She froze and immediately wished that she’d done anything else. Kicked, screamed, fought. Flailed or hollered or shoved. But she didn’t do any of that. She didn’t even check to make sure that it was a gun pressing against her ribs. She just stood there, him behind her—as close as a boyfriend, his face tucked down low near her neck. He wasn’t much taller than she was. Probably barely outweighed her, too. But he had a gun, and he’d killed before.
Leda could barely breathe. Her mind sprinted from option to option, hunting for an escape hatch in this terrible, wet, dark, sudden trap. But there weren’t any options. Certainly not any good ones. Where was she? Her head swiveled around, seeking landmarks to orient herself. She recognized a steampunk-themed hair salon and triangulated her position using that, a lesbian bar, and a hot dog kiosk.
Okay. The bookstore was one block to her left. Castaways was one block to her right.
On the bright side…
Was there a bright side?
There had to be a bright side.
Okay, well… Abbot Keyes was not at Castaways, shooting up the place in search of Leda or Niki or Grady. He might not even know the others were there. Leda was the one he wanted, and if he got to hurt her, he’d probably call it a day from a murder standpoint. Silently, she prayed to anybody who might be listening: Get Grady. Please let him have gotten the phone call. Please let him find us. Please.
Please. Please.
Please?
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!”