Page 114 of Carter

But he’s one step ahead of me, because he’s not preparing for a fight.

He’s got a gun, and it’s pointed right at me.

“Don’t you fucking do it,” I growl, my own hand on my own gun.

“Let me go. I didn’t do anything!” he shouts. He uses his feet to push him back across the cement.

“Let’s talk about this,” I say. “Just put the gun down. You don’t want to do anything stupid.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Okay, fine. But you need to put the gun down, because that is something.”

He scoots back until there is about twenty feet between us. Then he gets to his feet.

“Don’t run, Jason. Let’s talk about this,” I say, his gun still trained on me. Eyes wide. Crazy looking.

But he starts to move back the way he came, and I hardly move at all. There is no doubt in my mind that he’ll pull that trigger and I am not ready to die today.

He rushes to the road at the exact wrong time, and bumps into a runner—and immediately turns his gun on them, shooting. One loud pop rings through the night.

“No, fuck!” I shout as I watch the civilian goes down and rush toward them.

The gun is turned on me, and the burn that I feel as the bullet hits me is like nothing I could ever describe.

Chapter thirty-eight

Carter

I wake up in a dark room, not sure what woke me, but something did. My eyes fly open. The apartment is quiet. Still. It’s late, but I can’t tell how late, so I grab my phone. It’s almost eleven p.m.. I should go back to sleep. The second I think it is when I realize Nash didn’t call. He was supposed to call. I sit up, wondering why he didn’t. Could he still be working? He said it would be late. This is late. But there is still a lot of time that’s considered to be late. I don’t know how long these things take, so I shouldn’t worry. I should at least check on him though.

I send a text and wait a minute or two but don’t get a response, so I call. It goes right to voicemail.

Maybe it’s normal to shut your phone off when you’re dealing with this stuff? I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about it.

I put my phone down and get comfortable in bed again. He’s working. I can’t be needy when it comes to his job. I just miss him. I know he’d understand that and he wouldn’t get mad, but I don’t want to be a distraction for him either. Not ever, but especially not now, when it comes to this case.

There’s just an unsettling feeling in my chest that I can’t get rid of. I toss and turn but I can’t fall asleep. I grab my phone again, open the text, and just stare at it. It’s unread, but if his phone is off, he wouldn’t read it, would he? I send another, just so he has something to see when he turns it on.

Me: I miss you. Hope everything is okay.

I set the phone down, put the TV on for background noise, but make sure it’s quiet. Maybe his phone died and he’ll knock when he gets here. I want to make sure I can hear the door. Hopefully he didn’t try that already and I slept through it.

I shake the thoughts away, close my eyes, and try to go back to sleep. If I’m sleeping, I can’t wonder where he is, and when I wake up, I’ll see him. That’s what I tell myself and how I end up falling back to sleep.

Almost.

Sirens wail in the distance, which is nothing new in the city. But they get louder. Not in the sense that they’re right out my door, but in the way that there are a lot of them.

Firetruck horns, ambulance sirens, cop sirens, all of it.

Fucking New York City.

But then I hear the helicopter. Maybe two. And my heart starts pounding right out of my chest. So hard it hurts.

What if something went wrong…

I throw the blankets off me and get out of bed to go to the window.