W is for Wasted (Kinsey Millhone 23)

Linton took advantage of the moment to punch Pete in the side of the head. Neither man was in shape for a fight, and their clumsy blows and kicks left both floundering. In reality, they fought for less than two minutes, though from Pete’s perspective, the fistfight seemed to go on forever, his own responses weakening as Linton continued flailing. He managed to shove Pete away from him, then lashed out with a savage side kick to the knee.

Surprised by pain, Pete lost his grip on his gun. He heard it hit the pavement, but he was off balance and was dismayed to find himself falling into the shrubs. Grimly, he extracted himself, aware of how ridiculous the entire encounter was. He knew no good would come of it. He might not lose, but neither would he win.

Linton stepped back, as though declaring a momentary truce, which was fine with Pete. He was winded. He hurt. His lungs burned with every heave of his chest. He made a dismissive gesture and leaned forward, head hanging while he rested his hands on his knees. “Whoo. Forget it. This is nuts. I’m outta here,” he said.

He righted himself and dragged a hand down his face, feeling grit and sweat. He wiped his damp hand on his pants and straightened his jacket.

Linton said, “Look what I got.”

Pete didn’t catch the words. His scarf was missing and he was intent on finding it. He spotted it lying on the path behind him, picked it up, and hooked it around his neck, and then turned toward the street where his car was parked. There was no shame in withdrawing from a battle that was pointless from the get-go and had already played out. That was it for him. He was bushed. It would take him days to recover as it was. He hadn’t gone four feet when he heard the shots.

He looked down with astonishment. A fiery arrow of pain pierced his left side. Pete didn’t see the muzzle flash because his back was turned when Linton fired. Someone looking on might have caught that quick flame of superheated incandescent gas emerging from the barrel in advance of the slug, that small penetrating missile followed by the sudden intense burst of light as gas and oxygen ignited. A pungent smell hung in the air.

Pete turned to Linton with amazement. “Why did you do that?”

He saw that Linton held the Glock, which he must have snatched from the path while Pete’s attention was diverted. He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the man, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He tallied his wounds, neither of which seemed devastating. Linton had shot him once in the side. A second bullet had grazed his right calf. It wasn’t his injuries, but the insult that stung, the violation of the rules of fair play. He’d given up. He’d thrown in the towel. You weren’t supposed to go after a guy once he’d done that.

Pete shook his head, looking down at himself and then at Linton. “Help me out here. I’m hurt.”

Linton gave Pete the once-over, his glance taking in the blood seeping through his pant leg. Even to Pete, the bleeding from the wound in his side didn’t amount to much.

“You’ll be fine,” Linton said. His tone was light, with a touch of condescension, the sort of reassurance a specialist might offer a patient with a medical condition of no real consequence.

He slipped the gun into his coat pocket and turned away, strolling toward the parking lot. His pace was measured. He wasn’t hurried. There was no panic that Pete could make out, though it seemed clear he wanted to get out of the area in the event someone had heard the shots and dialed 911. Pete could conceive of Linton as a man who’d always wondered what it would feel like to shoot another man down. It must have crossed his mind, the idle thought of someone who’d never done much of anything except pull the wool over other people’s eyes. It made a certain amount of sense. If Linton had been good at what he did, he wouldn’t have had to cheat. The gun established his superiority, making him better than he was. It was as simple as that.

Pete felt a fine sheen of sweat break out on his face. He wasn’t sure he’d be fine at all. His early outrage had drained away and he wondered what kind of trouble he was in. Just like that, his vision crowded in on him and he toppled. The arms he flung out in front of him to slow his fall were useless. When his face hit the pavement, he registered little if any pain.

Dimly, he realized he’d broken his nose. He hadn’t believed the good doctor would shoot him and yet here he was, down on the asphalt, a hole in his side and a stinging gash on his calf. His leg was the least of his concerns.

When the bullet tore into him, a fragment of jacket lining had traveled into his flesh along with the slug. A large temporary cavity had bloomed and collapsed. That same slug had struck his rib cage, shattering bone before it veered off at an angle, taking a ragged zigzagging path through his descending colon. The trajectory of the lead had scarcely slowed when it nicked a far-flung tributary of his superior mesenteric artery no bigger than a piece of string, which began to pump out blood in a series of tiny spurts. Even if the bleeding had been caught, the resulting spill of fecal matter into his abdominal cavity would have overwhelmed his system soon afterward. None of this—the nomenclature, the knowledge of anatomy, or the acquaintance with the consequences of internal rupturing—was part of Pete’s thinking as he puzzled the sensations besetting him. He was intimately aware of the savage and destructive tunnel the pellet had plowed as it whipsawed through his organs, but he lacked the language necessary to express his dismay. It would fall to the coroner to translate the damage into its myriad elements, reducing fierce heat and sorrow to a series of dry facts as he dictated his findings, days later, in the morgue.