15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(61)

I didn’t have a death wish. I just didn’t expect to die. I was rationalizing. We were thirty yards from the shooters. Everyone was firing into the dark.

Joe said, “I don’t like our odds.”

Then he bounded out of his side of the car and took a position at the butt end of the trailer I was using as a barrier at the front. We aimed and fired on the shooters and reloaded.

When there was a momentary break in the gunfire, Joe yelled, “Alison, give it up! The cops are on the way. No one needs to die. Put down your gun.”

Muller laughed. It was a lovely laugh, both throaty and merry.

“You’re too funny,” she called back.

I saw the flash of Muller’s blond hair as she sprang out from behind a car in a crouch. Her bodyguard followed, the two of them running for the open hatch of the closest plane. My attention was on Muller, but there was something about that bodyguard that rang a tinny bell. I knew him, but I couldn’t place him at all.

And I didn’t have time to think about it.

We had to stop Muller from boarding that plane.

Joe fired into the narrowing space between Muller and the aircraft, and her bodyguard pulled her back into cover behind a car. Joe yelled, “This is a mistake, Alison!”

And then the leading character in this long-running nightmare leaned over the top of her vehicle and fired a long burst of bullets, spraying left, then right across the trailers.

There was a split-second pause in the gunfire, and Muller and the big man made another dash toward the plane. Sighting her, I took aim, followed her with my muzzle, and fired.

Muller jerked and flailed before she fell to the ground.

Her bodyguard called her name and went to her, frantically trying to help her up. But she got to her knees and shook him off as she struggled to her feet.

My shot had gotten her in the back. She could only be alive if she was wearing a vest, and even then, given the angle of my shot, she was lucky to have survived.

Part of me was relieved that I hadn’t killed her.

I wanted to talk to her, and I wanted to throw her in jail. But at the moment, Muller was armed and at large and bullets were flying at us again from her direction.





CHAPTER 93


JOE WAS RELOADING his gun when I saw four sets of headlights bumping over the rutted road toward the hangar. The cars drove past us and formed into a rough semicircle twenty-five yards away from the building and Muller’s crew. I heard Knightly shouting, ordering people to drop their weapons, and he had plenty of gunpower to back him up.

And then Alison Muller stepped out from between two cars with her hands in the air.

“Hold your fire. I’m unarmed!” she shouted.

She was walking toward the headlights in surrender pose, her bodyguard beside her, when one of the Asian men in Muller’s crew aimed his gun—at her. Her bodyguard yelled, shoved, and threw himself between Muller and the shooter in one movement. They both dropped to the ground.

In that moment, I recognized the bodyguard. But I didn’t have even a second to process the thought because the man who had fired on Muller and missed aimed at her again.

Before he could get off his second shot, Knightly fired and dropped him, and in the same moment, Muller got up off the ground.

Seeing Joe, she called, “Joe, Joe! Don’t shoot!”

She ran toward him and he lowered his gun.

Just then, I became aware of the waffling sound of helicopters coming in from under the lee of the mountain range, flying across the meadow toward the hangar, two choppers beaming light down on the airfield.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrived. The odds had decidedly shifted in our favor. My heart lifted as one of the choppers hovered near the de Havilland and landed in front of it, blocking the runway. There was more engine racket as the second helicopter cut off the Cessna’s escape path as well.

The din was deafening and the rotor wash swept the field, blowing up dust. I turned away from the choppers, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Joe and Alison in a stunning tableau.

I hadn’t heard what Joe had said to her, but clearly Muller had gotten the message. His gun was aimed at her head. And Alison, her blond hair whipping across her face, stood absolutely still with her hands in the air.





CHAPTER 94


DAWN WAS CASTING a cinematic glow over the remains of the firefight. Airplane and chopper pilots were getting out of their aircraft. Munder and Knightly took the three men left standing into custody and stepped around the dead bodyguard. But all of that was in the background.

I was watching Joe, listening as he said to Muller, “It’s over, Alison. Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.”

She looked at Joe and asked, “How could you do this to me? How in God’s name can you humiliate me like this?”

I was standing only ten feet from Ali Muller, and even though she’d been caught moments away from her great escape and had been shot at by her own people, she looked composed. If there was the slightest trace of vulnerability in her face, it was that of hurt feelings. And the way she looked at Joe made me think she was taking her arrest personally.

She said, “Are you kidding me, Joseph? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing and why?”

Joseph?

His smile was a grimace. He used Flex-Cuffs to pin her wrists together behind her back, after which he encircled her biceps with his hand. She twisted away, but it was halfhearted. She kept looking up into his face—I have to say, adoringly. I followed them across the grass, between the trailers and toward the shot-up Audi.