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She stood up and took a step toward him, and then another.
“Stay back. We’ve called for help,” Hawkins said. He pointed the M4 more or less in her direction.
“Aw, what’s a littleFiloviridaebetween friends? You sound English, you could take it back to London for us.”
She was fifteen yards away and Hawkins lifted the M4 higher. “Stay back. Please stay back.”
From above him, Letty, on her feet again, hands and face bleeding from the fall, still seventy yards away, screamed, “Shoot her! Shoot her, Alec! Shoot her!”
Turney was ten yards from him and she grinned again and said, “Aw, you’re not gonna shoot me, Alec. You’re too much an English gentleman.”
She took another step and Hawkins shot her in the heart. No longer grinning, she toppled backward and died.
11
Lucas ran up the slope to Hawkins, trailed by Rae, who’d come from across the road behind him, climbing through the yellow roadside weeds. Letty got to Hawkins first. He was standing, unmoving, staring at the woman’s body. When Letty came up, he said, without looking at her, “I just…I just…”
“You just did the right thing, Alec, except you waited too long.” She grabbed his shirt and pulled him away from Turney. “C’mon, back up, back up, we don’t know if she’s got the measles thing, back up…”
He was stumbling backward, upslope, Letty’s arms around his waist when Lucas and Rae arrived. Rae said, “She’s dead.” She slapped Hawkins on the back. “Well done, Alec.”
“I think…” He was still fixed on the body. “I shot her because she scared me. She wasn’t armed, I could see she wasn’t armed…”
“Bullshit. You don’t know that—she could still be armed, she couldhave a cloud of shit around her that we can’t see that could kill the whole planet,” Rae said. They all looked at the body at once: it didn’t look like a threat, it looked like a bag of rags.
Lucas: “Leave her. She’s not going anywhere. Maybe get one of the cops here in case some tourist comes stumbling through the trees.”
Hawkins couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dead woman, even as Letty tugged him downhill. At the road, Rae produced a switchblade, flicked the blade out, and cut the bark off a roadside sapling. “Straight uphill from here,” she said. “Let’s find a cop.”
As they headed back to the ski area, Lucas asked Letty, “What they hell happened to you? You look like you were attacked by a coffee grinder.”
She had a scrape on her forehead and one cheek, and the heels of her hands were bleeding. “Fell on those rocks…couldn’t keep my legs moving fast enough. I was out of control, I saw Turney walking up to Alec, who might be too nice a guy.”
She still had an arm around Hawkins’s waist, and Lucas said, “Why do I think you guys might be better friends than you let on?”
Instead of answering the question, Hawkins handed him the M4 and asked, “Would you mind carrying this? I’m a little distracted here, maybe shouldn’t be handling an automatic weapon.”
“First time you shot somebody?” Rae asked.
Hawkins nodded: “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. It’s actually fairly routine with this crowd.”
“Not with me,” Hawkins said.
Letty: “Yet another memo you’ll have to write.”
Now he showed a hint of a sad smile: “And it will be widely read, I can assure you.” He slipped his right arm around Letty’s shoulders. To Lucas: “You mentioned my friendship with your daughter. Nothinguntoward is going on, Marshal Davenport. We barely know each other. She seemed stressed by this entire situation, and I merely tried to do what I could to relieve her tensions.”
Made Lucas laugh, and he said, “I’m sure you did.”
Letty: “I hesitate to mention it, but, uh…”
Lucas: “But, uh, what?”
“He has some of your…tendencies.”
Lucas: “Hey! Stay away from my daughter.”
