Chapter 10
Saturday, midafternoon, EOD headquarters
G abby splashed water on her face in the women’s locker room and pulled herself together. If she broke Markus’s nose, that’s what happened. It was over, and she would need to deal with it. Broken noses were part of her new post-divorce, Sloane Ellis–prescribed adventure. Back on the training mats, she found Markus waiting, blood spatters down the front of his shirt. His eye wasn’t bruised yet, but it was swollen. It could be worse. He could have asked her to make him lunch and drive him to the mall.
“Is it broken?” She held her breath and waited for bad news.
“No. I’m fine.”
She wasn’t sure if she believed him, but it was a good story, so she went with it.
“Let’s take a break from hand-to-hand tactics.”
She exhaled with relief. She hadn’t been one of those “gym and recess are my favorite parts of school” kids. Library and quiet reading time had been her thing. It showed.
“Next is target practice.”
Target practice… She mulled it over. You didn’t need to be an athlete to shoot.
“I was considering a knife-throwing lesson, but…” He let his sentence trail off, and a single drop of blood fell in a perfect splat onto the floor between them, punctuating the reason why she would not be allowed near knives.
If he wanted someone to throw knives, he should ask her bestie. Justin was one of those guys whom people would pay to watch chop a carrot. High-speed, precision chopping. There was no vegetable that he couldn’t turn into a rosette. Last year, she had cheated at Halloween and invited Justin over for drinks. She’d had a glass of wine and watched him carve award-winning pumpkins. That was her skill—getting other people to do her jobs without realizing they’d signed on for a day of work. She’d always been great at that. It was un-American of her, but there it was.
Markus looked up, as if asking the heavens for counsel. After a deep breath, he said, “I guess we should do firearms training.”
Gabby had grown up liberal, silence and nonviolence. Guns were for police and bad guys only. And Gabby was a good girl. She’d always done what she was supposed to do, never questioned, just good girled her way into nothingness.
It was time to make a mark on the world. She could see herself with Valentina and Alice, dressed in sleek black clothes, shoulders thrown back, a pistol on her belt, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the RICO laws. She would be intelligent, informed, and ready to save the world. It was time for a new Gabby.
Time for a gun.
The gun range was a few stories underground and cold, all concrete and ballistics glass, which she knew because Markus told her. It was arranged like a bowling alley with four lanes. Instead of pins, there were paper sheets with human targets. The smell of gunpowder filled her senses and ignited a fire in her belly.
“We’re not breathing in lead, are we?” She’d read a lot about lead in children. It couldn’t be good for adults either.
“The smell is strong, but there are exhaust fans.”
Markus picked up a gun from a table where he’d laid out materials like a preschool teacher setting up for a craft project. Instead of Popsicle sticks, glue, and googly eyes, his materials were guns, ammo, and a few things she didn’t recognize.
“Have you ever fired a gun?”
“Only Nerf.” And she wasn’t very good at those.
“Not even paintball?” He looked shocked.
“No.” She hadn’t been the kind of kid who played paintball.
Markus gave her a lesson, and she tried to keep track of the rules:
1. Treat all guns like they’re loaded, even if you don’t think they are.
2. Keep your finger off the trigger.
3. When holding the gun, face it downrange.
4. When you’re ready to fire your weapon, squeeze the trigger gently.
Markus was so competent and good at everything. “Why don’t they send you into the field?” Gabby asked.
A melancholy smile that hinted at some sort of trauma played across his face. Something had happened to Markus.
Gabby couldn’t help but go into full emotional-support mode. “Well, you look exactly like every spy I’ve ever seen on TV. They oughta get you in the field stat so you can be out there making them look good.”
That earned her a quiet chuckle. “If you’re ever in charge, give me a field assignment. I’ll take it.”
Gabby made a sympathetic face. “In the meantime, please accept my condolences on being so hot, Markus.”
He rolled his eyes, but she earned a real smile. “Stay focused. We’re shooting.”
Was Markus too hot or too black? The EOD looked like a country club in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, except for Markus and Valentina. It made a person wonder.
He handed her a black handgun. “This is a Glock nine.”
The weight of the gun in her hand sent shivers of excitement up her spine. It was a drug, and she wanted to feel like this all the time—important and dangerous. Markus shouldn’t be cooped up in this building. He should be out in the field, using all those muscles and skills. Instead, it was going to be her.
“Use your dominant eye, close the other. Line up the sight closest to you between the goalpost sights at the end of the barrel.” Markus demonstrated, and she mimicked him.
“Aim for center mass. Don’t overthink it, just get a feel for the gun.”
Her heart pounded with the feeling of the cold steel in her hands and the image of herself as a secret agent. The EOD had recruited her . She was at spy training learning to shoot a gun. Ready to take out the Russian mob. She pulled the trigger and—
She jerked, and the gun fired high. Shocked, she didn’t move her finger but squeezed harder. The “pop-pop-pop” of more shots echoed through the room. It was the sound of bullets hitting metal. Gabby looked up to see steam spraying out of a pipe overhead.
“Damn it, Gabby!” Markus looked at the path of her bullets and shook his head. “I’ve never seen that happen.”
An alarm went off, the kind with flashing lights and noise. Her ear protection was the only thing saving her hearing from a wailing siren in a concrete room.
Gabby deflated like a waving Gumby in front of a tire store. She exhaled hard and sank down against the wall. So much for her Super-Agent Gabby Greene fantasy.
Markus took the gun. “Let’s stick to Tasers and pepper spray.”
Gabby rubbed her temples. This had been a disaster.
After making a call, probably to report that they hadn’t been attacked by anything but her incompetence, he made his way back to her. His initial anger had worn off. When he saw her pathetic self, he softened even more. “Don’t beat yourself up, Gabby. Sure, you’re not ready for a gun or hand-to-hand combat, but no one coming in off the street is. Yesterday, you were in the carpool lane. Today you’re at the gun range. We’re asking a lot of you.”
“How did I even do that?” She pointed at the ceiling.
Markus shook his head. “You anticipated the recoil and jerked. If you overreact to an imagined force or any problem that is not there—you create a problem that didn’t exist to begin with.” He gestured to the disaster she’d just created.
In her mind, Phil was the bad guy, but Markus’s words hit a nerve. She tended to blow things out of proportion. Every time she was worried about something, safety usually, she went straight for the panic button. That time she refused to go on vacation because of a babysitting concern, Phil had gone without her. He sucked, but she wasn’t blameless. When she wouldn’t let Lucas play outside for a whole summer because she was sure he had a bee allergy, she’d almost lost her mind indoors. She overreacted all the time. Every overcorrection had led to today, divorced and unemployed, trapped in a minivan with a happy family sticker on the back window.
The alarms still wailing, Valentina walked in. She took in the scene, rolled her eyes, and blew out a breath. There was so much judgment without a single word. She looked at Gabby. “Come with me.”