A Righteous Kill (47 page)

She searched for a way to explain her situation. It wasn’t like she could leave the agents, but if she kept walking to the door, Luca would notice and follow them both. She didn’t want to abandon Jimmy Mazure now. Besides, Corelli and Reinhardt were at the back of the church, watching for her. She couldn’t see them—should have worn heels—but she’d watched them come in.

“I mean it, Hero. Just
keep
walking.” He nudged at her back, harder this time, and Hero realized with a dawning horror that the hard jab against her spine wasn’t his elbow.

It was cold through her thin blouse. Hard and unmistakable.

A gun.

The faces of people she’d known for a lifetime blurred into each other as Hero’s mind surged from utter panicked emptiness to teeming with scenarios, all of them ending with someone innocent getting hurt. Because of her. Because they’d tried to do this
here
.
Why
had she ever agreed to this?

“I’m getting you away from
him
,” Mazure explained as Hero took a few halting steps forward, her mind suddenly blank from shock and fear. “I’m
saving
you, just a few more steps and we’ll be free.”

Suffused with a singular terror at the word
free
, Hero couldn’t think of anything better to do than to keep walking. If she got Mazure away from the crowd, then they, at least, would be safe.

Was Vince still behind them?
He
obviously couldn’t see the gun. Where were the other agents?

“Hero?” Luca’s voice lifted above organ music and the shuffling of the crowd, drawing the attention of the entire quiet congregation.

She glanced back to see Luca maybe only two or three paces away from her, pushing his way back out of the pew toward her with a surly frown on his face. Vince had been detained somehow up at the dais, and was now behind Rown, who played shepherd to the rest of her family.

“Luca,” she gasped. Knowing he probably couldn’t hear her, but hoping he would read the panic in her face.

He did, but not before old Mrs. Werner in the aisle next to her shouted, “Gun! He has a gun!”

The three seconds it took for Luca to get to them felt like thirty. Someone pushed the pause button on time, freezing everyone to their spot.

Hero kept walking through the pathway of people who ducked out of their way, prodded forward by the steel pressing into her back.

“Don’t look back at him,” Mazure snarled, though his eyes still held that wild, frightened animal look. “We’re almost free,” he said again.

“Don’t do this, Jimmy,” Hero begged. “There are children here.”

“Hero!” She thought she heard her pop’s voice, and tears sprang to her eyes as she prayed he didn’t try anything stupid.

“
Freeze
,” Luca commanded, and Hero looked back again to see Luca’s gun pressed up against Mazure’s temple from behind. She didn’t know if she should be relieved or even more terrified.

Her body picked terror, and began to shake and she needed to pee emergently.

“Put. The gun. Down.” Luca’s voice was hard and cold.

“I’d rather shoot her then hand her back to you!” Mazure yelled, his eyes growing wilder, latching on the doorway rather than Hero.

“I’m giving you three seconds.” Luca’s eyes were black holes, boring into Mazure as savagely as his bullet would.

A few desperate souls from the back of the church lunged for the door.

Hero turned forward to see Corelli and Reinhardt moving against those that fled, but doing their best to get as many people out while still trying to reach her. Maybe she should make a play for Mazure’s gun while he wasn’t watching her. Glancing back and down over her shoulder, Hero realized what Mazure meant to do, and that Luca couldn’t see because of his position behind the big man.

“Luca! He’s—”

It almost seemed like Luca was blown backward before the explosion of the gunshot ricocheted off the stone walls in a repeating succession. Hero screamed and lurched toward Luca as he fell, clutching his ribs, but Mazure grabbed her around the waist and started to drag her out of the church.

Pandemonium erupted like Hero had seen in the movies. People ran in every direction. Some toward the front exit off to the left of the dais, others toward the large doors of the cathedral, putting themselves in Mazure’s way. They shoved and trampled long-time friends and neighbors to reach the possible safety and cover of the darkness outside.

Hero could feel herself being jostled and bumped in the madness, but all she could bring herself to do was chant Luca’s name, searching for his body between the legs of what had become a mob.

She couldn’t see him. Oh God! Was he dead?

The other agents. Where were they? Could they get to him? She searched the isle in front of her, and saw that Corelli and Reinhardt had their guns out and were shouting commands at Mazure, but Hero understood right away why they didn’t take action.

They couldn’t shoot into the crowd.

Mazure was shouting back at them, pointing the gun at one agent, then the other. “Let me out! I need to get outside!”

Hero knew for a fact that if he got her outside, it would mean the end for her. Remembering something Knox had taught her long ago, she let her body go completely limp, sliding from Mazure’s erratic grasp like a heavy bag of wheat.

To her shock, he didn’t fight her much. The moment he was relieved of her weight, he lunged toward the door, clearing a path the only way he could see how.

Thunder erupted inside the stone cathedral. Mazure’s shot at Corelli landed right in the center of his chest. He got his next shot off at Reinhardt before the first agent staggered and hit the floor, swallowed by the crush of screaming bodies pressing toward the exit. Blood spattered from Reinhardt’s shoulder, as he spun from the impact and slipped beneath the sea of people.

It sounded like a flurry of gunshots rather than two as the noise bounced in between the terrified screams of the congregation. “I’m sorry,” Mazure yelled at her over the commotion. “I tried to save you—I’m sorry.” He joined the dash toward the arched doors with jerky, panicked motions.

Somebody stompped on Hero’s hand while another body stumbled and kicked her in the ribs. She cried out before strong hands hooked beneath her armpits and dragged her above the stampede and against a cold, square chest.

Dark hands roughly skimmed every inch of her torso, and she looked up into Luca’s harsh, black eyes just in time for him to shove her back into the aisle.

“You’re alive!” she croaked as another pair of arms scooped her into a similar cold, unyielding chest.

The hell?

“I’ve got her. Go, go,
go
!” Rown had her tucked into his side and her mother into another. From behind them, her father’s voice ordered Andra to stay down and Hero had
no
idea where Demetri and Knox were.

She looked back to where Luca had plucked her out of the crowd, but he’d vanished. She clung to Rown for a moment as he swept them into the center of a pew, searching for Luca’s dark head above the crush of the crowd.

“We’re safer here, now that the shooter is outside,” Rown yelled, gathering her family into the same row and letting the panicking herd of people filter slowly by. “Stay together and stay
down
.”

The female agent from the front of the room ran by with her gun drawn, the husky blonde man right behind her. They expertly elbowed through the crowd and out the door in pursuit of Mazure, announcing their presence as FBI. She couldn’t see Luca
or
Mazure and Hero tried not to drown in a sudden despairing anxiety. Luca
had
been shot. She’d watched him get shot.

After a second, the unnatural rigidity of Rown’s torso began to make sense. He wore a Kevlar vest. Which meant Luca did, as well. She’d have known that if she’d touched him at all that night.

“Thank God,” she breathed. Maybe the other two agents she’d watched Mazure shoot down had survived, as well. She sent a silent prayer on their behalf. How could this be? How could Mazure have been John the Baptist all along? He’d been so damaged, so lost. He’d been in custody when—

“Rown!” Demetri’s deep voice lifted over the din of screams, and they turned to where he and Knox’s hands waved above the crowd back toward the dais several rows ahead of them. “Officer down! It’s Vince!”

“Vince!” Hero cried. “Is he alive?”

“There’s a lot of blood!” Knox answered.

“
Shit
!” Rown swore, frantic indecision flashing in his emerald eyes as they bounced from Hero to his downed colleague and back to his family.

“Go,” Hero shoved him toward the isle. “Help him!”

“I’m not leaving you unguarded!” Rown insisted.

“I’ve got them, son. Like you said, John the Baptist is outside.” Her father squeezed Rown’s shoulder. “Help Vincent.”

The cathedral was finally beginning to empty, and Rown deftly leapt over several benches before braving the center aisle.

Her father turned to her mother and gently inspected a growing lump on her cheek where it looked like she’d been elbowed or punched. Blood ran from her lip.

“Mama, are you all right?” Hero called.

“I’m fine,” Izolda uselessly slapped at her husband’s hands. “I’ve survived worse.”

She had?

“Let me see that right now, Izolda, or I swear on this the day of the Lord’s birth, I’ll bend you over my knee,” her father ordered.

Andra already had her phone out and was yelling into it with a finger over her ear.

Hero heard her name called in low, desperate tones, and she wrenched around to see where it came from. No one left in the cathedral seemed to pay her any mind. The sea of people was thinning out, but she still couldn’t tell where the plea had come from. Then she looked down, and noticed a trembling hand reaching up at her from across the aisle, attached to a blood-soaked sleeve. “Help me, Hero.”

“Oh God!” she cried, and ducked away from her family to assist. How many people had been shot? How had any bullets reached all the way back to Vince? She couldn’t remember anyone shooting back that far, but gunfire had seemed to echo loudly from every direction once the shooting started. Plus she’d fallen on the ground. Had Mazure shot into the crowd after that?

Hero knelt down and clutched the hand reaching up to her, hoping to create enough space around the prone body so they could stand. “Oh, my
God
, are you all right?” The hand, steady now, grabbed her back with surprising strength, and by the time she saw the gun, it was too late.

Chapter Thirty-One

“Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”

~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Luca sprinted into the night, his breath coming in short, painful gasps. He was pretty sure the bullet had cracked a rib or two at point blank range, but breathing or not, he was going to run this motherfucker into the ground.

Adrenaline had dumped into his veins the moment he’d seen the panic on Hero’s face. Rage had strengthened the initial surge until Luca felt like he could run down a pack of stampeding wildebeests. He raced after Mazure down the cathedral hill, training his gun on the man’s fleeing back, but unable to get a clear shot.

Mazure was tall and fast, but running after and pile-driving someone into the ground was something Luca had done since high-school. He lifted his gun as soon as he broke past the last terrified parishioner. His long legs ate up the slippery grass, and when they hit concrete to chase Mazure across a paved square and toward the church garden, he began to close the gap between them.

“Stop,” he wheezed the command. “I’ll shoot.” Fucking vest was becoming too tight.

A manufactured outbuilding loomed ahead, and the plastic sheeting of the Parish nursery covered half of a garden, now bare and glistening in neat, frosty rows. On the other side of a slatted fence, a neighborhood of upscale townhouses backed up to the church property. Luca didn’t want to chance a shot going wild into a window, but also didn’t want to stop and take aim, possibly losing his gain on the gunman.

Who was he kidding? He didn’t want to
shoot
Jimmy Mazure.

He wanted to tear the man apart with his bare hands.

He was maybe five yards away and closing in. Luca holstered his gun and summoned a burst of speed fueled by murderous wrath. Three yards. Two. They were back on the grass now. He needed to pounce before Mazure reached the fence. If he did, Luca’s vest and other hidden gear, along with the fact he’d just been fucking shot, would give Mazure the advantage when it came to climbing, and tight neighborhoods were easy to disappear into. If Luca lost him now, Mazure would be a ghost.

Calculating the distance, Luca dove, caught the kind of air that would send a football stadium roaring to their feet, and crashed his heavy shoulder into Mazure’s kidney, tackling him to the ground and driving his face into the grass.

The nine-millimeter in Mazure’s hand went flying, but the man recovered surprisingly fast, and caught Luca in the jaw with his elbow.

Luca’s peripheral vision dimmed and stars exploded in the night sky as Mazure twisted his body from beneath him and began to scramble away. Fighting an enveloping darkness born of not-enough-oxygen and a soundly rung bell, Luca surged to his feet, grabbed Mazure by his fleeing shoulder with enough force to swing his big body around.

Luca saw the haymaker aimed for his temple just in time to block it, simultaneously landing a quick jab to the throat. Taking advantage of Mazure’s stunned gasps for air, he boot-stomped Mazure’s knee out from under him. The crazy bastard screamed and crumpled, giving Luca one more chance to connect with a hay-maker of his own. The crunch of Mazure’s nose beneath his fist was better than any Christmas present Luca could have imagined. He stood over Mazure’s writhing body. Reaching for the cuffs strapped to the back of his belt, he paused halfway back by the butt of his weapon.

“Get up, you son of a bitch,” Luca’s voice came stronger now, victory returning some of his breath. “Give me an excuse to
end
you.”