Page 106 of His Wall

Aimed.

I pushed the door open.

I stepped inside.

I brought the weapon up at a two-handed grip.

"FBI. Put the weapon down. Now."

The room froze.

The man by the window did not lower the gun. He did the thing trained men did when a second weapon entered a room with the wrong number of people in it. He swung the muzzle a quarter-arc to his right and the gun was on me and the gun was no longer on Julian.

Conrad turned his head a half-inch toward me.

He smiled.

The same warm pale-blue eyes. The same small fond smile he had given me from the middle of a ballroom on Saturday night with his glass of amber in his hand.

"Agent Calder."

Julian moved.

His head snapped toward the man by the window and his hand went up in front of him in the small useless gesture of a man trying to stop a thing that had already started.

"Leah, don't — "

The gunshot filled the apartment.

"Leah — "

TWENTY

JULIAN

The shot was not aimed at me.

I was looking at Leah and she was already moving when the man by the window pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash was at the corner of my eye and the bullet went into the wall behind where her head had been a half-second before. Plaster exploded. Dust came down. A piece of the picture frame from the shelf above the couch hit the floor with a sound I felt in my chest before I heard it.

I was on the floor.

I did not remember dropping. My knees were on the carpet by the kitchen counter, my left hand was flat on the cabinet, my right hand was at my chest, and my ears were ringing.

I looked up.

She was not on the floor.

She was standing in the doorway of my apartment with her weapon up and her gray eyes fixed on the man by the window, and I had never seen her look like that.

She fired once.

The sound was the same sound, repeated. The man by the window staggered. His own gun clattered to the hardwood. He grabbed his right shoulder with his left hand and his knees went and he was on the floor by the window, the gun a foot from his hand on the wood.

She did not lower her weapon.

She crossed the room in five steps. She kicked his gun across the floor toward the kitchen. She stepped between me and the rest of the room. Her weapon swept — the lawyer flat against the wall by the door with both hands up by her ears, Conrad still on the couch, the man on the floor at the window who was not moving.

"Hands where I can see them. All of you."