was hit, Lakshmi squeezed her own trigger, but I was already out of her line of fire, and the projectile sailed past where I’d been and lodged in the green couch next to Diana. Juan’s bullet didn’t make it all the way through Lakshmi’s body—which was a good thing; poor Juan wasn’t made of particularly stern stuff, and he’d have been tortured if one of his slugs had gone into Diana even though she was already dead.
Lakshmi, though, was still alive. Juan’s aim was lousy; he’d merely hit the writer in the shoulder. Still, she was discombobulated enough that I was able to spring up from the floor, retrieve my gun, and then wrest hers from her. I then knocked her down and stood over her, my pistol aimed right between her breasts.
Juan rushed over to Diana, in some desperate hope that she was only injured and not dead. I heard him making small sounds.
Lakshmi looked like she was falling into shock from the gunshot wound. If I was going to get any additional information out of her, it would have to come soon. “Stick with me, sweetheart.”
But she didn’t. Her eyes fluttered up into her skull.
I didn’t want to plug Lakshmi if it wasn’t necessary, not because she didn’t deserve it but because it would result in too much of a hassle with the cops—not to mention the administrators of the writer-in-residence program. She could have been faking being in shock, but the ever-widening pool of blood behind her suggested she wasn’t. I shoved Lakshmi’s little gun into my waistband, then looked for something to tie her up with. I supposed I could use my belt, but I’d spent enough of this case running around naked; I didn’t want to end up in a big chase with my jeans around my ankles.
Juan was still on bended knee in front of Diana, as if he couldn’t believe she were dead. “Cover Lakshmi,” I said to him. He seemed a bit shocky himself, but he nodded, rose, and lifted his weapon. I saw he wasn’t really pointing it at Lakshmi, but about a half meter from her; amateurs like Juan always found it hard to pull the trigger again after they’d seen up close the sort of damage a bullet could do.
I stepped into the other room and found a white terry-cloth bathrobe hanging in the closet. I pulled the sash out of the loops, brought it to the living room, and used it to bind Lakshmi’s wrists. The cloth soaked up blood from the surrounding puddle, the red stark against the white fabric.
Then, as it often does, fate took a hand. The doorbell sounded. A portion of the living-room wall changed to the view from the front-door camera. Standing on the stoop was none other than Sergeant Huxley of New Klondike’s Finest.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Imotioned for Juan to follow me, and we hustled into the back room of Shopatsky House. The doorbell sounded again as we climbed through the missing window. My first thought had been that the cops had pieced together Lakshmi’s involvement in all this, but then it occurred to me that Huxley was perhaps simply following up on the buggy joyride; Juan’s vehicle was still sitting on the fern-covered lawn.
I didn’t have time for the cops right now. Yes, Lakshmi needed medical attention, but even Hux would have the good sense to walk around the house when no one answered, and he’d doubtless find the hole where the window had been and go in to investigate.
Juan and I made our way along the edge of the dome, the alloquartz cool to the touch. I knew the clear wall next to me was curved, but from here it seemed completely flat. Juan kept saying, in a shaky voice, “My poor Diana.”
We had gone a hundred meters or so counterclockwise along the edge of the dome. Outside, on our right, we could see rocks casting shadows beneath the yellow-brown sky. In the distance, a couple of Mars buggies were going along at low speed.
To our left now was a warehouse, with cracked walls and a couple of boarded-up windows. Rent tended to be cheap out on the rim, despite it being the only place where you could get uninterrupted views of the vast Martian plain—people preferred to live near the center, if they could afford it, so that they could see something human instead of the vast unchanging monotony of the world that had crushed their dreams. “Let’s go,” I said, gesturing