What Doesn't Kill You

by Aimee Hix

  I picked up one of the frames that was lying face down on the dresser. Michael. But this picture wasn’t his service photo like from the memorial service. I hated that memorial photo. Those stupid pictures that they didn’t let them smile in. Knowing that the last time some people would ever see him was that unsmiling photo of him in uniform had made me so angry. I wanted to remember him always like he was in this photo. Happy. Smiling. Full of life. I realized Seth must have them all face down for me.

  He’d been doing those little things that I kept missing. Not so much ignoring but not seeing because I didn’t expect them to be there. I didn’t know exactly what to make of them other than he was trying. And he was doing it in ways that mattered. Not big gestures but the things that could go unseen because he wasn’t making a big deal about them. Like the sugar and cream for my coffee.

  A knock on the door and a beat of a wait saw the door open to Seth again. “We wanted to brief you about tonight if you’re ready.”

  He held his hand out for the photo I was still holding. He stared at the photo for a minute, a faint smile lighting his face. He placed it back on the dresser, properly.

  I followed him out to the kitchen where Gordon still sat, suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up, laptop in front of him. He looked up as we came in and gave us each a nod. Two words and a nod. Clearly, he was warming up to me.

  Agent Gordon flipped the laptop around to face Seth. I caught sight of a document that looked like a blueprint. Seth studied it for a minute, nodding occasionally. I wondered when the briefing would start.

  “Guys, I’m not sure if the ATF outfits its agents with brain chips that allow for telepathic communication, but I’ll keep up much better if we actually do this out loud.”

  Gordon snorted. Was that a laugh or an aborted sneeze? I glanced over at Seth, who looked a little nonplussed himself.

  “You’re right, Anderson, she’s funny. Most of this would be too technical for you to understand if we did a standard briefing, former cop or not, so I’ll high-level it for you,” Gordon said.

  He had a really nice voice. Like one of those guys that did movie trailers. If I had a voice like that I’d be talking all the time just to hear it. Melted caramel with a hint of chocolate. Dammit, I was hungry and getting distracted.

  I stood up and started to forage in the cabinets full of food that hadn’t been there when I searched the place earlier in the week. The cream and sugar weren’t outliers. The man had made a grocery run for me. That was even hotter than the half-lidded glances he’d been throwing me since I entered the kitchen. Not just the fact of the food he’d gone out his way to pick up but imagining him sauntering down the aisles of the store in his rough-and-tumble clothes searching for all my favorite foods. Gordon stopped talking. I turned around to find him looking at me with an annoyed expression.

  “I’m hungry, but I can listen while I’m looking for something to eat. It’s called multitasking, sparky.”

  That earned me another snort and a smile. I grabbed a package of cookies and handed them back to Seth while Gordon continued his explanation. I let the info sink in while I looked over the various cans and packages in the fridge.

  I grabbed a soda, my favorite, and sat down across from Gordon again. Seth ripped open the package of cookies without taking his eyes off the computer and handed it over to me. I pulled a stack out and popped open the soda. I was reminding myself that grownups don’t drool as I jammed a cookie into my mouth when I noticed Gordon had stopped talking again.

  “Wha?” I mumbled around a mouth of cookie.

  “You’re actually going to ingest that?”

  Seth looked up from the computer, his expression one of real fear. He knew how seriously I took my junk food. I could be civil. I mean, now that the sugar was coursing into my blood and I felt calmer.

  “Listen, a racist psycho who’s probably already killed one of his own friends has come after me twice. Failing both times, I may add. So if a handful of cookies and some caffeinated, colored sugar water makes me feel better, you can bet your ass I’m going to ingest it. I’d mainline them if it was possible.”

  Gordon just looked at me for a second, shook his head, and smiled widely. “You’re a badass, all right. But we need to work on your diet.”

  I took another bite of the cookie and stared back at him with a blank expression. He could try, like my mom and Ben. He’d fail just like them. He could have my cookies when he pried them from my cold, dead, well-preserved hands.

  He continued on with a bunch of boring details about warrants and exigent circumstances and imminent threat to civilian life.

  “Civilian life—that’d be me, right?”

  Gordon nodded. “Two attempts on your life in as many days constitutes imminent threat.”

  “It probably looks bad for your team if I get killed tracking down a murderer for the ATF, huh?” I winked at him.

  Seth’s hand eased over and stole a cookie from the package without even rustling the wrapper. I noticed Gordon was silent on Seth’s cookie.

  “Okay, so, the team’s surveillance report on the tattoo parlor didn’t get us any specific intel on the guns,” Seth said, “but we did get what we needed to in order to get in, search the place, and get out without drawing any attention.”

  “Please tell me we’re going in on wires like acrobats, Mission Impossible style.”

  “We?” Gordon asked. He looked over at Seth.

  “Will, you can’t come tonight. There’s no way around it. Chain of evidence protocols. We’ll go in and you’ll stay home with a black-and-white,” Seth said.

  Gordon continued. “We’re going to hit the tattoo parlor tonight and hope there’s something more there that leads us to other locations. They’ve been so careful that this is our first real lead.”

  “I guess I’d better see what’s on TV tonight then. Make sure you leave me some money for pizza and wings, Dads.”

  “Gordon, can you excuse us for a minute?” Seth grabbed my hand and walked me back to the bedroom. “You’re pissed.”

  “I have to just sit home while you guys are out playing secret agent using information I got you? Yeah, I’m pissed. But I also get it. I’d rather drive a railroad spike through my hand using my forehead than let Ingalls weasel out of anything, so if you need me to stay home and knit you a damn sweater in order to take him down, I’ll do it. I don’t have to like it.”

  “You knit?”

  “Do I look like I can knit, Seth?”

  Chapter

  24

  I flipped through the channels half-heartedly. I was bored and miffed. I knew why I couldn’t be there with Seth and Gordon. It probably wasn’t all that exciting anyway—just the two of them searching through a grungy tattoo parlor with its stashes of gross skin magazines and a porn collection alarming enough to generate a second investigation—but I still wanted to be there. These people had sold stolen guns to dangerous people not caring about the consequences. Mark Ingalls had killed Joe Reagan and had burned down the Horowitzes’ house. He’d come after me. He’d almost killed Seth. And I wanted to see the cuffs being put on every last one of them. Especially Ingalls. I deserved that. So if it meant I sat quietly at home with asshole Officer Harrison outside in a black-and-white at the curb and wait, then I’d do it.

  I checked my phone for the tenth time since they’d left. Seth had sworn several times he’d contact me the minute it was over. He’d wanted me to stay at the apartment, but I wanted my own bed and my own things. When he brought me home, I had showered again, finally washing off all the smoke from the fire, replacing the burnt wood and chemical smell with strawberries. I had stayed in there a long, long time, only getting out when the water ran cold.

  He’d sat on the bed, watching as I dropped my towel, not making a move toward me. I had dressed reluctantly, trying to drag out the time before he left, wanting to fall bac
k into the rumpled covers with him, to forget about fires and knives and racists like Mark Ingalls. Seth had been right—we had crappy timing.

  When I had finally pulled on the last of my clothes, he stood up and wrapped his arms around me. We stood quietly leaning against one another for as long as we could before he had to leave. He promised me one final time that he’d let me know when he was done and on his way home. I assumed he meant home was wherever I was and marveled at how quickly that had happened after years of stalled desire. How easy it was to be a team despite both our best efforts to push the other away.

  I was tired and thirsty, something the nurses had warned me would be a near constant complaint in the days after jumping out of a fire-engulfed building. My head pounded. I turned the TV off and got up from the couch to get some aspirin and water.

  I rounded the door from the dining room and had half a step and a heartbeat to recognize Mark Ingalls before he hit me in the face. I felt his fist glance off my cheekbone, clipping my brow and ghosting my eye. My teeth clacked together and pain exploded along my jawline. My ribs slammed into the edge of the counter, and that was enough to distract me from my face feeling like it was splitting in two.

  “You stupid bitch. You ruined everything.”

  Verbal skills notwithstanding, Mark Ingalls could throw a punch. I had gotten lucky that it was a glancing blow. If he’d hit me square, I’d have been in real trouble.

  I lashed my foot out and kicked him in the side of the knee but I was off-balance and slipped down onto the counter, mouth first, lip popping open. Ingalls doubled over, grabbing his leg and yelling. I was happy to note I still held the remote, so I smacked him across the face with it. It was one of those old ones—big numbers, lots of buttons, and a half-dozen batteries. The compartment opened and they all flew out.

  I took care with my footing as I pushed myself to standing and stumbled back out of arm’s reach. I had caught him on the nose and he was having a hard time seeing me, his eyes watering, blood streaming from a cut on the bridge.

  I was hurting and that first shimmer of fight-or-flight coursed into me. Adrenaline was my friend for now. I needed to keep it pumped up and I had to get my head into the game. Indulging in the pain could get me killed. This was Ingalls’s third try at me and he was not screwing around. He was bigger, he was stronger, and he was angrier, but I was smarter and I had home-field advantage.

  I backed into the dining room. My ear was starting to ring a bit. Ingalls was wild-eyed.

  “Reagan was a traitor. He lied to me. Never told me his piece was a kike.”

  This guy couldn’t stop being racist even while he was trying to kill me. Psychos really will talk at you about where it all went wrong and why they just had to do it—and it was always someone else’s fault. I looked around hoping to find something I could use as a weapon. All I saw was the cabinet full of creepy little figurines, which were about as dangerous as a nightmare. I thought about the knives in the kitchen and discarded the idea. I needed to keep him away from the knives. He could grab one just as easily, and I wasn’t trained in knife fighting. Plus he seemed to like them. I turned away and got two steps into the room before my head snapped back, his hand tangled in my hair.

  “No so fast. You’re not smarter than me, you bitch!”

  Creepy figurines it was. I kicked out, breaking the glass in the cabinet. There were a few that had a decent heft to them. I’d dusted them enough times to know which ones. Sorry, big-eyed couple on the swing. I pushed through the broken glass and closed my hand around it. I swung around, pulling my hair out of his hand. Shit, that hurt. The ceramic smashed into his temple. I pulled free completely and vowed not to turn my back on him again.

  Ingalls panted, a dazed look in his eyes. The powdery remains of the tchotchke dusted his face, mixing with the sweat and blood. He was more out of shape than I had figured. I eased to the right, trying to put the dining room table in between us.

  “You don’t deserve to breathe the same air as righteous white men, you worthless mongrel. When I’m done here I’m going to kill your boyfriend. Does he even know you’re a half-breed? Shame he has to die just because you’re a lying nigger.”

  Jesus, he was super-no-doubts-about-it-capital-I insane. Maybe if I could keep him talking.

  “This is not going to help you, Ingalls. My boyfriend is with the ATF. They’re on to your group. You need to get the hell out of here.”

  He lunged at me, uninterested in self-preservation. I shoved the small table hard, hoping to knock it into him, take him down. The damn thing had been in the same spot for fifteen years and the legs had made deep divots in the carpet that held like glue. My side of the table tipped up as I powered my muscles into the shove and it flipped up on its side. It didn’t even knock into Ingalls, but it provided the distraction I needed. I kicked the chair over, trying to give myself another layer. If he couldn’t run after me I had a better chance of getting to the back of the house. To the gun safe in the master bedroom.

  The muscle-deep bruise on my arm screamed at me. It had nagged all day but the table had woken it and it was fierce and angry. I reminded myself that being dead would be worse.

  Dad had a revolver in the office. The lockbox would be easier to get to than the gun safe. But that door was behind Ingalls. Dammit. I feinted to the left like I was going for the living room and he moved to the outside of the table just as I moved back to the right, pushing the table as hard as I could again, hoping that flipping it onto its top would distract Ingalls enough to slow him down.

  I raced into the kitchen, fighting every instinct that screamed at me to get the butcher block full of knives. I already knew he liked knives, so I didn’t even glance at it and took the corner to the hallway, clipping my shoulder on the edge of the wall. I heard his heavy work boots pounding after me on the linoleum. But he was slowing. I deliberately swiped my hand on the painting closest to the back hall. A little misdirection could only help. I knew the master bedroom door was closed. He’d think I slipped in there to hide.

  Back on the carpet my steps were muffled but my breathing was another matter. I was sucking in air too hard. I had to slow it down, be quieter, so I wasted a second taking a deep breath. My lungs clenched and I couldn’t stop the cough, only barely muffling it by keeping my mouth closed.

  I eased into the office and gave myself another second I didn’t have to acclimate myself to the dark. I slipped around the side of the desk and down into the chair well. It was a terrible place to hide but I wasn’t hiding. The desk was old and cheap with exposed drawer slides. I palmed the side of the top drawer and slid it open carefully. The lockbox was in the back of the bottom drawer. I could reach in and grab it without having to move out from under the desk.

  I clicked open the suitcase lock, flipping the code by memory. Dad’s badge number. I pulled the loaded revolver out.

  Ingalls had enough time now to find out I wasn’t in the back of the house. He’d be coming for the office any second. I was out of time. And I wasn’t running or hiding anymore. This was my house. This was my life. And he’d taken enough from me already. He wasn’t taking any more.

  I stood up and walked out of the office into the dining room. Ingalls was standing in the kitchen holding the butcher knife.

  He took a step. Then another. He was no more than ten feet from me. Even though I was armed and had the table between us, my stomach gave way to terrified spasms.

  As a cop, I should have given a warning. But I wasn’t a cop anymore, and he’d had plenty of time to stop. To leave. To not hurt me. To not try to kill me. He wanted me dead. He’d made that clear.

  I’d been well trained for situations like this. My mind tunneled. Just Mark Ingalls. Just the expanse of gray cotton stretched across his pudgy torso.

  Squeeze, don’t snap.

  Squeeze, don’t snap.

  I forced my mind clear of the pain and noise and
panic. Then I planted my feet, let my knees relax, and swayed slightly forward at the hips. Perfect shooter’s stance. One deep breath then another.

  Squeeze, don’t snap.

  Squeeze, don’t snap.

  The bullet hit him center mass. He grunted. In pain or surprise, I didn’t know. He looked surprised. Another bullet just to the left of the first. That one stopped him. He dropped to his knee and just lay down on the kitchen floor. It was almost graceful except for the blood.

  My tunnel vision was clearing. The dining room was destroyed. I couldn’t imagine how I would clean it all up, fix all the stuff that had been broken, make it okay to have my family in here. How would I ever sit at the table and eat Thanksgiving dinner again knowing I had shot a man over it? How would I have breakfast with my family in the kitchen with all that blood on the floor?

  Shit. There was blood on the floor. I shook my head. Mark Ingalls was bleeding on the floor and I was worrying about family holidays. I needed to call 911.

  I couldn’t find my cell phone. It must have fallen out of my pocket somewhere in our fight. I didn’t have time to look for it. I glanced over at the landline hanging on the wall. Mom had insisted we keep it. It hadn’t seemed like a good idea before I shot someone. The problem was I had to walk past Mark Ingalls lying on the floor to get to it and I really didn’t want to get anywhere near him.

  I stared at him for what felt like hours but was probably only a minute. I kept the gun aimed at him. I was practically sitting on the counter, sidestepping to the phone. I couldn’t take my eyes off his face. I was waiting for him to lunge up at me like the horror movie monsters did.