A noise cracked through the sky like the sound of a jet airplane making speed.
Ethan Nolan went down mid-stride, his hand grabbing at the fibrous cord that connected the muscles in the back of his calf to his heel bone.
I looked up. I had not taken him down. I hadn’t had the strength.
But Shooter had. And she got him right in the Achilles’ heel. Nolan got to one knee but screamed as he attempted to get up. As he switched to the other foot, a second shot rang out, and I heard the snap of the same tendon in the other leg.
Blood poured from the back of both feet, just above his heel, and Nolan howled in pain.
He began crawling toward the edge of the quarry, grunting as he did.
I walked closer, but kept out of Shooter’s eyeline.
Blackish-red blood was pooling in the dirt behind him. A gate was nearby, a fence surrounding some electric equipment that fed path lighting around the quarry.
“She’s gonna take off your wrists if you keep moving,” I said.
Nolan glanced up toward the mountain, using the edge of the fence to pull himself closer to the quarry. “What the fuck?” he said. “Who shoots someone like this?”
“It’s your Achilles’,” I said. “Greek mythology. That Oedipus arrow thing you and your dad were doing. She’s got an odd sense of humor.”
I grabbed Nolan by his left hand and dragged his body southward.
He screamed in pain, and I took out my cuffs. Locked them onto his wrist. Then clicked them onto the metal fence.
I turned, and he yelled, “What the hell? You gonna leave me here?”
I reholstered my Glock, unsure what I was capable of if he began speaking about my mother again.
“You’re going to prison, Ethan, and you’re never getting out. Someone’ll come get you.”
Five minutes down the trail, I found Banning, sitting on a log. He looked groggy.
“It’s over?” the director said.
“Yes.”
“You kill him?” he asked.
I shook my head. And Banning looked in the direction from which I’d come. An old bull, perhaps thinking he’d go after Nolan still.
But I heard the sounds of a mechanical bird, coming up over the ridge where Shooter had been. Jo would help the agents get Nolan onto a chopper and off to a hospital.
I assisted Banning back to a picnic table outside the cabin. An ambulance arrived sometime after. Took him away.
I sat alone then. Waiting for Shooter. When she arrived, we cleaned the pepper dust from Banning’s car and headed back west.
I got to the intensive care unit at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas four hours later and met with my mother’s physician on the fifth floor, in an office looking out over a green lawn covered in curving walking paths.
There was no new news, and after a few minutes of the doctor speaking, I stopped hearing the exact terminology that left his mouth, focusing instead on the words that he placed particular emphasis on: endotracheal tube and informed decision.
I thought of something my mother had once told me when we were discussing religion. She had grown up in a faith household, but had not raised me in that way. “Still,” she’d said to me, “a lot of things are faith-based, Gardy. Love, for instance. It’s hard to prove. But you know it when you feel it.”
I stood up, and the doctor stopped talking.
“For the time being, I’m not going to withdraw care,” I said. “I owe it to her. To see if she comes around.”
“Of course,” he said.
I moved back to the elevator and took it to my mom’s floor.
In her room, the sheets were pulled up around her arms. I heard the sound of whirring machines. My mother hated hospitals.
Richie and Cassie stood outside the door, and Shooter was a few feet down the hall. I nodded at them and entered my mother’s room while they held the door open.
“Let’s give Gardner a minute,” Cassie said, and I heard the door shut.
I leaned over my mother’s body, smelling the soap she used.
“I remember everything,” I said. “Not just what you said, but what you meant. The lessons.”
I stayed close to her for ten minutes, holding my hand against her cheek. “Wake up,” I said. “I need you.”
Then I stood up and wiped tears away with my wrist.
Cassie came in and hugged me.
Then Shooter.
I stood there, arms against my sides, unused to being held this long by so many.
When Richie joined in, I slowly put my arms around everyone. My mother was not my only family.
An hour later I drove over to my mother’s nursing home and found my way to the main room. Residents gathered, and her friends told stories about my mom. They described her as the resident analyst, advice columnist, and sometime shrink. She got a nurse to leave her cheating boyfriend and helped an orderly reconcile with his wife.
“When your mom was with us,” her nurse, Flavia, said, “I mean really with us—there was no one like her.”