Emmett’s shoulders sagged. All the fight was gone from him. “Do it. Just go ahead.”
Annalise looked me in the eyes. “Ray.”
My turn at bat. I took Cabot’s gun out of my pocket and pointed it at the back of Emmett’s head.
In the movies, you often hear actors say it’s hard to kill someone. They’ll say it’s the hardest thing in the world. Well, that’s bullshit. Prison is full of people who thought murder was some kind of achievement-I lived with some of them.
And most of those guys wish they could take it back, because the truth is, the only thing a person needs to commit murder is a moment when they don’t care about the consequences, when they don’t think about what they’re doing and what it means.
Most people spend their whole lives without thinking what it means.
I couldn’t do that. I had done too much time and had too much conscience. I’d shot my best friend when I was just a boy, and I’d hated guns ever since. I knew exactly what would happen. I knew exactly what it would mean.
I squeezed the trigger anyway.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Emmett’s corpse looked just the way I expected it to look. So did the room around me. So did Annalise.
I saw a flannel shirt hanging on a coatrack and used it to wipe down Cabot’s gun. I tossed the gun onto the floor. It thunked as it landed. I wasn’t worried about Cabot, though.
Everyone in town had seen me. There was no way I was going to avoid prison this time. I was a cop killer. He was a corrupt cop and a killer himself, but that wouldn’t matter once the manhunt began.
But what choice did I have? I couldn’t let him walk free. What if he had another copy of the spell somewhere? What if he went looking for more magic? He would just move somewhere else and start killing again.
With some difficulty, Annalise pulled a red ribbon off her vest and dropped it onto a stuffed chair. It burst into flame. She kicked over a desk, scattering a stack of papers onto the flames. The fire was already licking at the painted walls. Soon the station would be lit by orange firelight, just like the Dubois home.
I returned Annalise’s debit card. I didn’t want anything of hers, especially not her money.
“Stop moping,” she said. “You did something useful here, even if the work makes you feel dirty.”
“Let’s just go.”
I followed her toward the door. A small, framed photo hung on the wall, and while I didn’t want to look at it, I couldn’t turn away. It showed Emmett with his arm around Charles the Third. The youngest Hammer was about thirteen and tall for his age, but he was carrying an extra hundred pounds of flab. An older man with Charles’s narrow face and unruly black hair flipped burgers on a gleaming barbecue. That must have been Charles the Second, Charles Junior.
While the fire grew behind me, I leaned close to the picture. The elder Hammer was the only one not smiling- his face was worn and sagging, his eyes rimmed with dark circles. He was a man with regrets. In the background, I could see the huge windows of an expensive modern house and a smooth, curved gray stone wall like the base of a castle.
The firelight cast flickering shadows over the photo. The flames had reached the ceiling. Annalise stood by the front door, waiting for me silently. Time to go.
We walked outside. The storm clouds had blown away, and I could see blue sky and sunshine for the first time in days.
A crowd of people stood across the street. The van was parked around the corner. We walked toward them.
“Next time, I’ll park closer.”
“Good idea. You look like a mess.”
I pulled at my shirt. It was torn, sopping wet, and it stank of gunpowder and antifreeze. “I needed more than four changes of clothes, I think.”
“I didn’t think you’d live through that many. Are you going to vomit?”
“Oh, yes,” I said to her. “But not right away, I think.”
As we neared the crowd, the cook approached me nervously. I must have been quite a sight. “What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s going on in this town?”
“The Dubois brothers killed Reverend Wilson.”
There were gasps of astonishment from the crowd.
“What?” the cook said. “You can’t be serious.”
“Go away,” I told him. We pushed through the crowd and headed up the block. No one tried to stop us. “Charles Hammer is next, right, boss?”
“He would be, if I knew where to find him. That’s all I’ve been doing is looking for him. He hasn’t been home or at his office since we were there last, and Karoly’s notes don’t tell me anything.”
“Are your hands any better?”
“No,” she said. “They’re worse. I expect I won’t be able to use them at all by tomorrow. They feel like they’re burning, and I can barely bend my fingers.”
We reached the van. I opened the door for her and helped her in, not bothering with the seat belt. I climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. “We could stop off at the butcher again-“
