Page 55 of Go First
“I can achieve a lot before that happens,” Cox snapped. He was completely gray, Kate thought.Like porridge.
“This is a massacre, Cox,” she said, her voice trembling.“Why plan all these careful murders when you just wanted a bloodbath?”
“Walk,” he ordered.
She should be frightened of him, but she was just angry.“You’re an animal.”
“Quiet.”
They moved through the trees, his gun an unseen weight at her back, his breath creaking in his chest.The path was uneven, not really a route at all, merely a series of gaps in the dense, untended undergrowth. Everything scratched or jabbed or pricked; it was Nature saying: humans stay out.And Kate would have loved to.
Looking ahead through a film of tears, she saw a snapped-off branch ahead, short and weighty, a bit longer than a baseball bat.Cox jabbed her in the back and she stumbled on.Estimating, counting: one pace, two paces, three…
At four, Kate seized the moment.She lunged sideways, grabbed the fallen limb, and in one continuous movement swung it back.It connected with a crunch.The gunshot exploded.A cry—not hers.
They grappled.She smelt his sick breath.She lost her footing, struck her head, but not before she’d slammed his nose into her knee.Pain rose up from the ground to greet her, then darkness surged, then nothing.
When Kate came to, the forest was silent save for the birds and, suddenly, in their tuneful midst, a low, ragged moan.She pushed herself up, dizzy and sticky with her blood and Cox’s blood, and followed the sound.
A man lay crumpled in the needles, stocky build, buzz-cut, blood gushing through his shirt.Something about him was familiar.His eyes flickered once.
The penny dropped.This was the killer.The thick-set figure at the crime scenes.Cox’s disciple.
No sign of Cox, though she felt sure she was witnessing his works.
Kate crouched, radio trembling in her hand.
“Agent Valentine,” she said, voice raw.“Officer down.Suspect at large.Repeat—Cox is gone.”
The wind moved through the pines, carrying the scent of sap and smoke.Somewhere, far off, a siren began to wail.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Hospitals had a way of making everything feel provisional.Voices were always a little hushed, as if nothing here was quite finished: the paint on the walls, the sentences, the lives.
Kate followed a green line on the floor to Neuro—left at Radiology, right at a vending machine advertising hot soup—and told herself that the throb in her wrist did not qualify as pain.It was information.Sprain, day seven, still complaining.The cuts on her forearm had faded from angry to embarrassed.She could live with that.
Marcus couldn’t say the same.He couldn’t say anything right now.
“Miss Valentine?”a nurse at the station called, glancing up at the chart.“You’re here for Mister Reid?”
“Agent,” Kate said, because Marcus would have corrected it if he could.“Yes.”
“Visitor pass on the right.”The nurse’s tone softened.“He’s stable.”
The word set off a small, disloyal response inside Kate—like a tiny, rebellious sigh.Stable.Not good, not bad.A truce between the two.
Room 412 had a window onto a parking lot and a tree.The tree felt like a kindness.
A woman was already there, perched on the orange visitor chair like a long-legged bird that didn’t trust the branch.She wore big, pink, plastic hoop earrings and a faux-fur zip-up jacket.Endless legs in electric-blue lycra were topped off with suede mules, mule-colored, on a chunky heel.Kate stopped in the doorway.There was only one person this could be.
“Cheryl,” she said.
“Hi.”Cheryl stood too quickly and bumped the chair, then smoothed the skirt that she wasn’t wearing.“Kate, right?I didn’t know if you were coming this morning.I mean, of course you’d come, I just didn’t know if it would be now, or—”
“It’s now,” Kate said.She lifted a hand, then remembered the brace and let it fall.“Can I—?”
“Sure.”Cheryl stepped aside so she could see Marcus.