The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [168]
“Hide,” she said.
The ensemble had set up on a small stage for that evening’s performance, and Peter dashed around the back of it and crawled underneath a heavy black tarp that had been left there. Nada stepped to the wall, parts of which were ringed with thick blue drapes. She slipped her entire body inside just one of the fabric’s folds.
She glanced toward the ceiling, which she couldn’t see in the dark. She’d started a fire. Russo was probably dead, either from the fall or from being shot. She sniffed at the end of the revolver’s barrel, freshly fired, and wondered what it meant if Peter had killed the doctor. Possibly that her enemies were also his enemies, and that Rhodes had instructed him to save her at any cost.
Crap. She was only about thirty feet closer to getting out of this place. And with no idea what to do next.
She felt the drape move. Nada tensed, fingering the trigger, waiting for somebody’s paw to feel through the curtains and land blindly on her. When it didn’t, she knew something wasn’t right. She extended her hand, careful not to disturb the fabric, in case someone was watching it from the other side.
Her hand touched flesh. And when it did, she heard a gasp.
Nada had her fingers around an arm. A biceps. A very small one. Like a child’s.
She moved slowly toward it, pulling the person toward her at the same time.
The gasp had turned to a sob.
Nada moved her face toward the sound slowly, slowly, until, just inches away, she saw the face of a young woman. Younger than Nada by a few years.
A young Chinese woman holding a violin to her chest. Not just any violin, either. Even in the nearly absent light, she knew its luscious patina and its sensuous shape and the grain of the maple wood and the tint of the stain.
Dad’s Guarneri.
For a moment, Nada, still not quite whole, wondered if she could be facing the ghost of Erica Liu.
“What are you doing here?” Nada whispered, but the girl didn’t speak English, and it was obvious besides. She was one of the musicians scheduled to perform tonight. She was petrified. Paralyzed. Too scared to flee the house with the others. The entire second floor must have been evacuated, but she had remained.
Instead of running, she had decided to hide.
The reverberating click of a door shutting in the chapel. Nada put a hand over the Chinese girl’s mouth. They were here, whoever they were, and whoever they were, they probably meant to do Canada Gold one kind of harm or another. She had to start making quick and difficult decisions. Her only chance was to surprise and shoot. She wasn’t a killer, didn’t want to be a killer.
They, whoever they were, kept refusing to give her any choices.
Nada put a finger to her lips and raised the gun, which drew another frightened short breath from the violinist. Then Nada jumped out from the curtain, revolver out in front of her, finger half squeezed.
71
THE WORD FELT LAME as it slipped from his mouth and he also knew he looked like hell, and then it really hit him, the guns and the knives and the murdered bodies and the threats and the possibility of going to prison for a very long time. There she was, the woman he loved, wide eyes wild, perfect jaw tensed, aiming a gun at him like a pro.
“Hi,” Wayne said.
But the thing that happened next was a surprise. He hadn’t really expected her to be glad to see him. He hadn’t expected Nada to throw her arms around him and to touch his wounds softly, to caress his tired shoulders and legs. He hadn’t expected her to cry with delight at the sight of him. He had daydreamed all those possibilities in the long days before, but he hadn’t really expected any of them.
He had never contemplated that she might shoot him.
There was an explosion and burning inside his triceps and his left arm flung itself behind him and the rest of his big body turned toward it, and all the pain up and down his weary body just shuddered from the intensity of it, every nerve ending he had just afire now, and as he howled in pain and called her name—“Nada!”—there was