20. Julian
TWENTY
JULIAN
The shot was not aimed at me.
I was looking at Leah and she was already moving when the man by the window pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flash was at the corner of my eye and the bullet went into the wall behind where her head had been a half-second before.
Plaster exploded. Dust came down. A piece of the picture frame from the shelf above the couch hit the floor with a sound I felt in my chest before I heard it.
I was on the floor.
I did not remember dropping. My knees were on the carpet by the kitchen counter, my left hand was flat on the cabinet, my right hand was at my chest, and my ears were ringing.
I looked up.
She was not on the floor.
She was standing in the doorway of my apartment with her weapon up and her gray eyes fixed on the man by the window, and I had never seen her look like that.
She fired once.
The sound was the same sound, repeated. The man by the window staggered. His own gun clattered to the hardwood. He grabbed his right shoulder with his left hand and his knees went and he was on the floor by the window, the gun a foot from his hand on the wood.
She did not lower her weapon.
She crossed the room in five steps. She kicked his gun across the floor toward the kitchen.
She stepped between me and the rest of the room.
Her weapon swept — the lawyer flat against the wall by the door with both hands up by her ears, Conrad still on the couch, the man on the floor at the window who was not moving.
"Hands where I can see them. All of you."
The lawyer's hands went higher.
Conrad set his whiskey glass on the coffee table. He set it down slowly. Deliberately. He laid his hands flat on his knees.
He looked at her with an expression I could not read.
"You are the assistant."
"I am the FBI agent who just shot your man, Mr. Weiss. Put your hands up."
He raised his hands.
Calm. Patient. The same warm pale-blue eyes he had been looking at me with two hours ago. He was not afraid. He was watching her.
I got to my feet. The cabinet was at my back. The plaster dust had settled on my shoulders. There was a piece of it in my hair I felt with my hand when I pushed the hair back off my forehead.
She did not look at me.
She kept her weapon up. Her dark hair had come halfway out of the low knot at the back of her neck. The gray sweater was half-untucked at her hip from where the holster had dragged at it. The watch was on the inside of her left wrist. Her hands were not shaking.
The sirens were coming up the avenue.
They came up faster than I would have expected. I did not know whether they had been on their way all this time or Leah had called them before she came into the apartment. Either way I was grateful. The sirens hit the corner of Eleventh, the lobby intercom buzzed once, and the apartment filled.
Agents in vests came up the stairwell three at a time.
Two of them broke for the window where the gunman was on the floor with his shoulder bleeding into the rug.
One went to the lawyer at the wall. Two went to Conrad on the couch.
Two more came around me at the kitchen counter with their weapons low.
One of them said, "Sir, are you injured?"
I said no.
The gunman went out on a stretcher with his shoulder packed and his cuffed hands across his chest. The lawyer went out cuffed at the wrists, talking fast about client privilege to a woman in a Bureau jacket who was writing her words down without responding.
The forensic team came in with cases and gloves.
Conrad was last.
Two agents gestured at him to stand. He stood before they had finished the gesture. He straightened the lapel of his gray suit. He held his wrists out without being asked.
They cuffed him. He did not flinch.
The lead agent walked him toward the door. As he passed the kitchen counter where I was standing, he stopped.
The agent at his elbow looked at me. He let it happen.
Conrad turned to face me.
The pale-blue eyes were on mine. The same warm fond look I had been looking at for ten years. The wrists in the cuffs in front of him.
"I built you, Julian."
I looked at him.
The man who had chosen me before my mother had died. The man who had used a grieving twenty-six-year-old kid's talent as the entry point and had spent ten years calling it faith. The man who had been on my couch an hour ago telling me the Vanguard was his.
"No, Conrad."
I let it sit.
"You used me. There is a difference."
He held my eyes for one beat. Two. The corner of his mouth moved in the small fond smile he had been giving me at lunch every Thursday for nine years. Then the agent at his elbow stepped forward and Conrad turned, and the two of them walked him out of my apartment, and the door closed.
Harlow came in last.
She was in a Bureau windbreaker over a navy turtleneck.
Her hair was pulled back. She walked the perimeter of the apartment slowly.
The bullet hole in the wall behind the couch.
The plaster on the floor. The acquisition documents scattered across the coffee table where the lawyer had dropped them when she had hit the wall.
The gunman's gun on the floor by the kitchen counter where Leah had kicked it.
She stopped in front of Leah.
Leah was standing at the kitchen counter with her weapon now holstered at her hip and her badge in her left hand at her side. Her chin was a quarter-inch up. Her shoulders were squared. Her gray eyes were on Harlow's face.
She was waiting for the reprimand.
I had been at this firm for ten years and I had stood in front of regulators waiting for reprimands. I knew the posture.
Harlow looked at her for a long second.
"Calder."
"Ma'am."
"You went into a residential structure with a confirmed armed shooter without authorization. Without backup. In direct violation of my order to hold your position. Do you understand the disciplinary review you have triggered?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Do you regret the decision?"
"No, ma'am."
Harlow held her eyes for one more beat.
The corner of her mouth moved. The smallest amount.
"That is the agent I have been waiting to see, Calder."
Leah blinked.
"Ma'am."
"Write it up. Every detail. I want it on my desk by morning. The conduct review will go through channels but the case is clean. The principal is alive. Weiss is in custody. The judge's protective umbrella collapses by morning. You did the job."
She turned to me.
"Mr. Cross. We will need a statement from you tomorrow. Today, technically. Field office at ten."
"I'll be there."
"Good."
She walked out.
The forensic team finished their photographs. The agents at the door coordinated the lobby. The last man out gave me a card with a name on it and said anything else, call me directly. The door closed behind him.
The apartment was quiet.
Leah was in the middle of the living room with her holstered weapon at her hip and her badge in her hand and the half-undone knot of her dark hair and the plaster dust still on the shoulder of her gray sweater.
The vinyl was still spinning. The Goldberg Variations Conrad had put on at one in the morning. I crossed the room. I lifted the needle. The room went silent.
I turned around.
She had not moved.
Her hands were at her sides. I could see the small fine tremor in them now — not in the hands themselves, in the place underneath them, in the whole length of her body where the steel of the last forty minutes was leaving her in the small ragged way adrenaline left a person who had been running on it.
I crossed the carpet to her. Slowly.
I stopped in front of her.
I lifted my hand. I took the badge out of hers. The leather of the case was still warm from her grip on it. I crossed to the kitchen counter. I set the badge on the marble.
I came back to her.
I lifted both my hands and I cupped her face.
Her gray eyes came up to mine.
They were wet.
She was not hiding it.
"You came back."
"Of course I came back."
"He could have killed you, Leah. That bullet — that bullet was aimed at the side of your head. He missed by an inch."
"I know."
"Why."
She swallowed.
"Because the last time I followed the rules, you almost died. And I decided that if something happened to you because I was too afraid to trust myself, I would not survive it."
I kissed her.
Not hard. Not desperate. Slow. My hands at her face, my thumbs on her cheekbones, her tears wet against my fingers. Her hand grabbed the front of my shirt and held on. She kissed me back. The kiss tasted like salt and like the dust from the wall and like the long shape of relief.
I pulled back.
My forehead came to rest against hers.
I held there for a second.
I had not said this in my life. I had not said this to a woman in three years. I had been getting ready to say it on Declan's kitchen floor at three in the morning.
"I love you, Leah."
It came out thin. My voice cracked on the second syllable of her name.
"Not Claire. You. The real one."
I stopped.
I started again.
"I love you."
She closed her eyes. Her hand on the front of my shirt tightened. Her shoulders went down a quarter-inch into my hands.
"I love you too," she said it quietly.
She opened her eyes. "I have loved you since the park, Julian. Since you told me about your mother and the buildings you never built. I loved you when I thought you were guilty, and I loved you when I knew you weren't. I'm sorry it took a bullet hole in your wall for me to say it."
I pulled her in.
My arms went around her back. Her face pressed into the side of my neck. Her arms came up around my ribs. Her hands fisted in the back of the white shirt I had been wearing, and I felt her shoulders go loose against me.
We stood in the middle of the apartment.
The plaster dust settled. The last of the sirens faded into Sixth Avenue. Somewhere on the street below us, a delivery truck went past. The radiator in the corner clicked. The early summer dawn was coming up gray at the corner of the curtain I had not fully closed when I had come in last night.
Her heartbeat was against my chest. Mine was against her ear.
"Stay."
"I'm staying."