“I don’t believe that, Lisa. You have done nothing illegal yet.” Well, except point a gun at her, but Maddie would say whatever she had to right now.
“It’s your own fault, you know,” Lisa said, her voice laced with bitterness. “If you’d stayed away from Keith, I wouldn’t have to do this.” She took a step forward, but unfortunately, she kept the gun pointed at Maddie. “I tried to get you to leave him, but you refused.”
Well, that explains the why.
Maddie remembered Keith dating someone named Lisa sometime in the early spring. When she’d become friends with the woman now pointing a gun at her, Maddie never considered she was the same person.
“I—”
“You should’ve walked away when I sent you those pictures. He doesn’t love you. Keith loves me. He’s been using you to make me jealous.”
The woman had so many wires crossed in her brain, who knew what she might accept at this point?
“Hey, I believe you. And I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t love me. I’ll call Keith now and tell him we’re through. Then you guys can be together.”
Shaking her head, Lisa pulled the trigger.
Click.
During her training at Quantico, Maddie’s firearms instructors often said that the loudest sound someone could hear was the click of a firing pin striking without the loud bang that followed. There were many reasons it could happen, but the exact cause was not important right now. Her instructors had drilled it into her during firearms training that as soon as you heard that click, you should tap the magazine to be sure you’d inserted it correctly. Then vigorously rack the slide to put a new round in the chamber so you would be ready to fire again. Maddie and any other well-trained person could do this in under a second.
Instead of doing any of that, though, Lisa stared at the gun, confusion etched on her face. Evidently, Lisa wasn’t familiar with firearms.
Get two hands on the gun.
Lunging forward, Maddie grabbed the pistol barrel with one and Lisa’s wrist with the other. Using the full force of her lunge, Maddie drove the pistol into Lisa’s face and pushed her back until her body hit the wall behind her. Not losing her momentum, Maddie drove her knee into Lisa’s bladder, causing her to double over in pain. Then, maintaining control over the pistol, Maddie violently twisted it, pointing the barrel directly back at Lisa and breaking her grip on the gun.
As she took two significant steps back, Maddie tapped the bottom of the magazine and racked the pistol’s slide, holding it back just long enough to see that the gun chamber had been empty the entire time, and watched as a live round entered the chamber.