Reckless

The bullet hit Hunter at such close range, he seemed to stop in midair, as if someone had pressed freeze frame on a movie, or an unseen hand had reached down and grabbed him from above. Then, like a sack of rocks, he dropped to the ground.

Tracy stared down in horror.

Lying on his back, his arms spread wide, Hunter’s lifeless eyes gazed emptily upwards, at nothing.

CHAPTER 32

THERE WAS NO TIME for tears. No time for shock. No time for anything.

Hunter Drexel was dead, and in a few seconds Tracy would be too.

Tracy’s gun was still on the coffee table, about twenty feet away. More in desperation than in hope, she made a run for it.

“Oh no you don’t.”

Cameron lunged after her, grabbing hold of the back of her leg. Tracy felt herself falling forwards, with the same slow-motion sensation she’d had for the last, agonizing minute, as if she were watching this happen to someone else, yet somehow remained utterly powerless to stop it. Her head smashed painfully into the table. Blood gushed down her forehead into her eyes, partially blinding her. Cameron tightened his grip on her legs as Tracy’s fingers scrambled desperately for the gun. By some miracle she grasped it, gripping the cold black metal for dear life. But there was no chance

to shoot. Cameron was on top of her now, his full body weight pressing Tracy down against the hard wood of the table, crushing her, squeezing the breath from her body like air from an old set of bellows. Blood, warm and thick, oozed from the gash on her forehead.

“Don’t fight me, Tracy. Don’t make this harder.”

Tracy could feel Cameron’s breath in her ear and his heartbeat hammering against her back.

She managed to twist her body slightly to one side, just enough to bring a knee up into Cameron’s groin. It was a move she’d learned years ago from a friend of Gunther’s, Tai Li, a martial arts expert whom Gunther had said she and Jeff ought to meet.

“Self-defense can be important in your line of work, my dears,” Gunther had told them. “Spend a few hours with Tai. You won’t regret it.”

That was a long time ago. Tracy still remembered how she and Jeff had dissolved into giggles during Sensei Li’s classes. Tai Li was old and wizened, with a face like a pickled walnut—although, as Jeff used to say, a walnut would have had more of a sense of humor. The old man took Jujitsu very seriously, barking instructions at Tracy and Jeff like a drill sergeant. Tracy remembered almost none of what he’d taught her. But this particular move had stuck with her, and it had come in handy more than once.

Cameron yelped in pain and rolled off her. His gun had dropped to the floor in the melee. Tracy kicked it aside, sending it skidding across the parquet floor like a puck on an ice rink.

“Bitch!” he hissed. The pain had made him angry.

It was now or never. Aiming her gun towards Cameron’s leg, Tracy fired. But this time he was too quick for her, knocking her arm upwards, so the gun flew out of her hand and the bullet lodged uselessly in the ceiling. Shards of plaster rained down like snow. The next thing Tracy knew Cameron had grabbed her by the shoulders. He was forcing her down on to the table but this time on her back, so that she was looking up at him. Sweat poured from his forehead and dripped onto Tracy’s skin. His face, the same face she had loved and that had made love to her just weeks earlier, was unrecognizable now, contorted in an ugly combination of anger and pain. His blond hair stuck to his scalp like the wet pelt of a dog.

He is a dog, Tracy told herself. An animal, wild and deadly and without compassion.

His hands began to close around Tracy’s neck, the fingers coiling around her windpipe like a boa constrictor. “I’m sorry, Tracy,” he told her, wheezing with the effort of holding her down. “I never wanted this.”

To her own surprise, Tracy felt panic start to sweep over her like an icy wave.

She’d told herself countless times since Nick’s death that she no longer feared her own. But now, as Cameron’s grip tightened and she fought and gasped for breath, her body’s survival instinct took over. She felt frightened, and angry.

Who was this man to rob her of life?

Who was he, Cameron Crewe, to decide who lived and who died? Whose lives mattered and whose did not? What truths got to be told and what hidden?

No. Tracy wouldn’t allow it!

But there was nothing she could do.

Her legs flailed wildly, uselessly. Her arms, pinned down by Cameron’s knees, twitched and jerked pathetically of their own accord in a grotesque dance of death. Froth was forming at her mouth as she strived vainly to free herself from his choking grip, her energy failing with each oxygen-starved moment. Tracy could feel her eyes bulging, the blood racing around her skull as if her head were about to explode. In the movies strangulation was quick, a few seconds of struggle and then peace. But this wasn’t like that at all. She hadn’t blacked out. Instead she could do nothing but look up and watch as a man she had once thought she loved murdered her, slowly and painfully, the effort of snuffing out her life visible in his flared nostrils and ugly, popping veins.

Frustrated himself by how long it was taking, Cameron began to shake her violently like a terrier with a rat between its jaws. He’s trying to break my neck, thought Tracy. She visualized her brain bouncing off the walls of her skull, like a soft pupa inside its cocoon. The pain was excruciating. She no longer thought of survival. Only of the agony being over.

And then, just like that, it was.

There was no bang. At least none that Tracy heard. Instead the bullet sounded like nothing more than moving air, a gentle whoosh, as if somebody—God?—were blowing her a last merciful kiss.