Fit to be Tied (Marshals 2)

I started taking clothes down, suits, shirts, and stacking them in my arms, layering them thicker and thicker until my bicep with the bullet in it was screaming as I stood there, legs braced apart, close to the door, waiting.

“Miro!” he roared from out in the hall. “I won’t be able to stay here much longer. Do you really want me to go? You want me to keep haunting your life? Won’t you eventually go mad?”

It was a definite possibility. The not knowing was the worst. I would rather be dead than have Hartley able to scare me for the rest of my life. It was like those awful stories where people were missing and their families didn’t know what happened. They couldn’t grieve, and hope was so hard to hold on to year after year. In all my years in law enforcement, I’d never met anyone who ever said limbo was the preferable option. Bad news, the worst news, was still closure.

“I can hold out longer than you,” I yelled through the door, finally becoming the cat in our game, sick to death of being the mouse.

I heard him running toward the sound of my voice, and seconds later I saw a line of light under the closet door. The bathroom was beside me, and I knew he was in there, checking, realizing where I wasn’t and where I was before I heard only silence.

Later I would think, What a stupid plan! Who came up with that? and realize that there had only been me there, so the idiocy was mine alone.

From the outside, the light flipped on, the door was thrown open and he strode into the closet at the same second he fired at me from point-blank range, to the left, aiming for my heart.

The bullet should have ripped through my chest, but ridiculously, I had all those clothes in my arms, propped against my chest. A stack of layers—so many that it had to look like I was moving in the middle of the night or stealing them in a snatch-and-grab from a department store with the wheelman waiting right out front.

So instead of me going down from a gunshot wound that should have killed me instantly, the bullet hit the layers and altered course, sliding along the top of my shoulder, barely grazing me. At the same second, my adrenaline kicked in and I charged, driving over him in a play that any defensive end would have been proud of—and not because it was particularly agile, but because it got the job done.

Hartley went down hard, slammed to the floor, his head hitting with a thump. I hurled the clothes sideways, found him disoriented and winded, and before he could lift the gun, I fisted my hand in his sweater, lifted him toward me, and punched him in the face.

I hit him many times, stopping only to grab the gun and toss it out of his reach. I stood up and kicked him in the ribs to get him to fold into a fetal position and in the head to knock him out.

I waited, checking for movement, then walked out of the closet, retrieved the Heckler Koch HK45C with the suppressor he’d been using, and walked back to him and made sure he was breathing.

I had the momentary thought that, really, shooting him in the head would be the best end to my day. No one would miss him, I’d be saving the taxpayers a crap-ton of money, and no one would even question why I’d shot an unarmed man. He was Craig Hartley; of course I had to kill him.

The issue was that the more I thought about it, the less appealing it became. Hartley had done enough to me. I didn’t need his death cluttering up my psyche for the rest of my life.

Slamming the door shut, I grabbed the chair from the vanity table, wedged it under the closet’s doorknob, and staggered over to the bed. I would have gone downstairs and out to my truck to get my phone, but I didn’t want to leave Hartley alone. It was fortunate the people who owned the house had a landline—which amazed me in the age of the cell phone—and I used that to call Ian. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, guess where I am?”

“You’re out in Park Ridge for some reason. Kohn tracked your cell phone because you didn’t pick up the fifty times I called. Where the fuck are you?”

“With Craig Hartley in a really nice house that I hope is for sale because I don’t want to think about the—”

“What?” he gasped.

“What?” I heard Kohn echo in the background before I heard him loudly exclaim, “Where the hell are you, Jones?” Ian had put me on speaker.

“I caught Hartley.”