Myron is thirty yards away from you.
You now don a surgical mask. Better safe than sorry. They are rarer today — surgical masks — but far from uncommon, a hangover from the Covid era.
You are already wearing gloves, of course.
Twenty yards away.
You take out the Ruger LCR. You keep your arm at your side, your dark pants camouflaging your black gun.
Fifteen yards.
You snake your finger onto the trigger.
Seconds away now.
You feel the rush start coursing through you. The anticipation. No, this part isn’t as satisfying as the actual kill. That’s the sweetest — the moment the eyes close and the life leaves the body. But this, the foreplay of murder, is still a heady concoction.
And then, without warning, Myron deviates from the path.
What the...?
He slides quickly behind a tree and presses his back up against it.
Why, you wonder, would he do that?
Is he... hiding?
So it seems.
Does he know you’re here, waiting?
You can’t see how. You watch now as Myron turns his head left and right. Then he cautiously leans out just a little, just enough to look out.
You duck.
But he isn’t looking in your direction.
He is looking back down the path.
As if he knows you are coming for him. Except, of course, he’s looking in the wrong direction.
Did that make sense?
He’s still on his phone.
Who is he talking to?
That doesn’t matter.
You don’t know what’s going on or why Myron is hiding behind the tree. You debate your next move. Should you wait for him to start walking this way again?
No.
You can’t risk that. You must act and act now. Suppose Myron is being followed. Or suppose he doubles back in the opposite direction, back toward Emily’s apartment. You’ll be out of position. You may lose him entirely. Your plan will be jeopardized.
Go! you tell yourself.
So you do.
You abandon the safety of the tunnel entrance and hurry toward him. His back is still turned. He keeps glancing in the direction of the Imagine mosaic while talking on the phone. That’s good. He’s distracted. He isn’t looking toward you.
You’re only a few yards away when Myron suddenly takes the phone away from his ear.
He looks at something on the phone’s screen.
A lot of things happen at once now.
You raise the gun to shoot him in the head.
You also see what he’s looking at on his phone. When you do, you freeze.
It’s you.
How the...?
You stay frozen. But not for long. Barely a second. You push away the panic and snap out of it. You put the muzzle of the gun up to the back of his skull.
You start to pull the trigger — and as you do, Myron spins around and knocks your arm.
But it’s too late for him. The bullet fires.
And his blood splashes on your face.
Chapter Forty-One
Myron dropped to his knees first. Then he fell forward onto his hands.
Blood poured off him. Myron stared down and watched it pool on the pavement below him. There were screams and shouts and everything seemed to be in motion.
Myron blinked and felt the cold.
He realized that he had been hit — that he was heading into a state of shock.
Move, he told himself. Move or die.
There was no plan, no conscious contemplation beyond the simple idea of not staying still. He knew that he’d been hit and hit badly. The pain came at him in a roar and spread. It felt as though a giant animal had taken a huge bite out of his neck. From his hands and knees, he tried to get up. No go. He pushed instead off one leg, a wounded sprinter in the blocks.
“We aren’t bulletproof...”
Hadn’t Win said that just the other day?
Apropos.
Still, he managed to lurch forward a foot at a time.
Chapter Forty-Two
You are stunned but also feel delirious joy.
He surprised you, Myron Bolitar that is, when he swung his arm and threw off your aim.
Good for him.
Still, the bullet landed in the cusp between his neck and his collarbone. Blood gushes, splashing you. You wonder whether you hit an artery.
Will he simply bleed out?
You wanted chaos and you got it. You hear screams. You see people rush for the park’s exit on the west side. You swim with the tide of people, another salmon heading upstream.
But then you remember: He had your photo on his phone.
Somehow Myron has put this together.
You can’t just wound him. You have to make sure he’s dead.
There is no time for you to think it all through. If you did, if you had a few more seconds, you’d probably realize that someone must have sent him that picture, that Myron never works in a vacuum, that if Myron has put it together, others, like Win, will know too.
But right now, you don’t have time for nuance.
You need to kill him. No matter what. If this is the end for you, if this is your goodbye, it will be his too.
Myron is badly wounded. He crawls away from you like a crab with no equilibrium. The stream of people heads in the other direction, getting in your way. You debate just firing, but your weapon is a six-shooter. No reason to waste the bullets. When you lose sight of Myron for a moment, panic sets in. You fight harder now, pushing past the crowd.
And there he is, still crawling by the benches. He starts to rise up a little.
You aim and fire. You miss. You aim and fire again.
You hit him in the back.
Myron’s body jerks. He falls hard now.
Chapter Forty-Three
After the first bullet hit him, Myron tried to straighten up, but the pain made his head reel in protest. He stayed low, more slithering than running. He stumbled to the left. His head screamed in protest. He had no balance, no stability.
People ran by him, bumped into him, pinballed him to and fro. Everyone was screaming. Myron tried to keep moving away from the general direction of the shooter. He heard another gunshot. Myron blinked hard, felt the blood pouring off him. He kept stumbling ahead. Another shot rang out.
A hot searing pain entered the small of his back.
The impact knocked Myron forward, his arms splayed. His spine bent backward as the air rushed out of his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. His cheek landed hard on the corner of a bench.
Blood filled his mouth. Not from the fall. Not from banging his cheek on the bench.
The blood was coming up from his chest into his throat.
Drowning him.
Myron started to feel the darkness on the edges moving in. He was losing consciousness.
Hang on, he told himself.
But his body wouldn’t listen. Even his primitive survival instinct had faded away, grown distant. He rolled away, rolled under the bench. The darkness was starting to swim in front of his eyes now. Something inside of him was shutting down.
He wondered whether he was dying.
He lay now on his side, his cheek on the pavement. He couldn’t move. He could barely care. He could still see feet running by, but he couldn’t hear the screams anymore. The only sound now was a high-pitched whirring in his head. Why was that? Why couldn’t he hear anymore?
It felt as if some powerful force was dragging him down into the cold, into the black.
Two feet appeared in front of him. They stopped and bent down.
The face from the screenshot, complete with the black baseball cap, came into view and stared right at him.
It was Grace Konners.
His phone was still in his hand. She reached for it and pried it out of his weak grip with ease. Once she had taken possession of it, Grace pointed her gun at the center of his face. Myron couldn’t move. He could only look on helplessly. He saw the gleam in her eye, the way her lips curled into a smile.