pressed the phone to her ear with her left. “What!”
“Bella, Dylan is missing. He snuck past my men.” Jack said.
Annabelle stopped in her tracks.
It took a second to process the new information and then she was spinning back around and nearly sliding into the spot she was laying in before. Once more, she positioned the rifle in front of her and peered through the scope.
Down below, in the lab, Godrick Osborne was once more standing, pulling Virginia Meredith along with him, making certain that her own body shielded his from the window. He moved toward the exit door, Virginia reluctantly being dragged in front of him.
But before he could reach the door, it came open of its own accord, and in walked Dylan Anderson. The door slammed shut behind him and Osborne froze, as did Virginia. Dylan’s arms dropped slowly to either side and Annabelle could clearly make out the Colt .45 in his right fist.
He said something to Osborne. Annabelle couldn’t tell what it was.
Osborne reacted by jerking Virginia roughly, making her cry out. Annabelle couldn’t hear the sound, but she could see the look on Virginia’s face, her mouth open wide. Annabelle could only see a sliver of Osborne’s head from this angle, like a crescent of a moon. From her limited perspective, she guessed that Osborne was holding his gun to the other side of Virginia’s head again. The poor girl had a barrel aimed at her from both directions.
Dylan looked nervous now. His grip on the gun fidgeted, his fingers flexing and un-flexing. His eyes darted between Virginia and Osborne.
Annabelle’s heart beat drummed in her ears. Time had slowed, almost stood still.
And then, quite suddenly, it sped up again.
Osborne, apparently having decided that enough was enough, withdrew his gun from Virginia’s head and leveled it, instead, on Dylan Anderson.
Dylan reacted as quickly as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. He was a kid. He’d never shot anyone before. He was the good guy in this equation, which meant that he was the underdog, the one wronged, the nice person simply out for some kind of desperately desired justice.
It also meant that he wasn’t a killer, and hence, lacked a killer’s reflexes.
For some reason, however, Annabelle didn’t seem to lack them at all.
For, in that same instant, when time at once stopped and skipped into the future at full speed, Annabelle gently squeezed her trigger. The 20-caliber Hornady bullet spun across space and time at what would seem like many to be electric speed.
The window to the lab didn’t even shatter. The hole the bullet made was tiny and the glass spider-webbed around it with a beauty nearly poetic. Osborne’s body jumped to the left as that same bullet entered his right temple and exited through his left ear.
Virginia Meredith at once felt the man’s arm go limp around her and she dropped to the ground and scooted away even as Osborne was still falling.
It took an eternity for Godrick Osborne to hit the floor. His form swayed, his eyes open yet unseeing.
Dylan Anderson slowly continued to raise his weapon, aiming numbly at a bad guy that was no longer standing there.
It wasn’t until Osborne sank to his knees and then, ever so slowly, toppled forward to land on what was left of his face that Dylan realized the man had already been shot and began to lower his gun once more.
The teenager stared, blinking rapidly, at the now very dead Godrick Osborne, lying face down in a spreading pool of blood a few feet in front of him. He watched the rapid tide of red make its way toward him and found himself unconsciously stepping back out of the way.
On top of the roof of the next building, Annabelle Drake felt the distant ache of her weapon’s recoil on her right shoulder. The curve of the trigger was a bend of cold, smooth steel beneath her finger. There was no sound but the buzzing of nothing in her head. That severe silence that follows a gun blast.
It was a throbbing drone that drowned out the rest of her world as Annabelle continued to hold her breath. She couldn’t let it go. And she wouldn’t let it in.
It wasn’t until Craig Brandt slowly stood from where he’d been hiding behind the counter and Virginia Meredith ran into his arms that Annabelle realized she wasn’t breathing. Even then, however, she couldn’t make her lungs move. No expanding. No contracting.
She simply gazed, unmoving, at the felled man in the expensive suit who was now missing half of his brain. The floor of the lab had been painted red. So much blood. Three bodies worth.
Like an explosion, the roof exit door behind Annabelle suddenly burst outward, slamming noise in to her world and air into her chest as if she’d been hit with a tidal wave of existence. She found herself spinning around on the ground, letting go of the rifle she’d used to kill a man.
Her head pounded as her lungs suddenly and violently expanded. But that was the only part of her that worked; her legs would not lift her. She couldn’t even get them beneath her.
A large man dressed in the same manner as Osborne’s personal guard stormed the roof, his gun arm up and ready. Within a few short moments, he had located Annabelle, and turned to level his weapon upon her.
Once more, a bullet split the sky. And, the sound, like thunder, followed after.
Annabelle jerked with the explosion. She blinked once, and waited to feel the pain. But as she gazed at the man with the gun and waited for her body to bleed and die, she instead witnessed his own legs give out beneath him. He hit the ground, and then fell forward. His gun went spinning across the roof to skitter to a stop a few feet away.
Annabelle hadn’t been shot at all. The fallen man had never had a chance to pull his trigger.
Still stunned, Annabelle looked up from the dead gunman to the man who had been, unseen, behind him, standing in the roof exit doorway.
Jack slowly lowered his weapon. Their eyes met.
Annabelle drew a second, shaky breath. Sirens wailed in the distance.
It was something of a Houdini act, the way the Business tended to the clean up after a mess of a job like Godrick Osborne’s.
Some times a mystery was best put to rest with the truth. This was one of those times. Back in the United States, Max Anderson’s death was now officially considered a murder, and one Godrick Osborne, the killer.
Detective Chen, her partner, and the entire Twin Cities police force believed that when Annabelle Drake and Dylan Anderson had fled the country out of fear that Osborne would kill them, as well, Osborne had tracked them down and nearly accomplished exactly that.
That was where the truth of the situation went from black and white to a less distinct gray and the story became embellished, with the help of well-paid props and a few careful bribes.
Osborne did, indeed, manage to find Annabelle and Dylan, but he’d been unfortunate enough to do so while they were hiding out in a private residence, where one Jack Thane kept and displayed many impressive war relics, including several hand guns and rifles from Vietnam, Desert Storm, and the war in Iraq. A hefty tax payer and benefactor to the British Museum, Jack Thane was granted authorization to keep the items, as long as they were locked safely behind glass.
Glass could be broken. And Osborne’s bullet wounds were easily explained.
Concerning the reports of weapons’ fire in downtown London… A series of explosions in a medical lab had apparently caused the unfortunate and untimely deaths of three lab technicians, not to mention massive amounts of property damage. The victims were found in their once white lab coats, mortal wounds riddling their charred and unidentifiable bodies. Luckily for him, Dr. John Sinclaire, who headed the research at the lab, came away unscathed.
Dylan Anderson decided to return to Minnesota for his father’s funeral and for the reading of his father’s will. But, when that was done and said, he had plans to turn right back around, board another plane, and head to the UK once more. It seemed there was nothing left for him in Minnesota. And he’d just had a birthday. He was now eighteen, legally capable of deciding what to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to spend at least part of it in England. Apparently, there was something of interest to him there.
Jack attempted to bridge the gap between he and Dylan by helping the boy get the papers he would need to
