CHAPTER 38

A split second.

They say that all the time, that’s all you have, a split second.

Less than a breath to turn and rush for the door, abandoning my man in order to outrace a bullet.

I started to. Because he told me to. Because I wanted to live. Because I knew he’d just sacrificed himself for me.

I wheeled to my left, away from Tucker, away from Bastard.

Toward the door.

But I couldn’t. I stopped after one step.

I couldn’t leave Tucker, even if we both died.

I turned back to Tucker.

Bastard had raised his gun up. He was red in the face and had death in his eyes. It sounds like a cliché, but the bar had just been raised from “toying with you” to “premeditated murder.”

I said, “Don’t do it.”

Bastard’s eyelids hardly flickered in response. His gun levelled at Tucker, who shouted again, “Run!” But the note in his voice was futile. He knew I wouldn’t run.

The agony in his voice seared through me, raising goose bumps on my arms. He would die for me, but he didn’t want it to be in vain.

Still, I had to make our nightmare complete. I lifted my hands in the air and said, “I’ll take the burqa off.”

Bastard gasped, “I don’t. Give a shit. About that. Anymore. He fuckin’ hit. Me. In the nuts.”

Must’ve been pretty hard, too, because his voice was hollow and I thought I could detect a sheen of sweat across his forehead. Good. He’d be less interested in using them if they were newly injured.

Bastard pointed the gun at Tucker’s head. “Say goodbye, Blondie.”

Tucker blinked before he stared at me, willing me to flee like a good girl.

Instead, I hollered, “Wait! I can make it up to you.”

“No one can make it up to me, bitch.” But he didn’t cock the hammer. Maybe he’d gotten tired of killing people. He’d shot Stan and June right away, but he let Manouchka and David go. He wasn’t just a brainless machine gun. I could appeal to, well, his baser nature.

That was all I had left.

We’d worn out the Casey card. He’d already set a time limit on her arrival, which was now ticking down to maybe less than fifteen minutes. If the cavalry was going to bust out, now was the time.

So now the trick was to lure him away from Tucker without having sex with him.

I knew this was a dangerous game. Even if Bastard’s usual equipment was temporarily on pause, I remember a man, maybe a soldier, in Rwanda who raped a woman with a gun and shot it off inside her vagina.

Still, when you’re a doctor on call, you just take it one hour at a time. If it’s a really bad night, you take one minute at a time. You might not think that you can survive another eight hours, but eight minutes? That just might be possible.

I might be able to Mata Hari him for fifteen minutes. “You want me to get clean, right? So I’m ready for Casey and your son?”

“Yeah. Show me your tits.”

Right. Mardi Gras at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I took a deep breath.

“It’s really hot in here,” I breathed, trying to sound sultry. “I’m going to take it off anyway.”

“Hope,” said Tucker.

Bastard whipped toward him. “Shut your motherfucking mouth, or I’ll blow it off.” He turned back to me with a crooked grin. “All right, bitch. Entertain me. Show me your mouth.”

My hands faltered for a second. I remembered how, on Reddit’s Girls Gone Wild page, one girl had posted a picture of herself lifting her top, with the title something like, “Do you like small tits?” (I clicked on it for obvious reasons.) To my surprise, not only had the guys slavered over her breasts, but at least two of them drooled over her lips in the top left of the photo.

And her lips happened to look like mine.

So I wasn’t crazy about revealing my naked face to Bastard, even though he’d already seen it before. In fact, it could be even more of an aphrodisiac that I was all covered up, so a glimpse of my arms or my hair would make him think he’d scored.

But this wasn’t about me. This was about saving Tucker. Already, the energy in the room had dipped from murderous to...still powder keg, but at least now he’d shifted the gun between us, no longer aiming it directly at Tucker’s forehead.

I didn’t say I would take everything off. I didn’t say I would fuck him. I was just taking off the burqa.

I picked up the hem and joked, still a little breathless, “Could I have some music?”