For the life of me—literally—I didn’t know how she did it. Keeping her cool. The composure. Waiting for exactly the right moment to tip me off without giving herself away. Or, at least, that’s what I was hoping.
Did he catch on? Did he figure it out?
Either way, I was walking into an ambush. There was no other choice. No path around it. He had Elizabeth. He got to her so he could get to me, and I was about to deliver myself on a silver platter. There would be no negotiation. Any chance for that had come and gone. When pushed to the brink, all that remains is your most primal instinct.
Kill or be killed.
Can I help you? no one asked.
The security provided by a doorman is only as good as the size of the building. When there are hundreds of apartments, there’s no checking the IDs of everyone coming through the revolving doors. There’s no waiting to be buzzed up. Just walk through the lobby like you live there, and no one says a word. I always told Elizabeth how I thought that arrangement was a little risky, given her line of work. Of course, it was nowhere near as risky as her line of work itself. “Besides, I like my place,” she’d often say. “It gets great light.”
She lives on the twenty-third floor. It’s the corner apartment. The living room faces east.
I stepped off the elevator and headed left, all the way to the end of the hallway. With my back against the wall next to her door, I reached out and knocked with my left hand. I shoot with my right.
There was no response, no sounds of approaching footsteps. I knocked again, waiting.
“It’s open,” came her voice, calling out.
One, she was nowhere near the door. Two, she would’ve never just left it open for me. Three, that’s the number I was counting to in my head. One, two, three…
I flung the door open as hard as I could from the side, hoping to draw his fire. He might have been a pro, but reflexes are often just that. Sure enough, he squeezed off two shots through a suppressor on movement alone, the bullets piercing the hallway wall opposite the door at roughly chest and head high. Immediately, I swung around, coming in low, crouched behind the barrel of my gun. All I was looking for was a barrel pointed back at me.
What I got instead, what I saw, was his gun pressed tight against Elizabeth’s head.
He had her in a choke hold, her body blocking his. I had no shot, and he knew it. He was twenty feet away, standing in the middle of her living room with the blinds closed, and even though I could barely see his face, I could tell that he was smiling. He was in charge.
“Drop it,” he said.
“You first,” I said back.
Just because he was in charge didn’t mean I was going to make it easy for him.
He jammed the end of the silencer hard, grinding it into Elizabeth’s temple. She winced from the pain. “I’m not going to tell you again,” he said. “Drop it.”
“Don’t you do it,” Elizabeth pleaded with me. “Don’t you dare.”
But it was my only move. This was the play. “As soon as you let her go is when I lay it down,” I said. “You can kill me as many times as you want, but only after you let her go.”
Sometimes you have to say the quiet part out loud, but this wasn’t one of those times. He already knew. He couldn’t shoot us both. If he killed her, I was killing him. But he didn’t have to tell me the flip side, either. Someone had to go first in this stalemate, and that someone was me.
Slowly, I lowered my arm as I kneeled to the ground. I could see the tears falling from Elizabeth’s eyes. “No,” she said. “Nooooo.”
I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, but that was a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
I didn’t want my last words to her to be a lie.