Ready to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Your turn,” he snarled at Pescoli. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this!”

“Drop your weapon, Cort. It’s over.”

“For you.”

“You’re really going to kill me in front of your daughter?”

He didn’t even flinch and she saw his finger move to pull back the trigger.

Automatically, she dropped and rolled, her gun aimed at him.

Blam!

He pulled the trigger.

She fired back at the same moment, gunfire deafening in the still air.

Her shot went wild, over his head. She aimed again but before she squeezed the trigger, another rifle cracked.

As Heidi screamed, Brewster fell to his knees, blood blooming on his chest, the spit foaming from the corner of his mouth turning red. His eyes were wide and disbelieving as he staggered, firing wildly once more. Then the weapon fell from his hands and he sagged into the snow, flopping forward as his sobbing daughter raced toward him.

“Stay away!” Pescoli yelled, her Glock trained on his still-moving body.

Heidi ignored her. Out of her mind with grief, she ran screaming and crying toward the fallen man who lay groaning and writhing in the snow.

Flinging her body next to his, she was whimpering and crying. “Daddy, oh, Daddy, no, no no.” Tenderly, she cradled his head to her body as she rocked back and forth.

In the distance, sirens screamed, but it was too late for Cort Brewster. Spittle, turning red, foamed at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes, though open, were beginning to fix upward, toward the heavens.

“Daddy, please! Don’t die! You can’t die!” Heidi cried, then looked up to a space behind Pescoli. “You killed him!” she screamed. “You killed my dad!”

Hearing the crunch of a boot in the snow, Pescoli turned to spy her son, shaken and white, standing just five feet behind her. The butt of a rifle was pressed to his shoulder and he still stared through the sight of the damned gun Luke had bought him for Christmas.

Epilogue

“So, after all that, you’re not going to quit?” Alvarez asked Pescoli a week after Brewster was finally arrested. They were having lunch at Wild Wills at a table with a view of the falls. The place was full, waitresses scurrying from table to table, the clink of flatware and rattle of glasses competing with the buzz of conversation.

“Just cut back some. Work more normal hours, if I can. That’s what I promised Santana. And now that Brewster’s out of the picture, I think I can make it happen.” Pescoli, starved as usual, was halfway through a chili dog while Alvarez picked at a root vegetable salad.

“It’s lucky he didn’t know about Verdago calling his hit list his Dirty Half Dozen. That’s what really got me thinking, when Wanda mentioned it,” Alvarez admitted. “Why were there seven pictures, not six? It didn’t make sense. Obviously the pictures were Brewster’s, but he wanted it to look like they were from Verdago’s hit list. Verdago never had any photos. That was all Brewster. He figured he’d just add a couple extra to the mix, and he went to great lengths to find pictures of people he wanted dead. Fortunately for him, some of them overlapped with Verdago’s list.”

Pescoli thought back to Brewster standing naked in the cabin and still trying to convince her how smart he was. “He almost got away with it. His list was only three people who just happened to be on Verdago’s list, too: the judge, because she was pressuring him to get a divorce; Grayson, because Brewster wanted his job; and me, because basically he doesn’t like me. I’d made mention of thinking about becoming a PI and he couldn’t have that. I’d be all over him eventually. My gut always told me that something wasn’t right with him. He knew it. And my resignation would never have been enough for him. He wanted me in the ground.”

“You’re too good an investigator to have out there loose.”

“Let’s not forget I’m Jeremy’s mother.”

Alvarez nodded. “He would have kept coming after you.”

“Yeah,” Pescoli said soberly.

Miraculously, Brewster had survived the attack and was in the hospital, under tight security and awaiting arraignment. Though he’d come out of his coma, he wouldn’t be able to walk for a long time, if ever. His spinal cord had been compromised by Jeremy’s bullet, which was still lodged in his spine.

The rumor mill had it that his wife was leaving him, and as the scandal erupted about her husband not only being a adulterer, but a murderer as well, she’d taken Heidi and moved out of state to live, at least temporarily, with her sister in San Leandro, California.

Jeremy and Heidi had been in contact, however, though she hadn’t forgiven him for shooting her father. Pescoli felt badly for the girl, but hoped beyond hope that she found some surfer dude or other California type to take her mind off of her son and the tragedy in Grizzly Falls.

Jeremy, it seemed, rather than being turned off by the experience, was more determined than ever to become a cop. Come spring term, he was starting school full-time and was still volunteering at the department. He’d also become a bit of a hero over the events at Brewster’s cabin, and that led to being hired back at Corky’s Gas and Go.