Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

Heart pounding, body struggling, Kayla watched the two men play a lethal kind of hide-and-seek.

Obviously Rand had figured out where Bertone was waiting behind a wall. Instead of continuing down the shredded corridor, Rand had retreated and reentered the maze from the front.

Kayla watched, worked, and tried to breathe through the duct tape as Rand ghosted up the metal stairs. Halfway to the top, he looked up. He ran up the rest of the way, grabbed a handful of wires, and ripped.

Another camera went out.

No shots followed.

Sweating, terrified, she wrestled with the cuffs and watched as Rand disappeared from the monitors. She looked overhead at the network of catwalks and observation platforms for the action below.

There was no cover.

And no cameras to track him.

Watching, raking her gag against the rough console as she struggled, Kayla saw Rand move down the catwalk one slow, gliding step at a time, scanning the maze below for movement. She could tell when he spotted her in the control room in the center of the maze.

Rand shifted the weapon from his chest to his back and eeled toward the control room on his belly.

Bertone was nowhere in sight.

Kayla gave up on her cuffs for the moment and struggled toward a bank of monitors, pointing with her bound feet, clearly wanting Rand to look at the TVs.

Two rooms away, he watched the big screens that were still working. Each was being fed in rotation by several cameras, perhaps as many as a dozen cameras covering the tactical course. The right-hand screen rotated through a blank monitor every four or five seconds, one of the holes he’d left in the coverage.

Kayla breathed hard through her nose and watched the screens like a bird watching a snake. Rand watched with her through several cycles.

A flash of movement.

Bertone was sneaking back across the corridor near the end of the maze, still carrying the heavy M-60 like it was an assault rifle. He was sweating but not breathing hard.

Damn, that’s one strong bastard, Rand thought. It will take a lot of lead to bring him down.

And he was closing in on Kayla.

On the monitor she saw Bertone head for a concealed door in the control room. She slumped back against the console just before Bertone walked in.

She forced herself not to look at the ceiling catwalk.

Bertone gave her an amused look. The blood on the floor told its own story about her useless struggles. He focused on the monitors.

Motionless, Rand hugged the catwalk and sweated. He could hear his own breathing again; the deafness from the blast of the M-60 had faded. That meant Bertone’s hearing was back online, too. Moving on the metal catwalk to get closer to Bertone would be difficult, but the range was too great for Rand to be accurate with a borrowed pistol.

Kayla was too close to the target.

Bertone studied each of the monitors through a complete sequence. Nothing moved. He shifted the M-60 and cat-footed it back to his peephole overlooking the corridor.

Kayla rolled as far as she could from Bertone’s position, wanting to give Rand as much of a firing field as possible. Watching slugs ricochet off the stone lobby floor had been an education.

Am I making enough noise? she asked Rand silently.

She threw in some shoe scrapes and muffled thumps. She balanced on the tightrope of helping Rand cover his approach, yet not making so much noise that Bertone knocked her out-which he’d done before he found the duct tape.

Rand used Kayla’s sound as cover, closing in on the control room. Now he could see a Glock pistol with an extended magazine lying on a narrow table beside one of the screens. A Glock tricked out like that was a mini machine gun, twenty shots on semi- or full automatic.

Using Kayla’s muffled thrashing, Rand eeled to the place where another catwalk cut across the shooting house. Bertone hadn’t moved from his ambush spot.

Now, Kayla thought. Time to see if those yoga classes live up to their ads.

It was her last chance. If Bertone found her, she would die. But then, he was planning to kill her anyway.

After he made her scream some more.

She shifted and wiggled and strained until she fell over. She glanced at the screen and saw that Bertone hadn’t moved. She forced her cuffed hands over her butt, down her legs, then fought her ankles and feet through.

Her blood helped to grease the way.

When she was finished, she was sweating, her chest was heaving, and she felt like she’d strained every muscle in her arms. She was still cuffed, but at least her hands were in front of her.

She peeled down enough of the gag to breathe more easily, then dragged herself over to the ugly pistol Bertone had left behind. Her shoulders ached in time to the rapid beat of her heart.

She watched the screen.

Bertone hadn’t moved.

She pushed herself to her knees and grabbed the gun. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked, but she guessed it would have a hard recoil. She knew enough to recognize the safety. It wasn’t on. Very carefully she set the pistol next to her on the floor. Watching the screen, she started clawing at the duct tape around her ankles. This time the blood got in her way, making her fingers slip. An inch at a time, she managed to peel the sticky stuff off.

She glanced up at the catwalks as she pulled the tape free.

Rand was grinning like a pirate. He gestured with one hand, sweeping her back out of the line of fire he would have to use if Bertone came back into the room.

She glanced at the screen again.

It was empty.

Arizona Territorial Gun Club

Sunday

2:44 P.M. MST

Bertone moved with incredible speed for a man of his bulk. By the time Kayla caught the motion on another screen, he was in the hallway just outside, his heavy gun pointed at the catwalk.

Rand saw him before Kayla did. He threw himself to the side and tried to pull the AK-47 into firing position. Something hung up on the catwalk. Suddenly the gun spun off and fell down into the opening below. He lunged for a narrow steel observation platform as he grabbed his pistol.

The sound of the M-60 deafened him all over again.

The hail of heavy slugs punched and clanged and sang around him as he wriggled on his stomach to the edge of the steel platform. A fragment of metal ricocheted so close that he felt a burning line drawn across one eyebrow. Pistol ready, he leaned over the edge just enough to see Bertone.

Too far for a pistol.

But not too far for the machine gun.

Bullets punched and exploded around Rand. Bertone was chewing the observation platform into ragged steel lace.

Rand rolled over and over. It was suicide for him to stay on the platform and certain death if he went back to the catwalk. Ignoring the blood dripping down his face, he took a new position, leaned over the edge, and fired two times, the shots a bare instant apart.

Bertone jerked and swung the machine gun. Rand kept firing as he watched the muzzle brake of the M-60 turn into a tunnel of death looking for him.

Finding him.

He kept pouring bullets into Bertone. He might as well have been pumping bullets into a tree for all the good it was doing. At this range, the little bedside pistol just wasn’t getting the job done.

Or Bertone was wearing body armor.

Kayla stepped out of the control room and closed in until she couldn’t miss Bertone. Eyes open, jaw clenched, she aimed at the back of his head and held the trigger down. Bullets and fire came in a continuous stream until the magazine was empty and the slide locked back.

With a violent shudder she flung the gun away and turned her back on the twitching Bertone. She had taken all she could, and then she had taken more.

She was done.

Distantly she heard sirens screaming and Rand talking to her. His arms held her.

“Easy, love, easy,” he said. “It’s over.”

She closed her eyes and sagged against him. “You sure?”

He looked at what had once been Andre Bertone. “Yeah, I’m sure. Body armor only protects what it covers.”

Leaning on each other, they walked slowly out of the bloody shooting house, toward the sound of sirens pouring in through the shattered front doors.

Phoenix

May

Kayla stood close to Rand and watched a lone hummingbird dip and drink, dip and drink, a tiny feathered pump sucking nectar from a feeder dangling above her apartment balcony. When the bird leaped back, hovered, and darted off into the velvet dusk, Kayla sighed and straightened.

“Okay,” she said, “I’m ready now.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I need to.”

He didn’t argue. He knew what some of her dreams were like. He’d held her through them.

She’d held him through his.

He shut the patio door, threaded his way through the painting gear that had taken over the living room, and went to the TV. An unmarked DVD stuck out like a silver tongue from the slot.

As he bent to shove the disc into place, she asked automatically, “How are your ribs?”

“Ask me next week, when we get to the cold, wet Pacific Northwest.”

“Do you want to stay here?”

“Not unless you do.”

She shook her head. “I’ve always wanted to see Washington’s San Juan Islands.”

He picked up the controller and sat next to her on the couch. “If you’d kept your grandmother’s bank account, you could own those islands.”