Taking Stock (50 page)

She’d just come from there. He wasn’t lurking among the shelves. Could he have given up and left
?
They’d both seen him. They knew who he was and what he’d done. How could he expect to get away
?
Maybe he knew the police were coming and decided to run.

She stepped tentatively from the cover of the shelf to the desk, her back to Gregg with the gun aimed toward the far aisle.

She couldn’t free him and keep the gun trained across the room. Reluctantly, she turned her back to the shelves, wheeled Gregg back a few feet and stepped around behind the desk and rummaged through the drawers for something sharp. Taking a rusty old pair of scissors from the top drawer, she set the gun on the desk and started working to free his wrists. The dull scissors chewed rather than sliced. Her mind ticked off every second she worked, warning her that she was standing in plain view, focused on Gregg rather than the danger that could be ready to pounce. She clamped down on the scissors, slowly tearing through the tape.

Gregg jolted backward and howled. 

His wrist broke free of the tape and he clutched his shoulder. Blood immediately painted his fingers bright red.

Eric
a wheeled for the gun, but before she could reach it, searing pain ripped through her right shoulder and threw her forward, sprawling her on top of the desk.

The telephone exploded into two dozen plastic shards.

Eric
a clutched the gun in her left hand, turned and fired blindly. She fell, landed sitting with her back to the desk with nothing between her and Herman. Visible now, he stood at the far end of the room using the shelf for cover. He fired a fourth time in their direction, luckily missing them both.

Eric
a aimed and fired twice and he retreated behind the shelf.

A bullhorn blew a warning from outside. The police wanted them out of the building, but the shouted warning provided little relief. The police might take minutes to come inside.
Eric
a and Gregg could be dead in thirty seconds and the call would make Herman far more desperate.

Eric
a dropped the gun on Gregg’s lap, grabbed the chair with her good arm and pulled Gregg toward the cover of the shelf. She’d use the long aisle to keep him at bay until help arrived. Herman heard the movement, ducked out and fired.
Eric
a picked up the gun from Gregg’s lap and returned his shot with a wild one of her own. She needed help and she cursed herself for forgetting to remove the silencer. The report would have brought the police rushing in to help.

At the cover of the shelf,
Eric
a held the gun in her weak hand and twisted off the silencer as quickly as she could. She didn’t waste a bullet to alert the police, but her next shot would tell them exactly where she was. She considered throwing the silencer down the aisle, but guessed Herman was smarter than the man she’d killed upstairs.

“It’s over, Herman. The police are outside. There’s no getting out of this now,”
Eric
a yelled.

“Not with you two alive,” his voice boomed. “But telling my story is going to get much easier in a minute.” He was still somewhere on the far side of the room.

Eric
a looked down at Gregg. He was bleeding badly, still blinded by the tape with one hand fastened to the chair. The scissors were on the floor across the room. Too far to run out in the open and get them. There was no way to get him up the stairs without getting shot.

Blood dripped on his jeans, her blood. Her triceps was torn, blood running down her forearm and dripping down from her elbow. Her arm hung lifeless. She could use her hand, but barely. With nothing to stop the bleeding, she ignored the wound. She needed to get Gregg outside to the paramedics. He was covered in blood and he was looking pale and weak.

They huddled behind the width of one shelf. If Herman rushed them, she couldn’t move Gregg and return fire. She opened the clip. Three bullets left. Gregg needed a safe place to hunker down. Herman would be moving soon and there’d be no way to know which direction he’d come from.

Eric
a rushed away from Gregg to the far end of the main aisle.

She shifted the gun to her weak hand and yanked on the first shelf, rocking then tipping it over with a crash, cutting off the aisle so Herman would have to climb over the boxes to approach. She did the same to every aisle, save the one in the middle. Soon the room looked like a maze with every avenue blocked. Herman was still out of sight.

She wheeled Gregg to the one open aisle and tipped over the third shelf, creating a shortened aisle for them to hide in. The blockage protected them from Herman, but allowed a view over the boxes to the stairwell on the opposite side. When the police came, she could call to them. If Herman came down the aisle, he’d be completely exposed. If he chose another aisle, he’d have to noisily climb over the boxes. If he went around one of the ends, he’d be stuck in the main aisle, blocked in by the overturned shelves.

Eric
a fired two shots. She only had one left, but the report filled the room and set the police and Herman in motion.

 Herman’s feet shuffled on the opposite end of the room, no doubt looking for an aisle to sneak down and finish them. He paused in each aisle, confronted with the mess she’d left to block it off. She could hear his calculations in the long pauses in his steps. He knew time was running out. Soon he’d figure out where they were.

The footsteps fell silent. He was coming.

Eric
a left Gregg in the corner, shielded by the fallen boxes on one side and the undisturbed shelves on the other two. She stepped to the end of the aisle and stood quiet listening for Herman’s approach.

Seconds later she heard a scratch on the concrete floor. He was coming, but she couldn’t afford a look. She had just one bullet left. He’d have a full clip. He was coming down the main aisle from her left. With the gun in her left hand, she’d have to expose herself completely to shoot. She’d wait for him to be right on top of her. She couldn’t miss, but if he got a shot off, neither could he. She had to be quicker.

Sweat poured from her brow. She didn’t dare wipe it. She waited, barely breathing. She could hear the steps now, shoes softly touching down, steadily closer. When she imagined he was only a few feet away, she burst out into the aisle, gun leading, arm outstretched, her eyes searching for the sight and her target. He wasn’t three feet away, it was more like twelve.

Startled by her sudden appearance, he flinched, his gun aimed over her head a second before he regained control. She fired before his gun came level. The bullet ripped low through his chest, but he didn’t fall. He wobbled, trying desperately to line up a shot, but his arm wavered with the pain, defying control. She charged him full speed, dead into his sights with just one good arm. His first shot whizzed over her head. He didn’t fire another.

She buried her shoulder into him and he dropped, slamming his head on the concrete floor, immobile from the shock. She wrested the gun away and stood over him.

Eric
a was finally free.

The paramedics swarmed around Gregg a minute later.

Holding his hand in the ambulance and listening to the steady beat of the heart monitor, she knew for the first time how completely her world had changed.

Melanie, Sarah and Stan followed Gregg and
Eric
a up the slope for the last attraction on their tour of the Turner’s farm. Stan and Gregg lugged heavy picnic baskets while
Eric
a listened to Melanie chat away about her new job with the Boston Globe. They passed the sturdy pine that
Eric
a and Gregg spent two evenings underneath and climbed a set of makeshift stairs up to the plywood decking that would be the main floor of the new house. No walls had been framed and the concrete foundation for the barn had yet to be touched.

A sheet of plywood over three sawhorses formed the picnic table. There were no chairs. Sarah spread two large blankets over the plywood table and the men opened the baskets and began laying out the food.
Eric
a noticed Sarah’s hand on the middle of Stan’s back and a wide smile passed between the two women. It seemed the Friday night dinners were turning into something more.

Back at BFS, Sarah and Stan were running internal audit together until they got a new boss. They were both relieved to be rid of Herman and co-managing had gone well in the first month.
Eric
a and Gregg had agreed not to press charges or speak to the media. Marty paid handsomely for their silence and both retired quietly from the firm. Pete Harrison had found Herman’s Swiss accounts and was helping Marty give the money back to investors. Pete and his bosses had agreed not to go public. The group at the picnic would never know how much that had cost Marty.

Stan asked
Eric
a what she’d do now that she didn’t need to work for a living. Programming computers seemed pointless. Odd after she’d poured four years of her life into learning so much about technology, but she realized she wanted to have a real impact in the world. She wanted to help people. She’d figure out how later.

A car drove up and Carolyn and her fiancée stepped out and walked over the grass.
Eric
a jumped down and jogged across the field to meet them. She held her mother there like she did that day in the courtroom. Mother and daughter connected like never before. Tragedy had ripped their lives apart. Carolyn had struggled to repair her life from the moment Dale Fletcher hit the floor. She’d worked hard, raised her daughter and now she was enjoying a new life with a new man.
Eric
a had been running away from her life ever since that day thirty years earlier. She’d never realized how hard she was running until Brad started chasing her.

Standing in the grass with her mother,
Eric
a spun around the gold band on her left hand to show her the diamond ring she’d kept hidden all morning. She’d finally stopped running from Gregg.