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McCall pulls Jimmy aside, keeping his voice low.
“The longer this goes, the more likely it is that we’re looking at a very bad outcome,” McCall says.
“Well aware,” Jimmy says.
He keeps picturing a clock running down, like it’s the end of a game. Only this is as far from a game as you can get.
Jimmy feels as helpless as anybody out here. All he can do is watch it play out. And hope they can get Shore back on the phone.
McCall walks Jimmy halfway up the block, tells him that it’s not just the visit Shore paid to the Carson home that turned Shore into a person of interest. Hank Carson and Shore had also been seen arguing at the Cornerstone Bar on Jericho Turnpike a week before the Carson murders. The bartender had finally come forward, saying that he couldn’t keep quiet any longer even though he knew who Artie Shore worked for and the risk of getting sideways with Bobby Salvatore.
“Then somebody shoots up the Carson family not long after.”
“Too neat?” McCall says.
“You know what they say about things that look like they’re too good to be true.”
Jonah Johnson keeps trying to get Artie Shore back on the phone, without success. He says he’s not going to wait much longer before going in.
Jimmy thinks:You should be in there already.
Nobody pays any attention to him, everybody staring at Artie’s window, as he walks away from McCall, all the way up the block in the other direction, cuts across some backyards until he finds his way to Artie Shore’s building, an unlocked back door.
He heads up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Racing that clock he sees moving down toward triple zeros.
I know how to do this.
Let me talk to the guy.
He is about to knock on the door when he hears a single shot and knows he made his move too goddamn late.
Twenty-Two
MY OWN GUN,my trusty Glock 26, is locked safely in the glove compartment of the car, not that it would do me much good right now, not up against what I’m sure is a long gun.
I’m a gun girl. I know the sound, as I dive to the ground after the first shot and get behind the tree right before the second shot hits, shattering my target.
Then another shot, this one from a different angle, the bullet hitting the side of the tree.
I mean, whoever it is has moved. Or is moving in.
I scrabble into the bushes now, as another bullet scatters rock and dirt about six feet away from me, maybe less.
If he wants to hit me, he would have hit me already,I tell myself. It is, in the moment, the most optimistic way of looking at things, because the alternative is that he wants to frighten the hell of out me first but really is closing in, in which case I am very much a dead duck.
So duck, girl.
I get up and launch myself deeper into the bushes, branches slapping against my face, feeling as if I’ve been cut. Least of my problems.
I crouch where I am and yell, “If you’re trying to scare me, mission accomplished.”
Nothing.
Just some distant birdsong in the night, and the roar of cicadas, almost as loud as my own breathing sounds to me.
I think:Even if somebody has heard the shots, they probably think it’s the BB gun—mine—they hear all the time.
