Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [127]
“Yes, Ripinsky, you can and you will. You’re hurting, and it’s the only way to find out if it’s safe to go on.”
4:54 A.M.
Gray dawn was breaking as I reached the top of the high embankment. The shapes of the rocks and scrub vegetation on the other side had begun to take on definition. The cold sea wind blew more strongly in this unsheltered place. I lay flat on my stomach, then slowly raised my head and looked around.
Things moved down below: they could have been animals, polios, human coyotes—or merely branches stirring in the wind. Like the phantom wolves of my childhood bedtime stories, they slipped in and out of the shadows, eluding identification. For a moment my calm deserted me; I wanted to scramble back down the embankment and run as blindly as I had from the wolves in my long-ago nightmares.
Then the calm reasserted itself, and I knew I was done with stories for good.
I took out my father’s .45 and braced it experimentally on the mound of earth in front of me. Checked my watch again. Nearly five minutes had gone by. I scanned the surrounding terrain, saw no one. Listened. Waited.
Then there were sounds below, echoing in the drainage pipe. I tensed, peering through the half-light. Sniper’s light, they call it—
And there was a sniper.
At first I thought it was only a tamarisk tree moving in the wind. Then I made out a man’s figure, down on the opposite side of the ditch. I squinted, strained to identify details. Medium height and slender, holding a weapon. More noise came from the pipe, and the man slipped forward.
Marty Salazar, with a semiautomatic pistol.
He stood in a place where he wouldn’t be visible from the pipe’s outlet. Would only be visible if you were on his side of the ditch—or up here. He held himself ready, primed to fire, but patient. He’d wait until he identified his quarries, had them clearly in sight, then spray them with bullets. A person coming out of the pipe would never see Salazar. Would never know what hit him.
But he was clearly visible to a person up here. Only yards away—easily within range of her gun. If she was a good shot. And she was—very.
My fingers tightened convulsively on the .45. I relaxed them, steadied the weapon on the mound of earth.
Everything I believed in told me this was wrong. Everything I cared about told me this was right.
One shot, two at most. Shoot to kill. A gun has only one purpose: if you use it, be prepared to take a life.
More noise below. Salazar moved forward, his stance steady, footing firm. He raised the pistol, ready.
I sighted on him. Waited until he was completely still.
And pulled the trigger.
Thirty-Two
Tuesday, June 15
“Listen, Shar, you are rich! What’re you going to do with all that money?”
“Save it for when my unemployment runs out,” I told my brother.
John, Hy, and I were sitting on the purloined park bench on John’s hill, sipping beer and watching the sunset. We’d been there since four that afternoon, and by now felt mellow and a little giddy, and would probably regret our behavior in the morning. But for the time being, a spirit of good fellowship prevailed, a pizza was speeding to us from John’s favorite Italian restaurant, and I’d managed to keep at bay the terrible images that threatened to invade my mind.
Images such as Ann Navarro dropping to the floor as Jaime’s bullet smashed her skull. Such as the flight through Smuggler’s Gulch in the moonless early morning. Such as the murder I’d committed on the embankment above Monument Road,
Well, I wasn’t fending off the images any longer….
The murder: it was just that, no sugarcoating the fact. Sure, the authorities considered it self-defense. Sure, Lieutenant Gary Viner had congratulated me on ridding the county of one of its more noxious vermin. But I’d shot a man in cold blood. Taken his life to get my people through.
Hy glanced at me, frowned, and touched my cheek. “Don’t brood.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. I always can tell.”
John said, “She’s been a brooder her whole life.”
The two