT way for some time.
What I remembered:
Lucien Moriarty shooting me in the shoulder while Watson fumbled for the gun.
The look on Lucien Moriarty’s face as he fired. Something like an angel seeing the gates of heaven, exaltation, et cetera. It was fascinating.
Thinking Oh, I’ve been shot, in the same manner one would think about ordering takeout.
Watson yelling. A gurney. More yelling, mostly Watson, though I thought I heard Shepard join into the fray. Black. Roiling black, laced through with bits of bright pain, and me saying No morphine, you can’t, I’m an addict, or I thought I did—could they hear me, through the oxygen mask? A monitor, beeping.
I remember, too, asking for my mother.
5b. I didn’t get my mother. I got my brother instead.
Milo shouting Watson down in an elevator, saying This is your fault, this is your fault, you idiot child—
Morphine, which was something I could feel in my system even when that system was broken, blinking red. I could feel it even more then.
Leander, in a dark room that smelled like plastic. The hospital? He was saying something I couldn’t hear. A national newspaper left on my dinner tray, open to the politics section. Someone had circled a headline: Morgan-Vilk Assists in Manhunt; British National Captured.
Shepard asking me questions. Shepard, asking me questions the next day, and the next, and I dreamed them even when he wasn’t there: How long did you know? Were in you touch with anyone at the Yard? What happened to Anna Morgan-Vilk? She’s disappeared—
And Watson. Watson there every day. On the hard plastic couch next to Leander. Watson speaking with the nurse. Watson asleep with his head in his hands. Always there when I was struggling in or out of sleep, when I was still wordless. When my dreams were all red weather. Watson there until he wasn’t.
Thirty-One
Charlotte
Two weeks later
I STILL COULDN’T MOVE MY ARM.
Or my shoulder. Or my neck. There was a physical therapist. We were practicing small motions together. It was straightforward and infinitely boring.
The withdrawal from the morphine was something else. Because it was all the same thing—oxycodone, morphine. Opioids, all of them, and my body rid itself of them the same way. Poorly.
This was boring in its own way, too. But the nausea had passed by then, and the runny nose, the teary eyes. The dreams where I woke up screaming. I had hoped, somehow, that withdrawal this time would be different. It wasn’t. Not really. Only the incessant yawning was new. My body demanded sleep it then refused to allow me. I spent nights watching the television bolted to the wall, shows mostly about men rebuilding houses. This has good bones, they would say, or This is a gut job. The episodes about gut jobs brought back my awful stomach cramps, and so I moved on to hospital shows instead.
Those annoyed the nurses, at least, and I felt a pathetic sort of triumph about that. The worst thing about the hospital was how available I had to be. A kind of girl art exhibit, there for gawking at, to be examined at all angles and interpreted. There were so many comments on my accent that I adopted a Texan swagger just to be contrary. There were so many people in scrubs calling me Miss Holmes. The cheeky addiction specialist called me Charlie. That, I found, I didn’t mind.