“He was wrong. He didn’t know what he was saying. He was pissed at me for leaving him. He just took it out on you. He shouldn’t have said what he did.”
She glared at him, her eyes suddenly glistening with tears, the grip on the gun now shaky.
“You can kill me if you want, but don’t hurt Tyler. None of this is his fault.”
“It’s your fault!” she blurted out.
“That’s right. It is. This is not about him.” He reached out to her and inched forward. “Just give me the gun, Laura. You don’t have to kill anybody else. We’ll get you the help you need.”
She smiled, and the look on her face was truly paralyzing. “You asked back at the shack how this was going to end, Will. Well, not by my giving you my gun. It’s going to end like this.”
She drew closer still and her finger went to the trigger guard. This was it.
Tyler screamed.
Robie whirled.
He saw the armored head coming out of the water, barely two feet from them. He had lost track of the gator that could swim faster than any Olympian.
Yet as Robie eyed the grue
some creature, everything seemed to slow down for him. His heartbeat eased, his blood pressure dropped a few points. His breathing calmed.
Cold zero.
His little brother was not going to die in the jaws of a gator.
Robie took aim, with his naked eye instead of through optics, and threw the stone, not at Victoria but at the gator. His aim was as good as it had been back when he was flinging touchdowns for Cantrell High. The stone hit the gator directly in the eye with great force. Blood spurted out of the socket. The creature’s jaws snapped open but it backed away, and the now-half-blinded reptile slid into the water once more.
Robie turned to Victoria. She was within six feet of him now, covering the distance in one long stride.
Two-year-old Tyler could have pulled the trigger and killed him at that range.
And Robie was out of weapons. And ideas.
The muzzle was right in his face now.
He looked at the woman and her smug, triumphant expression.
“I hope it was worth it,” he said quietly.
“You’ll never know how much. Who loves you, Will? Surely not me.”
The shot rang out.
Robie braced for the impact. He imagined himself falling to the dirt, nothing but blackness for a future.
He opened his eyes in time to see Victoria still staring at him.
But the smug expression was gone, replaced with surprise.
And blood was flowing down the side of her face, reaching her lips and then passing to her chin, like a river following its banks.
Robie felt something warm on his face. He touched the spot and then pulled his hand back to reveal the blood there.
Her blood.
The next instant Victoria toppled sideways and hit the dirt, the gun falling from her dead hand.
Robie staggered back as Tyler started screaming. He reached the boy and lifted him up, his injured arm surprisingly numb.
He looked to his left.
And saw the person.
The gun was still pointed at where Victoria had been standing a few moments ago.
Then it slowly lowered.
“Dad?” said Robie in disbelief. He had thought that it would be Reel, with some Herculean effort, standing there.
For one long moment Dan and Will Robie stared at each other over the distance of a fatal shot fired. Then Dan dropped his pistol, hurried over, and hugged his sons with the little strength he had left.
Chapter
78
WAKE UP, SLEEPY boy.”
Robie slowly opened his eyes, the effects of the anesthesia fading as he did so. He hadn’t slept this well in years.
As his vision focused Sheila Taggert came into view. She was not in uniform.
“Doc said you came through it just fine,” said Taggert.
Robie slowly nodded. A lot had happened since his father had appeared at the river’s edge and fired that shot. Part of it was blurry and part of it was crystal clear.
They had gone back to the shack, gotten Reel, and driven off in the same ambulance that Robie’s father had been loaded into back at the Willows.
While his father drove with Tyler buckled in the seat next to him, Robie had called Taggert and triaged Reel on the way to the hospital. She had been immediately taken into surgery.
It was only when Reel was safely away that Robie had collapsed from his own blood loss and what was later determined to be a broken clavicle and a perforated artery in his arm that had come close to rupturing.
He had been stabilized and then taken by medevac chopper to Jackson for the surgery that had permanently fixed his injuries.
Robie focused more fully on Taggert. In a croaky voice he said, “Jessica?”
“She’s going to be fine. She came out of surgery fine, Will.”
He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. When he reopened them he said, “My dad showed up in an ambulance? How?”
Taggert drew up a chair and sat down next to him.
“Well, the way my colleague laid it out to me, your daddy sat up in that ambulance, took the deputy’s weapon, and made everyone get out, and then he drove off in the damn thing.”
“But how did he know where we were?”
“I have not been made privy to that information.”
“Where is he now?”
“At home. With Ty.”
Robie slowly nodded again. Though the anesthesia was receding he still felt in a fog. It was disconcerting. He didn’t like it. “Is Ty okay?”
“Physically, yes. Emotionally? It might take a while. I got briefed a little, but you’re really the one who knows everythin’ that happened. We’re goin’ to need a statement from you when you feel up to it.”
“I know,” said Robie groggily. “Don’t worry. I won’t be forgetting a single detail. Ever.”
“So, Laura Barksdale, huh? Who would have ever thought?”
“Yeah,” said Robie. “Who would’ve thought?”
* * *
A week later Robie was brought back to Cantrell and spent several hours with Sheriff Monda and Agent Wurtzburger. Evidence linking the crimes across the various states was compared with forensic evidence taken from Victoria’s body. The results matched, and the case was closed on each of them.
The woman had indeed been busy.
He was reunited with Reel the next day.
She was in a wheelchair, looking pale and tired. The shot fired by Victoria had done more internal damage than was first thought. A full recovery was expected to take at least a few more weeks. Clearly not fast enough for her.
After Robie filled her in on everything they sat together in a room at the Cantrell police station.
“Mississippi did not turn out to be so good for us,” said Reel, wincing slightly as she adjusted herself in the wheelchair.
“No, it didn’t.” Robie fell silent and studied the floor. His arm was back in a sling and would be for a while.
“What?” she finally asked.
“I left you behind, Jess. I…”
“You had no choice, Robie. You were between a rock and a hard place. You took Ty. You saved him from that…monster.”
“I was going to come back for you.”
“I had no doubt. I only wished I could have been the one to shoot her.”
“When I saw my dad I’d never been more stunned in my life.”