The gunman didn’t lower his weapon. Instead, he began to swing it toward the sound of Marcy’s voice. Marcy wasn’t sure how visible she was in the moonlight, but she was taking no chances. She squeezed off a shot.
The gunman twisted to the left, obviously hurt, and reflexively fired a round of his own.
The rifle he carried was a Remington 783, and the bullet he fired went nowhere near Marcy Britnell. Instead it flew toward the house, clipped a pine bough, penetrated the glass of the sliding doors that adjoined the deck, pierced the coarse fabric of the curtains, passed within inches of the phone Gordo was holding to his ear, and struck Amanda just under her left shoulder and inches from the curve of her spine.
I looked away from her at the sound of the bullet cracking the window. I saw the curtain billow and settle back as if a wind had lifted it, and I saw Gordo pause in mid-conversation, mouth open but motionless as he tried to sort out what was happening. When I turned back to Amanda she looked perplexed. Then she fell toward me, eyes open, and I caught her.
In those days we liked to talk about “Tau telepathy.” It wasn’t really telepathy, of course, but we understood each other so deeply, so intuitively, that it often felt that way. What we discovered that night on Pender Island was something even deeper than Tau telepathy. Call it Tau rage.
Amanda tumbled into my arms, struggling to say something that emerged as a choked whisper, and time began to stagger forward in a series of static moments, snapshots taken in a glaring light. Probably everyone else in the room could say the same thing. But we worked in concert despite our confusion. I went to my knees, Amanda’s weight carrying me down. I helped her to lie on her right side. I could see the wound now, a flower of blood on the back of the wrinkled white blouse she was wearing. The wound was bleeding freely but not gushing. Her eyelids fluttered and the pupils of her eyes rolled upward.
I said, “Amanda?”
Hands pulled me away from her, and Gordo MacDonald knelt down in my place. “I’m qualified in emergency first aid,” he said, “and Marcy’s on her way in—Marcy did time in Afghanistan as a field nurse. Let us look after her.”
Before I could answer he had taken a knife from his belt and cut away her blouse. Amanda gasped, a sound like water bubbling over rocks.
The exterior door flew open almost immediately. It was Marcy, breathless, with a plastic case the size of an overnight bag in her hand. A med kit, which she had stashed in the trunk of one of the cars that had come over on the ferry. She looked frazzled and breathless, but she moved straight to where Gordo was tending Amanda. She inspected the wound, checked Amanda’s pulse, called her name and got a weak response. “Hang in there,” Marcy said. She turned to Gordo and added in a low voice, “We need professional help.”
“The shooter?” Gordo asked.
“Nelson’s bringing him in.”
Damian was on the phone to a Tau contact back in Vancouver. He put down the handset and began a brief, intense conversation with Gordo. I couldn’t hear what they said. All my attention was still focused on Amanda.
She was alert enough to murmur something about the pain. Marcy took a syringe from her kit and with practiced efficiency gave her a shot of morphine. Almost immediately, Amanda’s eyes drifted to half-mast. “She’ll be okay, Adam,” Marcy told me over her shoulder. “I mean that.”
“She needs a hospital.”
“Setting it up right now,” Damian said from across the room.
There were a couple of local physicians on Pender and a small regional hospital not far away on Salt Spring Island, but we needed a better and faster option. Late as it was, it took Damian only three calls to find a Tau who ran a helicopter-commute service out of Tsawwassen. A Sikorsky S76 was in the air twenty minutes later, by which time Damian had located a Tau physician near Ladner with access to a fully equipped clinic. The doctor agreed to assess and treat Amanda without reporting a gunshot wound, as long as she didn’t require complex surgery—which Marcy had said she would not.
As that was being arranged one of Gordo’s security guys, the one called Nelson, came up the stairs to the rain-sodden deck with the wounded shooter clinging to him. Damian stopped him at the door: “Not in here—we can’t have his blood all over everything.” The shooter slid down to the hardwood planks.
When we talked about it later, that was what we called him: the shooter. Because we had heard the word on TV and in the movies. But that wasn’t how I thought of him at the time. Not when Amanda was still losing blood. I thought of him instead as the son of a bitch who had tried to destroy everything that made my life worth living.
Marcy and Gordo headed for the deck, and I followed them. The shooter was a skinny dude with one of those long faces you sometimes see on very tall people, as if his features had been stretched vertically. His hair was wet and dangled over his forehead in two black wings. His eyes were anxious but unfocused. Marcy’s bullet had taken him mid-body, below the ribs and to the left. Blood had clotted on his cotton shirt and discolored his jeans from the waist to the left knee. Marcy looked at him and said in a small voice, “Oh, Christ. Gordo—”
“I know,” Gordo said.
The man was dying, and there was nothing Marcy or anyone else could do to save him. That was what I surmised from their silences.
It made me glad.
Hatred is a purifying emotion. Before that night I would have said I hated a few people. But dislike and disdain aren’t hatred. They’re pallid, hollow emotions. Real hatred is a bulldozer. It wants to demolish and destroy. It brooks no opposition.
I looked down at this piece of shit in the form of a human being, and he looked back at me through a haze of pain. Furious or frightened tears leaked from his eyes. I knelt down and put my face close to his face. His pig eyes narrowed. His breath stank of cloves and halitosis, mingled with the coppery smell of all the blood he was spilling. I ordered him to tell me his name.
Gordo, behind me, tried to get my attention. “Adam—”
The shooter wasn’t saying anything, though I had his complete attention. So I put my hands on his throat. I felt the stubble where he had shaved that morning. I felt his Adam’s apple frantically bobbing against my fingers. His lips struggled to form words. I let him take a breath.
“Fuck you,” he whispered.
Gordo pulled me away before I could do any damage. “Adam, we know who he is. We’ve got his wallet. His driver’s license. His credit card. His phone.” He looked at the dying man and I realized that the same hatred I felt was running through Gordo, Damian, Marcy, everyone else in the house. It was one big river. Maybe what they felt was a little less white-hot than what I felt, but it was real, visceral hatred.
“This time tomorrow,” Gordo said, “we’ll know everything about him. Where he lives, who his friends are, who he’s working for. We already know he’s an amateur. Carrying his personal shit on him like that.”
The shooter moved his mouth again, seemed to be trying to say something that wouldn’t come out.
Marcy fetched her medical kit. After a brief, hushed conference with Gordo and Damian, she produced a syringe and filled it from a small brown bottle.
“Hold him steady,” she said. “I don’t want him knocking this out of my hand.”
Gordo leaned across the shooter, pinning his legs and his left arm. I tugged his right arm straight out as Gordo used a pocket knife to slice his shirt sleeve from cuff to shoulder. When Marcy jabbed the needle into the shooter’s bicep, he arched his back in a feeble spasm of resistance. I asked Marcy what she was giving him.