“Everyone freeze.”
She heard a groaning noise coming from the edge of the steps, where Peter had pointed his rifle and had likely fired the three shots. It sounded almost human. Had he shot someone? Was that person lying down there?
“Peter,” Joan called out from forty feet away. “You’d better put that gun down. I figured out what you did. I know that it was you all along. And if you drop that gun, we can talk about it.”
Again, Peter lifted the gun sight to his eye. This time, he was aiming his rifle directly at Joan. But before he could squeeze
off a shot, Joan fired.
Not once, but three times.
And the sound of the gun was not pytoo, pytoo, pytoo.
It was BAM, BAM, BAM.
The sound was deafening, and the aftershocks echoed off the exterior walls of the tiny cottage. Peter yelped, grabbed his gut, and went down to the ground. His body curled into a ball.
At that moment, a man came galloping across the lawn from the direction of the main house.
And he was screaming, “Peter, Peter! Oh, my God, Joan! You shot Peter!”
Chapter 26
Claire had left her handbag at the breakfast table, which meant that she didn’t have a phone on her.
Holy shit, she didn’t have a phone.
She ran past Joan over to the man called Peter, who was on his back on the grass. The other man, whom Claire took to be Robert Murphy, was cradling Peter’s head and pleading with him, asking him not to die.
A quick visual exam told Claire that Peter had taken a shot under his rib cage. The man was probably bleeding internally. He’d taken another bullet to his left thigh, which was spouting blood like a small fire hose.
Peter was conscious, and he seemed to be in excruciating pain. In between moans, he was gasping to Robert, “It had to be done. I had to do it.”
What was he talking about?
Claire directed Robert to take off his belt so he could make a tourniquet above the bullet hole in Peter’s thigh.
“Robert, cinch it and hold it tight. Good. I’m going to make sure an ambulance is on the way. Do not let him move. Do you hear me?”
Robert nodded. Tears were running down his cheeks. “He has PTSD. From a stint he did in Afghanistan.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He freaks out sometimes. Jesus Christ. Peter.”
Claire told Robert to try to keep Peter calm. Then she stood up to look for Joan.
And she saw her. Joan was walking back toward the house at a leisurely pace. She was still holding the gun at her side. She’d simply turned her back on the bloody, awful scene that had blown up in her own backyard. All because of the gunshots she’d fired.
But in Claire’s opinion, Joan had shot Peter in self-defense. Those shots had saved her life and probably Claire’s, too. She must be in shock. That was understandable. But now that a man’s life was on the line, Joan had to snap out of it.
Claire yelled, “Joan! Call an ambulance!”
“Okay,” said Joan. But she didn’t quicken her pace. She just continued to stroll up the soft, grassy lawns toward the house.
“Joan, they don’t call this a matter of life and death for no reason! If you don’t hurry up, Peter could actually die!”
Joan turned and seemed to give Claire’s words some thought. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “There’s a landline in the pool house.”