man standing in the hayloft with his gun at his side. Slowly, he began to move toward the ladder.
Irene watched Maxwell's hand-if it began to move, she was prepared to shout a warning, maybe even try to grab it. Pender started down the ladder, hanging on with his left hand, gun in his right, toes feeling for the rungs, head turned at a painful angle so he could keep his eyes on Maxwell.
“So far, so good,” called Maxwell, slowly bringing his hand out from behind his back when Pender reached the ground. Then, without taking his eyes off Pender: “Irene, would you count down from ten to one-same cadence you just used.”
“Wait,” said Pender calmly. “I just want to be clear on this-do we draw at one or after?”
“What's your preference?” asked Maxwell, just as calmly.
“Could be problematical either way. How about three, two, one, go, and we draw on the go.”
“Okay by me. Got that, Irene?”
“Got it.”
“Then let's git it on,” said Maxwell, in a high, pinched voice. Irene didn't recognize it, but knew it was one of his impressions.
He does that when he's nervous, she remembered. He was nervous that first day with me.
“Ten,” she said, loudly and clearly, hearing her voice echo around the barn.
Pender was still trying to decide what number to go on when she started her count. He'd thought about it all the way down the ladder. Going before the count began would have been risky- Maxwell was watching him too closely. But Maxwell had implicit faith in Buckley's trick. Once the countdown began, he'd start to relax, he'd be in familiar territory.
“Nine.”
Too soon.
“Eight.”
Not yet-nerves of steel.
“Seven.”
Pender cocked his wrist and fired from the hip. Seven sounded just about right to him.
87
The hollow-point caught Maxwell high in the left shoulder and spun him sideways. His balance and reflexes were superb. He kept his feet and even managed to squeeze off a round of his own that ricocheted off the cement floor and sent chips flying from one of the stanchions separating the stalls.
Pender managed to get off a second shot within the space of a heartbeat, but yanked it high. A rookie mistake-second shots tend to pull high due to bad initial positioning caused by the upward kick of the gun on the first shot.
You know better than that, Pender told himself. Everything but his mind was moving in slow motion. He found he had all the time in the world. Still he overcompensated downward on the third shot. The bullet smashed through Maxwell's knee as he struggled to switch the heavy Glock from his useless left hand to his right. The gun went flying, but somehow Maxwell managed to hop halfway out the barn door before falling, despite the fact that his right knee had all but disappeared in a spray of fine red mist.
Maxwell lay on his back, half in and half out of the barn, staring up at a rosy sunset sky. Pender approached him cautiously, holding the SIG out in front of him, his finger half-tightened on the trigger. When he reached Maxwell, Pender saw that he was still conscious, and that neither of the wounds was necessarily fatal. What a goddamn shame. He knelt at Maxwell's side, placed the muzzle of the SIG against Maxwell's forehead so that Maxwell could see it and feel it.
“Caz Buckley sends his regards,” Pender said softly. “By the way, he said to tell you he never really liked you.”
When the shooting began-she hadn't seen who started it-Irene had dropped to the floor and crawled under Maybelline. She was astonished at how calm she was. A week ago, she knew, she would have been either hysterical or catatonic. Instead, she waited for the gunfire to end, and didn't crawl out until she saw Pender's Hush Puppies crossing her line of vision.
She stood up, saw Pender kneeling in the doorway at Maxwell's left side, holding the gun to Maxwell's forehead. “No!” she cried. “What are you doing?”
“Just securing the prisoner,” he replied, hurriedly beginning to pat down the waistband and pockets of Maxwell's shorts with his free hand, searching him for another weapon while trying to avoid the blood spurting from the damaged knee. At that point Pender himself wasn't entirely sure whether he had intended to fire a third round into Maxwell's brain from point-blank range. Probably not: though he was pretty worked up, he hadn't forgotten that powder burns on Maxwell and blowback on himself would have been a dead giveaway.
Irene approached them with a certain amount of dread, but when she saw Maxwell's wounds, her medical training kicked in.
“Here, give me your bandanna.” She knelt beside Pender and pressed her thumb against Maxwell's spurting femoral artery.
He glanced over at her, did a double take, though he had to have noticed that she was naked before then, then hurriedly stripped off his torn, sweaty, bullet-riddled, blood-spattered, scorched, threehundred-dollar jacket and draped it around her shoulders. It hung to the floor.
“Your bandanna,” she said again.
“What for?”
“I have to make a tourniquet.”
“What for?”
“To stop the bleeding.”
“Oh-right.” Reluctantly, almost resentfully, Pender stripped off his bandanna and handed it to Irene. For a disconnected moment, Pender couldn't imagine why she'd have wanted to save Maxwell's life. But of course they had to keep him alive. How else would they learn the fate of all those strawberry blonds? Unless…
“Dr. Cogan, while the two of you were together, did he tell you about any of the other strawberry blonds?”
“He told me about all of them.”
“Names and everything?”
“Names and everything. I have them in my notebook. Hold your thumb here.” She had him press against the artery while she tied the knot. Only after the bleeding had stopped did she slip her arms through the sleeves of Pender's jacket and button it around her.
“How many?”
“Twelve altogether,” replied Irene.
“Counting Wisniewski?”
“Counting Wisniewski.” Irene stepped across Maxwell's supine body and knelt to examine his shoulder wound. It didn't look bad. But as she tore a strip of rayon from the bloody hula shirt and pressed it into the bullet hole, she remembered from her emergency medicine rotation in Palo Alto that the exit wounds were always worse. She had Pender lift Maxwell up so she could examine his back. There was no exit wound: that first bullet was still inside him somewhere.
Max groaned as they lowered him back down-his extraordinary mind was still clicking away, though he could feel his will ebbing, floating off into the peaceful, rose-pink sky.
“Take it easy,” said Irene, as they lowered him back down. “It's okay-just relax now.” A blond lock had fallen across Maxwell's forehead and into his eye; she brushed it back gently with her fingers. “We have to get him to a hospital,” she told Pender.
“You sure you want to do that?” he whispered. “Keep him alive, take a chance on him getting free some day?”
She stared at him blankly.
