CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The shape moved again inside the room.
Selena pressed her shoulder to the wall beside the ruined doorway and forced one breath down into her lungs.
The motel walkway smelled of splintered wood and stale cigarettes.
Somewhere behind her, a woman screamed from one of the other rooms. A television kept laughing through a wall as if none of this was happening.
Blood had run down the side of his face from a cut at the hairline, dark and glossy against his temple. One arm was braced under him, trying to push up. The other reached for nothing. No gun in his hand. Her eyes moved to a shadow.
Nolan Pruitt crouched behind the far side of the bed with Connor’s revolver clenched white-knuckled in one hand, face gone wild and sharp, none of the meek musician left in it.
The keyboard had been knocked sideways against the wall.
One lamp lay shattered near the dresser.
The radio mic Connor had worn was half visible beneath the bed frame.
“Nolan Pruitt! This is the FBI! Come out with your hands up or I’m coming in shooting!”
No reply came.
Selena raised her weapon and fired once through the doorway at the slice of shoulder she saw above the mattress.
The shot tore stuffing from a pillow and drove Pruitt lower.
He answered at once.
A blast from Connor’s revolver punched into the wall inches from the doorframe. Another shot came right after it, lower this time, chewing a line through the motel railing outside.
Selena stayed where she was. She needed an opening.
From inside, Pruitt finally shouted, his voice high and ragged. “You should’ve left me alone!”
Selena risked a quick glance and saw Connor roll onto one elbow, dazed but moving. Good. Moving meant alive.
“Drop the gun, Nolan!” she yelled.
“Nolan’s dead!”
The words came back with such venom they almost sounded spit out.
“He died with the rest of them. You understand? The dirty parts. Siring an illegitimate child. The rot. All of it had to be burned out.”
This was dangerous. He was clearly deranged. Whatever abhorrent rationalizations had taken hold in his head, they were eroding at his very personality.
Selena shifted her grip on her pistol and leaned just far enough to see into the room again.
No clear shot.
Only mattress, broken lamp, Connor’s boots near the floor, a sliver of Pruitt’s wrist, then nothing.
“You’re done,” she said. “You know that. Backup will be here soon. One way or another, you’re coming with me.”
A bitter laugh snapped out from behind the bed. “Done? No. You people never understood anything. Those women were filth. All they did was spread it. God is on my side! He won’t let those sacrifices go in vain. He’ll protect me!”
Connor tried to get a knee under himself.
Selena saw it and said sharply, “Connor, stay down.”
Pruitt heard that, too. The revolver swung toward Connor’s shape.
Selena fired again, fast, forcing Pruitt back behind the mattress before he could line up the shot.
The room fell quiet for a moment. Wind moved over the parking lot. A truck braked hard out on the road. Inside Room 12, the scrape of Pruitt shifting position with Connor’s revolver held ready.
Selena checked her angle.
If she went through the doorway, she might get a clean shot. She might also take a round through the throat before her eyes found him. But it was worth it if it saved Connor. That thought surprised her, but it felt good; a noble impulse in a world full of horror.
The bed gave Nolan too much cover. He only had to hold that one side of the room. She had to expose half her body to challenge it.
From the floor Connor’s voice came out thick and rough. “Selena.”
“Don’t move.”
“That was the plan.”
The fact he could joke at all steadied something in her.
Pruitt barked a laugh from behind the bed, uglier than before. “Still joking. Still walking around like your lives matter more than everyone else’s. Still acting like there’ll be no judgment! When judgment is coming! For all the whores! All the corrupt lawmen! All of you!”
Selena kept her eyes fixed on the doorway. “Three women are dead because of you.”
“No.”
His answer cracked through the room like another shot.
“They were already dead. You can’t live like that and still be alive in God’s eyes. Brenda. Lauren. Tara. They gave themselves away piece by piece and called it living. Gave away their wombs to sordid one-night stands. Gave away their right to sire life!”
He was ranting now, no rhythm to it, no careful language, only conviction stripped down to its ugliest bones.
“I purified them,” he shouted. “That was mercy. That was the only mercy left for them. It’s all for His glory!”
Connor pushed up another inch and winced hard.
Selena heard it.
Pruitt did, too.
The gun shifted again.
Then she said the one thing she had not planned to say like this, shouted into a cheap motel room with broken plaster under her feet and Connor bleeding on the carpet.
“I know about Donna, Nolan.”
Everything stopped. A sudden void where Pruitt’s fury had been.
Selena went on before he could recover.
“I know about the baby. The first death you marked.”
The effect was immediate and total.
“My child…”
“Yeah, a tragedy,” Selena said. Then she decided to use it as a weapon against him. To goad him into acting. “Maybe if you’d been a better support for Donna, she would have gotten clean sooner and the baby would have survived. You ever think you had a hand in all of this?”
Pruitt rose too fast from behind the bed, face contorted, eyes bright with something beyond rage. “You… Shut your mouth! Another whore who can’t shut her filthy mouth!”
There he was.
Open.
Selena fired.
The bullet hit him high in the upper arm and spun him half sideways. Connor’s revolver flew from his hand and clattered across the room under the small table by the window.
Pruitt screamed, but it did not stop him.
Instead, he charged.
No hesitation. No attempt to dive for cover or recover the gun. He came straight through the doorway at her, wounded arm hanging useless, good hand out like a claw. A man possessed.
Selena got one step back and tried to realign for a second shot, but the walkway was narrow and he was too close, too fast. He reached her and hit her hard enough to drive her into the outer railing.
Metal slammed across her lower back. Her gun hand went wide.
She held onto the weapon by reflex alone.
Pruitt grabbed for her wrist.
His face was inches from hers now, stripped of every trace of the quiet man from the revival. Spit at the corner of his mouth. Blood running down from the wound in his arm into the sleeve of his shirt. Breath hot and sour.
“She killed him with drugs!” he snarled. “She killed what God gave us!”
Selena drove her knee upward.
It caught him in the thigh, not high enough to finish it. Enough to jolt him. He slammed her wrist against the railing and pain shot bright through her hand. The pistol almost slipped free.
Then weight hit him from the side.
Connor.
He came off the motel carpet like something half resurrected, one hand out for Pruitt’s throat, the other around his waist. The impact ripped Pruitt off Selena and sent both men crashing through the broken doorway into the room.
They hit the floor tangled together, Connor on top for half a second, then not, then both rolling through splintered wood and motel grit.
Selena did not hesitate.
She rushed in and went first for the revolver.
Always the gun first.
Connor’s weapon lay under the little table. She scooped it up, backed one step clear, and trained her own pistol on the struggle while Connor and Pruitt fought across the carpet in a blur of elbows and cursing breath.
Pruitt clawed for Connor’s injured head.
Connor answered with a short brutal punch to the ribs that knocked sound out of him.
“Stay down,” Connor growled.
“Go to hell,” Pruitt spit.
They rolled again. Connor’s grip slipped. Pruitt tried to buck him off and nearly managed it.
Selena moved in.
She holstered her own pistol on instinct, dropped to one knee, and drove it hard between Pruitt’s shoulder blades. The breath burst out of him. Connor got a forearm across the back of his neck and pinned him flat.
“Hands,” Selena snapped.
Pruitt thrashed once.
Connor jammed his face into the carpet. “Don’t.”
Selena caught his good arm, twisted it behind him, then the wounded one more carefully but not gently. Pruitt made a raw animal sound into the motel carpet.
“Cuffs,” Connor said through clenched teeth.
“Got them.”
She pulled them from his belt, snapped one bracelet shut around the right wrist, then the other. Metal clicked. Final. Pruitt sagged for a second, chest pumping.
Selena kept her knee in his back anyway.
Only when she was certain he was no longer going anywhere did she look at Connor properly.
Blood had run down into his eyebrow and along one cheek. A scrape scored his jaw. He was breathing hard, shoulders rising and falling, but alert.
“You hit?” she asked.
Connor sat back against the bed frame and touched the side of his head, then looked at the blood on his fingertips as if annoyed to find it there.
“One bullet grazed me,” he said. “Mostly pride and decorative damage.”
Selena reached for his shoulder, turned him slightly, and checked the line of blood at his temple. Not a penetrating wound. A graze and a split scalp from the earlier impact. Ugly-looking. Survivable.
“You’re going to milk this,” she said, her lungs still burning.
Connor managed a faint grin. “I deserve a lot of sympathy for all of this, don’t you think?”
Despite everything, despite the gunshots and the stink of blood and the man cuffed under her knee, Selena smiled.
“I’m not quite ready to give that to you just yet.”
Sirens rose in the distance then, faint but coming fast.
A moment later boots pounded up the walkway outside and Arnold appeared in the doorway with his weapon drawn, chest heaving, eyes wide behind the sights.
He took in the wrecked room. Connor on the floor. Selena kneeling on Pruitt’s back. The shattered lamp. The broken door hanging off its frame. Blood. Guns. General ruin.
Then he lowered the muzzle a fraction and said, with real disappointment, “Aw. Is it over?”
Connor let his head fall back against the bed frame for one second. “Yes, Arnold, it’s over.”
Arnold grimaced. “I really drove like hell for this.”
Connor pointed weakly toward the room with one finger. “Don’t worry. There’ll be a ton of paperwork, and I wouldn’t want to keep all of that to myself.”
Selena caught her breath and allowed herself a laugh.