Second Shot

After all, they’d argued, I was still barely recovered from my wounds. The doctor with the perfect smile had expressed his disbelief that I’d been capable of walking through a building and shooting two men dead at that stage of my recovery. It must have been an act of extreme determination, he said, for someone who had suffered such injuries to do what I had done. But there was something sad in his eyes as he said it, something disappointed. As though he hadn’t expended so much of his energy and skill carefully repairing me, only for me to go out and kill people by way of a thank-you.

Sean and I had flown back into a rainy Heathrow and I’d tried to pick up the pieces of my former life. I worked hard on my rehabilitation, as though if people couldn’t see the physical aftereffects, they wouldn’t see the freak I’d become. The stuff of children’s nightmares, who sent a little girl I would cheerfully have died to protect into a fit of pure hysterics at the sight of me.

I hadn’t seen Ella since that day at the surplus store when I’d killed the man who was threatening her as he’d held her in his arms. It was for the best, the child psychiatrists told me, if she never saw me again. My image was forever tainted with the kind of horrors no one of Ella’s age was ever supposed to witness. Just the mention of my name, they told me, caused her enormous distress. The very fact that it did so caused me enormous distress also, but I didn’t tell them that.

Matt had taken her home to the house he and Simone had shared in north London, where the people who claim to be experts in this kind of trauma felt Ella might achieve some kind of stability. Harrington’s bank had arranged a trust fund that, properly managed, would ensure she never wanted for anything in her life.

Apart, possibly, from a mother.

And I hope, when she’s old enough to understand, that Matt will tell her the truth about what happened to Simone. Better for Ella to have the cold hard facts than to half-remember, and to wonder. And maybe to have history repeating itself in twenty years’ time when she goes looking for her grandfather and finds him in a New Hampshire prison serving life for the murder of his wife.

After all, if Simone had been told the truth about the real Greg Lucas, would she have wanted so badly to track him down? Would six people now be dead?

“You did what you had to,” Sean said now, as though he could read my thoughts. “Reynolds would have killed her.”

“Would he?” I turned back to face him. “He knew what Ella was worth-and she wasn’t worth anything dead. Maybe-”

Sean shook his head. “You couldn’t let him take her,” he said. “And you said as soon as he saw you-the state you were in-he went for a shot. You did what you had to,” he repeated. “Let it go.”

From the hallway we heard the apartment door open and a voice call an echoing hello.

“In here,” Sean said, not taking his eyes away from my face.

Parker Armstrong ducked his head into the living room, smiling. A tall, slim man in his early forties, with artistically graying hair that seemed older than his face but not as old as his eyes. Sean’s new partner. My new boss.

“Well?” he said, advancing when he saw us. “What d’you think?”

Sean raised his eyebrow at me. I hesitated just for a second, then plunged into a decision and felt a weight lift as I did so. I turned to Parker and smiled.

“It’s perfect,” I said, and thought I saw his shoulders ease a fraction.

He grinned. “So’s the rent,” he said, wry. “What use is it having family who own property in Manhattan if you don’t abuse your connections, right?”

“Right.”

Parker held his hand out to Sean. “I guess this means we’re in business,” he said.

A slow smile spread across Sean’s face as he took it. “I guess it does.”

“Charlie,” Parker said, offering me the same. “Good to have you with us.” His grip was firm and dry without being overly macho. One of the things I’d liked about him from the outset. “Losing Jakes was a bad time for everyone. He was a good guy. I hope this will be a breath of fresh air for all of us.”

“So do I,” I said, and meant it.

“We’ll get the lease signed for this place when we get back to the office. You guys hungry? You want to go get something to eat?”

We rode south on Sixth towards TriBeCa and the Financial District, in one of the ubiquitous yellow Crown Victoria taxicabs that had the suspension of a water bed. I sat behind the driver, next to the window, watching the vibrant sun-drenched New York streets as they flashed past. Manhattan Island was small enough that it seemed so much more concentrated than London, more intense, and I wondered if I craved that noise and bustle as a means to drown out other voices.

I thought about Ella and wondered how long it would be before the memory of her faded. Her smile, and her healing kiss, and her screams.