Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

28.

“Move,” said Abbot Keyes, nudging her away from the shelter of the awning.

She didn’t fight him, and she sounded mostly calm when she asked, “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll… I’ll figure it out, when we get back to my car.”

Keyes sounded even less calm than Leda felt—which was not reassuring considering that the man tended to murder in a panic. She had to fight her nature and stay calm. She believed from the bottom of her heart that if she started screaming, he’d shoot. He didn’t even have to threaten to do it. It was written in his tense posture and in his anxious voice, in the press of the metal on the back of her thin jacket.

He was cornered, and he had little to lose.

He pushed her up the hill, away from both the bar and the bookstore. She dragged her feet and stumbled. “Is this the same gun you used to kill Tod and Amanda?”

“What? Who? Oh. Jesus, no. I threw that one into the sound. I never really meant to hurt anybody,” he said as he urged her into the crosswalk.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Yeah, I get that.” He stayed right up against her, hiding the gun and his intentions, but he didn’t sound confident. Probably, he never sounded confident. Probably, he was better at murdering people than he was at anything else he’d ever tried, and he was still behaving like he was pretty sure he’d muck it up.

“This is stupid,” Leda tried to tell him. Maybe she could keep him talking long enough for the police to show up. It beat just walking meekly along with him. “Let’s go back to the bar and talk this through, okay? Or you could just ditch me and make a run for it. That’s always an option. I’d even say nice things about you. Just tell me what happened.” She was impressed with herself. It almost sounded like a demand. It hardly sounded like begging at all.

“What do you care?”

She stopped, and he ran into her. The gun hit her spine, hard. She winced but held her ground. “Tod was my fiancé. You didn’t know?” She looked over her shoulder but only saw the side of his neck and the fabric of the hoodie he was wearing pulled up over his head. “You didn’t even google me, or anything?”

“I didn’t think about it,” he said grouchily. “Come on, keep moving.” But as they started walking, he muttered into her ear. “He wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I was only trying to talk to Amanda. I was going to offer to… to split it with her, but she maced me and things… things got out of hand.”

“That happens to you a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Shut up. This is your fault.”

She laughed. It was a brittle laugh, but she meant it. Things were only funny when they were true, right?

Then her frantic amusement soured. The more she thought about it, and the farther she walked with his gun shoved against her coat, the madder she got. Who the hell was this guy, that he got to take out his frustrations on everybody else? All God’s children have problems, but he gets to be a murderer? An indiscriminate murderer, even. He didn’t even mean to kill half the people he bumped off. Somehow that made it worse.

Yes, he was the literal definition of “worse than useless,” and she was going to be his next victim. It didn’t just anger her; it embarrassed her.

She stopped walking. He pushed, but she balked. She was not going to simply waltz off to her doom with this maniac. She refused.

“You’re only delaying the inevitable,” he groused into her hair as he shoved her forward. “If you’d rather, I could just shoot you right here, then shoot my way out of the neighborhood, and kill anybody else who gets in the way.”

She thought about it, as she dug her heels into the sidewalk. “You won’t, though. That’s too large-scale for you. You’re clumsy and reckless, but you’re not stupid. You’d rather blend in and vanish. That’s more your brand.”

“I don’t want to blend in!” he almost shouted.

“Why not?” she almost shouted back. “It’s the only thing you’re really good at!”

Leda looked around on the street and saw a young couple walking a small dog, an older homeless man with a cardboard sign, a dozen black-clad folks in a flock headed toward the Goth bar a few streets away, and a drag queen checking her makeup in a storefront window’s glass.

Abbot Keyes shoved her around a corner—then changed his mind and grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back. He swore under his breath and jammed the gun harder against her. He hadn’t been fast enough to keep her from seeing it, though: the police were out in force, swarming a small pay lot between two large apartment buildings.

Leda hadn’t seen Grady, not in the split-second glimpse she’d caught. Her eyes were mostly clear now, the ocular migraine having cleared out by surprise or by force, and the police were right there, across the street. She was so close to safety she could feel it.

Abbot Keyes held her tightly around the waist with his left hand and stabbed the gun into her side with his right. She could feel that, too. He kept knocking the muzzle against the lower edge of her rib cage, roughly and repeatedly.

“Were you going to just… put me in your car and drive me someplace to kill me? That’s just so… so stupid!” She was practically yelling. People were starting to look.

Keyes brought his mouth down close to her ear and said, “Stop screaming.”

But she’d spent too much time not screaming already. Staying quiet hadn’t gotten her anywhere, and one way or another, time was running out. For her. For him. For everyone, eventually. She wrestled in his grip, a little bit at first, and then with all her body weight. “Let go of me!” she demanded. “Let go of me!”

Behind them, a woman gasped. “That man has a gun!”

The woman’s voice startled her in the best possible way. It meant that Leda wasn’t alone anymore. Someone else saw what was happening. Maybe Abbot would panic, and maybe he would shoot, but he was going to do that anyway, wasn’t he? Might as well go down screaming.

“Yes!” Leda cried out, against orders. “He has a gun! Everybody get down! Run! The police are right over there—somebody get the police! Help! Somebody help me!” Maybe he’d kill her, maybe he’d hurt her, and maybe he’d hurt other people, too. But he’d run out of bullets eventually. And how many other people would he go on to hurt, if she just let him get away?

No.

The street was watching. One guy took up the cause and started yelling, then everyone else joined him. Everyone saw Abbot. Everyone knew what he was. It was too much for a man who had always blended in.

Distracted, he relaxed his grip. It was all Leda needed to swivel in his grasp.

She wrenched herself free and face-planted into a bakery window—which did not break, and she made a mental note to thank God later, because she didn’t have time right then and there.

For a count of three or four seconds, she and Keyes stared at each other across the space of a sidewalk square. He was confused and rattled and surrounded by people, and he couldn’t possibly shoot them all—maybe he couldn’t even shoot his way out of the neighborhood, how many bullets did a gun like that hold, anyway? He was good at blending in. If he played his cards right, he could walk away. But playing his cards right was never his strong suit, was it? He hadn’t even thought to hide the gun. Its tip poked out from under his jacket sleeve.

“You know what?” she asked him, as she balled her hand into a fist. “You’ve taken enough away from me.” Before she could think it through, before she had a moment to get extra terrified, and before he saw it coming—she swung for his face and caught it, hard enough that the crack she heard might have come from his nose, or her fingers. She didn’t know and didn’t care.

He staggered backward, the gun hanging at the end of his arm like a ball he’d forgotten to throw.

She lunged forward to hit him again, but he backed away just in time. She waited just a hair too long to wind up and kick him square in the balls; by the time she’d swung her leg back, he’d turned around and started running.

Leda took a deep, ragged breath and backed up against the window, watching him flee the scene. “Somebody stop him!” she shouted as loud as she could. “Where are the police? Get the police! That guy has a gun!”

At the end of the block, the drag queen she’d passed earlier casually stuck out a high-heeled boot and caught Abbot’s foot on the fly. He took wing and soared for a few feet before crashing down at the curb, collecting himself and making another go at escape.

Over his shoulder he glanced and saw two uniformed cops charging in his direction. He squeaked and took off for the nearest alley.

Somebody would run him down. Somebody would bring him to justice, Leda had to believe it—otherwise this whole adventure had been for nothing, and that simply wasn’t an option.

Somebody was Grady Merritt.

He leaped from between two cars and tackled Abbot Keyes to the ground. Keyes struggled, and then he didn’t.

The rain poured out of the sky, and down the hill, collecting used needles, dirty napkins, plastic utensils, cocktail straws, half-eaten slices of pizza, a few dead rats, more than a little urine, some broken windshield glass, a splash or two of vomit, and a strand of plastic beads… and it washed them all the way down to the sound—past Scott Abbot Keyes, who was unconscious and facedown in the gutter by the curb.

Grady cuffed him, rolled him over, and pulled him back onto the sidewalk before Abbot could aspirate enough of Seattle’s liquid detritus to hurt him. Grady slapped Abbot’s cheeks a couple of times until the younger man blinked rapidly, uncertainly, and damply. “Come on, asshole. Wake up. I need to read you your rights.”