Flawless(83)

Outside, people were already milling in fear, asking questions, looking as if they didn’t know which way to run.

Craig got a glimpse of Mike sprinting toward the cross street and raced hard in that direction.

He entered an alley just in time to see Mike disappear behind a delivery truck. He hopped over a box of garbage and followed.

Mike was standing in the alley ahead of him, looking up at the various fire escapes behind the buildings. His Glock was raised, but he was looking in the wrong direction.

Craig saw the shooter; he was on the opposite side of the alley, high on a fire escape. He had his gun trained on Mike.

“Mike!” Craig roared.

Mike dropped just as the shooter fired. The bullet slammed into a wall.

“Drop it!” Craig ordered, his own gun aiming upward.

The shooter’s gun turned toward him.

Craig had no choice but to fire.

The shooter catapulted down from the fire escape to land with a heavy thud on the broken pavement of the alley.

Mike got to his feet, and they both hurried over to the body.

The dead man had been wearing a hoodie, but the hood had fallen away as he fell, and Craig gasped.

He knew that face.

No time to worry about that now. He hunkered down to feel for a pulse, while Mike called in the shooting.

No pulse. The man was dead. He’d bled out from the hole in his heart.

It occurred to Craig suddenly that it had all gone down by the book. He regretted the fact that he’d had to kill the man.

Because he knew him. He’d seen him before. Several times. At Finnegan’s. With Jimmy.

It seemed obvious. He’d been at the pharmacy to kill Bailey Headley before she could give anyone a description of the woman who had purchased the phone.

The sound of sirens filled the air.

He hung his head. It would be hours now before he could leave. Hours before he could get to Finnegan’s.

And he had never before felt such an urgency to be there.

*

Kieran didn’t have to wait for the news to hear about the shooting.

Marty filled her in.

He was proud to be on duty all night, watching over her and the pub. Although, as he was quick to assure her, he wasn’t alone.

Detective Mayo had sent in several officers, two in uniform and two in plain clothes. The two in uniform were there to be imposing. The two in plain clothes were there for backup.

She had to admit she was worried, though also hugely relieved that Craig and Mike were all right. But, she reminded herself, she had promised to steal a cell phone.

Even with the place filled with cops and Marty there watching her, stealing Jimmy’s phone was, as she had promised Craig, a piece of cake.

She sat at the table with Jimmy for a few minutes while he told her about stocks and bonds.

She didn’t know much about either one and had no real idea what he was talking about, but she pretended to pay attention.

His phone was sitting on the table. She was easily able to lean toward him on an elbow as if fascinated by what he had to say, and ease it off onto her lap.

She could always say she had found it on the floor, but she doubted it was ever going to come to that. People lost phones at Finnegan’s all the time. She was pretty sure that Jimmy had left his on the bar more than once.

But after Jimmy had left and with his phone tucked safely in her pocket, they all stopped to watch the news and suddenly it all seemed so much more immediate and terrifying than when Marty had told her about it.

She found herself shaking with relief when the reporter on the scene emphasized that no one other than the shooter, who had died at the scene, had even been injured.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” a customer at the bar murmured.

Others echoed the sentiment. If a guy was shooting at innocent people in a pharmacy, it was probably a damned good thing that he’d gotten shot instead.

A lot of people left after that, and it turned into a quiet night. Kieran didn’t want to leave, so she decided to take advantage of all the empty tables to start scrubbing them down with the special polish they used to protect the wood.

She was on the third table when she found scratches that annoyed her. She tried to polish them out at first, then realized that they went too deep, that someone had written on a piece of paper and pressed down so hard that the impression had gone through to the wood.

“Idiots,” she murmured to herself. “Would they do something like this at home? I don’t think so.”

But just as she realized that they were going to have to sand the table to even out the surface, she paused. She’d seen Jimmy here the other night along with Gary and the two unknown men—the dark guy and the Nordic-looking guy.

She hesitated, then headed back to the office and found paper, a pencil and a heavy jade paperweight, before returning to the table. The impression was so faint that she hoped the paperweight would give her the pressure she needed to make it readable.

She almost crashed into Marty; she’d forgotten that he was there, watching over her.

“Please don’t go off without telling me,” he asked her.

“I’m sorry. I just needed something from the office.”

“Just tell me when you’re going to disappear, okay?”

“I’ll tell you next time, I promise.”

Marty nodded, apparently appeased, and she hurried back to the table. She realized that he was watching her closely and tried to appear nonchalant about what she was doing.