something behind me, something or someone, staring past me like a man facing down a crowd. He was trying to raise his gun. I didn’t think he was going to make it, but you want to be sure.
I shot him again, and it was done.
I stood over him for five minutes, perhaps ten, as his blood pooled out over the wooden floor. It was spattered over the coffee table, too, and across the sofa where I’d last seen Amy when she was in this place, sitting working, as she so often had. I remembered the way she would look up at me and smile when I came down the stairs, making me feel I was home. I remembered also something that she/Rose had said:
There’s some concern over how Marcus got through in the first place. One of our helpers may have been involved.
It occurred to me to wonder whether Rose had sent Shepherd here to tie me up as a loose end or if the hope had been for it to pan out the other way around. If I had already started working for them.
“You killed a friend of mine,” I said again, to the man at my feet. But I knew in my heart that was not why I had done what I’d done.
He’d come to murder me. I had no choice.
I am not a killer. Not Jack Whalen. Not my father’s son. But something inside me is, and with every year that passes, I feel it struggling harder to get out.
I am on the road now. I am in Shepherd’s car. I brought nothing from the house except a photograph of myself with a woman I once loved and may once more, if I ever see her again. I have looked in the suitcase that lies on the backseat. There is a change of clothes that will probably fit me, and a large sum of money. Both the case and its contents belong to me now, I guess.
It is growing dark, and the sky is leaden. It will snow again later. I will watch it alone. By then I hope to be far from here. I don’t know where I’m going.
I never have.
Acknowledgments
A huge thank-you to my editors, Jane Johnson and Carolyn Marino, for their help in making this book a book; also to Sarah Hodgson, Lisa Gallagher, Lynn Grady, and Amanda Ridout; to Jonny Geller and Ralph Vicinanza for advocacy and advice; to Sara Broecker and Jon Digby for research; to Ariel for the web; to Stephen Jones, Adam Simon, David Smith (and The Junction) for support—and to Andreia “Peppa” Passos for so much else. Mad props as always to my ho, Paula, and to the shortie, N8. Y’all be clutch.
About the Author
Philip K. Dick award winner MICHAEL MARSHALL is a screenwriter and the author of the trilogy The Straw Men, The Upright Man, and Blood of Angels. He lives in London.
www.michaelmarshallsmith.com
THE INTRUDERS. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Marshall Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
