The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [172]
Nada said, “Let me see it,” and Kloska flipped it carelessly to her, mumbling something about “goddamn fingerprints,” but his attention and his gun focused on the wounded men.
Nada studied the disk, turning it slowly, studying the edges, wondering about its provenance, finding at last an imperfection with her finger, an almost invisible scratch across one face of it, a scratch that ran right through the crotch of the silhouette of the Colossus of Rhodes, and as if everything snapped back into sharp focus at exactly that moment, she remembered how she’d amused herself by looking at the scar on this chip and thinking how pleasant it would be to witness the forced castration of the rapist Phillip Truman right before she’d wrapped it up with Kerry Meadows’s phone number and tossed it across the room.
To Bea Beaujon.
For the first time in her life, Nada felt the wolf inside her, the wolf she had always feared, the wolf her father had warned her about—I just couldn’t stop the wolf.
The wolf she once thought she’d inherited from him.
She had been mistaken.
Nada pointed the barrel down and away, firing in the same motion, startling Wayne and the violinist and Kloska, too, with the sound of the blast, but not Peter, who took the bullet silently in the cheek from just a few feet away. A small amount of blood squirted out the hole in front; a small amount of bone followed the slug out of the soft part of the neck in back as blood and spinal fluid oozed onto the floor.
After three long beats, the violinist screamed. Wayne let out a staccato breath and without opening his eyes mouthed, Thank you.
“Jesus,” said the cop, but he didn’t move as two figures appeared in the doorway behind him.
“Hi, Mom.” Nada bounced the sight of her gun from head to head. She stepped slowly backward and upward into the haze of smoke. The violinist repeated every step beside her. “Hi, Gary.” She tried to load her voice with as much sarcasm and loathing as she could manage.
Jameson watched the smoke drop behind them. Alarms beeped from every room, every hallway, every floor. “You’re burning down my house,” Jameson said.
Nada said, “Let’s call us square.”
Jameson looked directly into her eyes and then into Wayne’s and the violinist’s, as well. He glanced at the bodies on the ground without changing expression. “There are more important things than my house.” He stared again at Nada, which meant he was also staring directly into the barrel of her gun.
Another crash from above and behind her, the fire consuming another room. Kloska took a step toward Nada, restraints in one hand.
Nada turned to her mother. “Looks like I’m going to need a favor, Mom.”
Elizabeth looked at Peter Trembley’s body. “Detective, my daughter clearly killed this man in self-defense. You can take Jennings, and my daughter will give you a statement in the morning.”
“Not that simple, Mom,” Nada said. She pointed the revolver up, and then she turned the barrel around, pointing it at her own chest, thumbs on the trigger.
“This is where it is,” she said. “There’s a little nub there, you know, like those tabs at the top of little plastic soldiers. I can take me and my spider out with the same shot. Just like the guy who made these stairs. That makes nobody happy, except maybe me, am I right?”
Jameson lifted his arms and stepped back. Wayne barely moved, but she watched him mouth, God, Nada, no, and she could almost hear the sweet anguish in his voice.
Calmly, Gary Jameson said, “What do we do now?”
Nada, who couldn’t possibly have steadied herself on her own feet, put an arm around the violinist, who stiffened to support her. “Call an ambulance. Call the fire department. Mom, get me your lawyer.”
Kloska said, “What the fuck do you all think is going on here? I just witnessed a goddamn murder.”
No one else seemed to be paying attention to the detective, so Nada continued to ignore him. “And when you call him,” she said,