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.”
29.
Two days after Abbot Keyes nearly drowned in a gutter on Capitol Hill while being arrested on multiple counts of murder, Leda unlocked the door to her office in Columbia City. She opened the door and froze. Niki was already in there, asleep on the love seat. Her hair was a mess, her mouth was open, and a thin stream of dried drool was crusted on her chin.
“Nik?”
Niki shot awake and jerked upright, flailing until she rolled right off the short couch and onto the floor.
“What… are you doing here?” Leda asked.
From the floor, Niki replied, “I was very, very drunk, and I accidentally told the Uber guy to take me here. I couldn’t remember the address, but I remembered it was next door to the sushi place. I… there was… I had…”
“You have a key.”
“Right. I have a key, so. I let myself in to… to…”
Leda sighed. “To sleep it off?”
“I don’t think I had a plan, to be honest. I just needed to lie down.” Niki pulled herself back up, whapping her (now much smaller) boot cast against the edge of Leda’s desk. “Ow. Anyway, you look… alert.”
“I didn’t have that much to drink last night.”
“You didn’t?” Niki gave her a stink-eye glare that said she didn’t believe her. “It was your party.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was my makeup concert, since I bailed the other night.” She dropped her purse on the desk. “I was home in bed by midnight. Besides, it’s…” She sat down behind her desk and fished her phone out of her purse. “After nine o’clock. It’s not exactly the crack of dawn over here.”
“Yeah, but you still deserved to sleep in.”
“I couldn’t.” Leda had awakened shortly after the sun came up, and she’d never made it back to sleep. She was tired but restless, so she figured she might as well get some work done.
“Are you having, like, PTSD? Is it something like that? Do you need some weed and a good cry?”
Leda opened her laptop and pressed a button to turn it on. “Probably at some point, but not right now. Thanks for the offer, though. It’s been a hell of a week, right? I mean, not just the thing where I almost got murdered, but everything else, too. It’s been three days of cops and journalists, and I just need a quiet, nothing-gonna-happen day where I can pretend that my life is normal.”
“Your life has never been normal.”
“But wouldn’t it be nice if it was?”
Niki shrugged. “I don’t know. Sounds boring to me.”
“I could use a little boring right now.”
Her friend relented. She settled upright in the love seat, leaning back and crossing her legs. “Fair enough. How did The Stranger interview about all the murdering go?”
“It went fine. It was weird, and I sounded like a maniac, I’m sure. But the interviewer was nice, and I got in a plug for the travel agency, so maybe we’ll see a little bump in business. Murder is great advertising. Maybe? We kind of got off in the weeds for a bit. I told them how I met Grady and everything.”
“Oh boy. When will the piece go live?”
“It went live online last night; those Stranger guys work fast. Now the Seattle Times wants to do a piece on me, too, but I don’t know, man. I’ve had enough publicity this week for the rest of my life.”