Page 16 of Shatter

I get off the bike.

I tell myself I'm checking the back door, making sure Dale locked it behind him, because a regular might do it on his way home.

My boots carry me around the side of the building before I can argue with them.

I walk the side of the building in the dark, past the grease trap and the stacked milk crates, and the back door is locked, bolt thrown, and I stand there with my hand on the cold steel and my face going hot in the dark, a fucking idiot checking locks.

Then she screams.

It comes from the front lot.

High and ragged, cut off in the middle like somebody slapped a hand over it.

I'm moving before the sound's done.

I'm running along the side of the diner with my boots skidding on the gravel and the Glock already out of the holster at the small of my back, and I don't remember reaching for it.

I come around the corner, and the lot opens up in front of me.

She's on the ground.

The air punches out of me like I've missed a step in the dark.

Twenty feet from the front door, face down, a dark smear trailing behind her across the asphalt like she's been dragging herself.

A man is walking back from the sedan.

Unhurried, like a man coming back from the mailbox, a bundle of black cable ties in one hand.

He sees me.

He stops, and his free hand goes inside his jacket.

I don't think, and I don't warn him.

I plant my feet and put two rounds in his chest.

The shots crack off the front of the building and roll away across the empty street, and the man jerks like somebody yanked him from behind.

He takes one stumbling step and sits down hard on the asphalt.

The cable ties spill out of his hand.

I walk toward him with the gun up.

He's making a wet, whistling sound, trying to breathe through the holes in his chest, and his hand is still fumbling inside his jacket.

I don't wait to see what for.

The third round goes through his forehead, and he folds backward and stops.

My hands are dead steady.

They shouldn't be.

My ears are ringing.

The smell of cordite hangs in the thick air, sharp and bitter, and under it there's something coppery and wet I haven't smelled since I was nine years old.