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“It’s too late!” Ted turned his head enough to send the barrel of the gun notching to the right. Larry’s fingers reached out, stretching towards the curved receiver. “No!” Ted screamed.
Wiri seized the moment and dragged at Phoenix’s tee shirt. He powered his right arm with everything he possessed, sending all his weight into his fingers as he drove her sideways towards the door. But he hadn’t factored into his equation that she was Logan Du Rose’s daughter. Or that she’d spotted the same moment of weakness that he had and made her own contingency. She’d already dropped her weight back into her right foot by the time Wiri launched and she resisted, toppling sideways but not going where he’d intended.
The black void of the barrel’s interior moved as though time had stalled and Ted aimed at Phoenix.
And fired.
Ted’s hand recoiled even though the gun gave a gentle click, as though he’d manufactured the actual effect in his mind. But he’d pulled the trigger and prepared to live with the consequences.
Wiri held his breath and in his peripheral vision saw Larry raise his arms to cover his head. The sleeves of his cassock sagged by his sides like a washing line of garments attacked by the wind. Phoenix kept falling as Wiri watched, her eyes closed and her lips pursed. Shock and rage imbued him with strength and an unhinged desire to mete out revenge before Ted fired again. Phoenix hit the ground hard, driven there by the force of Wiri’s misplaced push. She rolled onto her side and Larry dropped to his knees, his body shielding her from further harm.
Wiri spun to face Ted, his fingers balling into fists of steel. But Ted lifted the gun and pointed it at his temple. “Sorry,” he breathed, before pressing the trigger again.
Wiri jerked backwards in shock, blinking as Ted remained standing. Jet’s game of roulette returned as a laughing spectre and he faced the old man with venom in his flashing irises. Jet’s next foray into depression may well have been his last.
“You’re dead!” Wiri ground out the words through gritted teeth, seeing just an outline of Ted’s blurred shape through a lifetime’s compounded grief and rage. He bounced forward, determined to send the old man into the afterlife with his bare hands. All reason abandoned him, and Logan’s self-defence tactics paled to nothing. Kane Du Rose whispered to him from the depths of his soul, a gentle voice urging him to destroy because he could. It reeked of revenge and the filth of a life ill spent. Wiri listened, saturated by the swirling emotions he couldn’t even name. Ted had fired at Phoenix, intending to take her away from him. Wiri’s reasoning abandoned him and left him with a pervading hollowness in his gut.
He crossed the distance in one gigantic stride and his fingers closed around Ted’s throat. The old man’s eyes bulged in his grizzled face and his cap slid sideways to reveal a bald head.
Then the gun discharged a third time, and a deafening tinkle of glass accompanied it. But the burning was nothing like Wiri had ever experienced before.
***
Third time unlucky.
Wiri lay on the tasselled rug in Larry’s office while Phoenix tried to stop the bleeding. Her lips moved, but he struggled to hear the words she spoke over him. Perhaps they were prayers. Perhaps admonishments.
The gun’s report still echoed in his ears, ricocheting around the room and bouncing off the framed, crucified Jesus over the mantelpiece.
Ted dropped the gun next to the fireplace, and it spun and clattered against the brick hearth. Larry lurched for the phone and dialled the emergency services. He didn’t stop Ted from leaving, placing the receiver on the desk and leaning over Phoenix’s shoulder. “What do you need?” he demanded, his voice husky.
“Something to stop the bleeding,” Phoenix replied. She leaned hard against Wiri’s left thigh, putting all her weight into the action. The fingers of her right hand snatched at his belt buckle and he felt his lips slide into a smile as indecent thoughts crowded into his conscious mind. A clank and a thud followed the sense of something running along his spine. It curled around his waist and he saw Phoenix holding up his belt. His father’s buckle drooped from the end, the brass head of a horse there and then gone as she dropped her hand beyond his vision. Phoenix’s lips pursed hard enough to make them pale. “Kane did nothing else for him,” she said through gritted teeth. “Maybe now he’ll help to save his life.”
Pressure dug into his thigh, eking through the blaze of pain which burned like a bush fire. It throbbed and ached, the heat backed by a peculiar chill which attacked the rest of his body.
Phoenix’s face appeared above him. He grunted as the pressure tightened in his thigh, an ache consuming his knee and everything beyond it. His fingers scrabbled against the rug, fighting the way its threadbare surface curled and bunched beneath his grip. “What’s happening?” he demanded, his words slurring.
“Larry’s tightening the belt.” Phoenix’s curls draped across his face, tickling and sticking to the sweat beading on his brow and running along his neck. “I think the bullet went straight through and broke the picture leaned up against the wall behind you.” Shaking fingers brushed her hair from his cheek. “An ambulance is on its way.”
“Yes, I’m a trained first aider, but my friend is doing a grand job.” A thud signified Larry laying the receiver on the desk again. He rose and disappeared, but his voice continued from a distant corner of the room as he gave Phoenix instructions. A heavy blanket landed over Wiri’s body, pressing him down into the floorboards and forcing him to acknowledge the ridged lumps in the rug. One ran behind his tail bone and he wanted to move away from the pain. He squirmed and Larry knelt beside him and forced him back with a hand to his right shoulder. “Keep still,” he advised, authority in his voice. “You’re going into shock. Keep the blanket over you.”
Wiri swore and Phoenix raised a smile. “I think you’re okay then,” she said, masking her fear behind humour. But he recognised the hugeness of her pupils and the trembling of her chin as she looked down at him.
“Ted didn’t load it.” He inhaled and controlled the breath as it left his lungs, letting it out by degrees so he could focus on it. “And he didn’t know it had only one round in the chamber.”
Larry uttered what sounded like a prayer. He tutted and peered down at Wiri. “I put it in there for safe keeping,” he admitted. “I just needed to keep them both together. Ted noticed the gun, asked if it was loaded and I said yes. I never expected him to pick it up when I went to answer the door and fetch him a glass of water.”
Wiri groaned. “You loaded a gun to avoid losing the bullet?” He whimpered and tried to contain the laugh bubbling in his chest. “That’s hilarious.”
“It actually isn’t.” Larry’s eyelids shuttered to hide the dismay radiating from his eyes. “It was stupid. I knew better and now I’ll need to explain myself to the authorities.” He exhaled. “I wish I’d never taken possession of it.”
“Not as much as I do,” Wiri replied. His teeth chattered. He focussed on the rhythm of them clicking together as another sound added to the melody. The siren wailed in peaks and troughs of a tinny cry. Wiri lost count as he tried to match the two noises together. Instead, he concentrated on the shaking fingers clutching his between the blanket. “Larry?” he said, his voice cracking. “I got you all wrong. When Phoe called you Pastor Hendricks, I figured you told Donovan all the town gossip. But you didn’t, did you?”
“No.” Larry shook his head and sighed. He glanced over his shoulder and into the hallway, shifting on his knees as he prepared to admit the paramedics clattering onto the porch. “Ted did. He knew everything about everyone.”
