Jonathan looked to Sam. “Tell me about y’all’s relationship,” he said. “Why is she here tonight?”
“She came here terrified,” Sam explained. “I never found out why. It was still dark. She was only here for less than an hour when you showed up and she took off running.”
“But why here?” Gail asked. “You seem to know each other.”
“We do,” Sam said. “At least I thought we did. She came to visit me every week or so.”
Jonathan sat a little taller and adjusted his rifle so the magazine quit poking him in the thigh. “What does visit mean?”
Gail shot him an annoyed look, but he ignored it.
“She would just come by. You know, to talk. And to play with Jilly. We’d have coffee or hot chocolate in the winter, Cokes or iced tea in the summer.”
So this had been going on for a long time, Jonathan realized. “Colleen?”
She looked at her lap. “Why did you have to ruin everything?”
“Because you kidnapped my friend’s family,” he said.
Sam gasped again. “Oh, my God!”
“You forced my hand, Colleen. Why did you do it?”
She sighed and moaned. “What have I done?” she whispered.
“You killed a lot of people,” Jonathan said. “What’s done is done. Now tell me why you shot those people on the bridge.”
“They’re Users.” She said it as if it were really an explanation. “We’re at war with them.”
“And the mall shootings in Kansas City?”
She nodded.
“The school bombing in Detroit?”
“It’s war!” she yelled. “People die in war.”
“And more are coming, aren’t they?”
Colleen shut down and looked at the table.
“How many more, Colleen?”
“A lot,” she said. “Brother Michael didn’t trust me with all the details, but I know that there are many teams out there.”
“I don’t believe this!” Sam exclaimed.
Jonathan put his hand on her arm again. “Please,” he said. “Just let us talk.”
“I don’t want to say any more,” Colleen said.
“Why did you kidnap Ryan and Christyne Nasbe?” Jonathan pressed. “How did they figure in to your war?”
Colleen looked tired. “We needed symbols. We needed faces for the cameras.”
“But why them?”
“Because they were Users and they were there.” She clearly didn’t understand why people didn’t understand something so obvious. “I had orders to take prisoners and I followed them.”
Gail looked shocked. “Just anybody?” she asked. “Random selection?”
“Users are Users,” Colleen said. “This one or that one, it doesn’t matter.”
Sam stood, abruptly enough that Boxers moved to intervene. “I’m calling the police,” she said.
“They’re part of it,” Jonathan said. “Kendig Neen is a leader, isn’t he, Colleen?”
“ Sheriff Kendig Neen? Is a terrorist?”
“A soldier,” Colleen corrected reflexively.
Sam sat back down heavily. “Oh, my God. He comes by all the time, too. He’s a nice man.”
Jonathan turned his attention back to Colleen. “Where are the other attacks going to be?”
“I swear I don’t know. What’s going to happen to me?”
“This isn’t about you anymore, sweetheart,” Gail said. If anyone could pull off a nice tone under the circumstances, it was she. “This is about a lot of innocent people who are in danger.”
“They’re not innocent,” Colleen said, kicking the table. “They’re Users!”
Sam exploded, “That bomb at the school killed children, Colleen! Small, innocent children!”
“Children die in war all the time,” Colleen said.
Jonathan’s patience was thinning. “Tell me the end game, then,” he said. “What does all of this killing accomplish?”
She snorted a laugh. “Same as in any war. We win.”
“You win,” Jonathan repeated. “And then what? What happens in victory?”
“The Users stop using,” she said. “When people are afraid to leave their houses, when they can’t shop or go to school, the economy will collapse.”
“How?” Gail asked. “Tell me how one leads to the other.”
“Users are weak,” she said. “They frighten easily, and they’re anxious to blame whoever they want to be guilty. When they get angry, they go to war, and their precious stock market falls. The Users lose their precious money, and when that happens, the poor will rise and get an even chance.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Jonathan said, but then he stopped himself. This wasn’t the time for a civics lesson.
“You wait,” Colleen said. “You wait until the head is cut off of the snake. You wait to see what happens then.”
Gail scowled deeply. “Snake? What snake?”
A deep baritone voice rumbled from the living room, “Good morning everyone.”
Jonathan jumped to his feet and Boxers spun on his axis, unblocking the doorway to reveal a haggard, exhausted Kendig Neen standing just inside the front door. With his ample belly and his handlebar mustache, he might have been Santa in civvies. Jilly sat in the crook of his elbow, one arm casually over his shoulder. His free hand held a cocked pistol.
“Good thing little Jilly knows how to call the police, huh, Sam?” he said. “Poor little thing saw people with guns and was scared to death.”
“Nine-one-one is not for fun,” Jilly said, obviously pleased at her own rhyme.
“Hands away from weapons, please,” Kendig said. “I don’t-”
Jonathan moved with lightning speed, dropping to his knee and drawing his. 45 in the time it took the sheriff to bring his gun around. Jonathan fired two shots, hitting the sheriff in the ear and the eye as Neen fired off one of his own-by reflex, Jonathan imagined. Neen and Jilly fell together onto the floor of the foyer, where a river of gore instantly started to stain the wood.
Jilly screamed. And screamed.
Sam rushed to her and scooped her up in her arms. When she got a good look at the anatomical wreckage that was Kendig Neen’s head, she started screaming, too.
“Holy shit, Boss,” Boxers said, his admiration obvious to all. “I didn’t know-” He paused and nodded to a spot behind Jonathan. “Uh-oh.”
Colleen sat awkwardly in her chair, listing to the side. Bloody spittle formed at the corner of her mouth, then dripped like crimson thread onto the fabric of her coat.
“Ah, shit,” Jonathan spat. He rushed to her, but Gail beat him to it. She opened the coat and revealed the rapidly spreading stain on her shirt.
“Get her on the floor,” Boxers instructed from across the room.
In the hall, Jilly and Sam continued to wail.
Boxers whirled on them. “For God’s sake, woman, will you shut up? You’re safe now. Scream later.” Not many people in the world can deliver a message like that and have it obeyed. Boxers was one of them.
Jonathan pulled the table out of the way to make room on the floor to lay Colleen down. An instant later, Boxers was with them, and he lifted Jonathan out of the way by his collar so that he could take his place. Boxers’ combat medic skills had always been better than Jonathan’s.
With her coat already spread wide, he stripped her shirt open, and there was the bullet wound: center-right chest. The froth at her lips told them the bullet had pierced her lung, but the location probably meant liver, too. The rate of blood loss said that it was fatal.
“Well?” Gail said expectantly.
“We got nothing for this.”
Colleen reached out and grabbed Big Guy’s sleeve. “What does that mean?”
Boxers pulled his arm away as if he’d touched a spider. He stood abruptly and turned to Jonathan. “She’ll be dead in a couple of minutes,” he said, and he walked out to the hallway where Sam and her daughter stood stunned.
“What’s happening?” Sam asked. Her face showed desperation.
Boxers said, “Um, well, she’s not going to make it.”
“What have you brought to our house?” Sam shouted.
Boxers bent at the waist to look at her eye-to-eye. “A much better outcome for you and your little girl than if you’d been here alone with her when this asshole came by.”
“Michael Copley’s an asshole!” Jilly said.
In the kitchen, Jonathan and Gail kneeled next to the dying girl, Gail holding her hand. To Jonathan, she said, “There’s nothing?”
“She needs a surgeon, and there’s not enough time to get her one.” Jonathan leaned closer and raised his voice. “Did you hear that, Colleen?”