time for a quick cup of joe before you leave?” I said as I backed off a couple of steps, jerking my head as if I was heading back to the hotel and he should follow.
“Not really,” he said, bending over his keys. “I gotta hit the road. Shit.”
He’d dropped his keys again, and got tangled up in his coat as he tried to dig them out. When I saw what he was doing, saw that there was in fact a gun he was fumbling for in his pocket, I screamed as loud as I could and shoved him into the side of the car.
He wasn’t expecting it, though he should have known by now that I would fight back. Jay didn’t drop the pistol, however, and I knew that my first goal was to keep him from pointing it at me. I couldn’t believe that I was doing what I was doing, but I stepped in closer to Jay, to his side, stumbling in the compacted snow. At the same time, I grabbed his wrist and the gun by the barrel and jerked both toward him with a sharp movement. He had no choice but to let go. Suddenly I had the pistol.
I backed away, a careful step at a time, trying not to get tripped up by the snowplowed berms, and tried to put some distance between us, so that if he tried anything, I’d have time to react. Despite the fact that I’d followed Jay out of the hotel with no coat, I was sweating. Again came the delayed response of an adrenaline flood, and I began to tremble.
Jay saw this and made as if to get to his feet.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. I swallowed again, trying to moisten the inside of my mouth, which was suddenly and desperately dry. I hate guns, I’ve always hated the damned things, but if it came to a choice, I knew what end I wanted to be on. It was heavy in my hand, and I could see that the point was wobbling crazily. I still had it trained on Jay, and he could see how badly it was jumping around; maybe that would keep him scared enough to stay put, until some kind of help came for me or we both froze to death or I decided what to do next.
I guess the wildly shaking pistol didn’t intimidate Jay as much as I’d hoped. “You don’t know how to use that, Emma. You’re far more likely to blow your own head off. Why don’t we talk about this?”
“I know enough to keep from blowing my own head off. I know that this is the trigger, this is the safety, and this”—I pulled back the slide and did a press check—“means there’s a round in the chamber.” Thank you, Meg, thank you, thank you…
The metallic noise was wrong out there, under that broad blue sky filled with strong winter sun, where there should have been nothing but the sound of bright, biting wind through snow-laden boughs and birds whistling in flight. Jay got that too.
“I don’t know what you think is going on, Emma,” he was pleading, “but I just want to leave. I don’t want to hurt you—”
“Shut up, shut up!” I said, my voice sounding shrill even to me. “Stop talking. I know what’s going on, I know it was you, you attacked me in my room.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said, and it worried me that he was so calm about this. I didn’t want him to be calm, I wanted him to be worried what I would do. What I was capable of. He sounded too confident and I didn’t like it.
I was unable to suppress a nervous laugh. “Why else would you—?”
“I saw you talking to Widmark. I just…wanted to distract you from him. From me.”
“You were the one in the woods,” I said, not wanting to believe it.
“No!” He shook his head vehemently, raised his hands in denial. I watched him carefully. “This has nothing to do with you, Emma. I just want to get out of here.”
“No,” I said.
“After all these years?” he asked sadly. “You can’t do this one little thing for me?”
“What? Give you back the gun?” I felt so sick now…
He shook his head vigorously; he thought he was making inroads. “Keep it. A girl can always use a little protection, am I right? It’s not mine, it’s not registered. I got it from…friends. My