Page 41 of Her Last Doubt

She kept her weapon up with one hand even as she fought to control his arm with the other, trying to find an angle to bring him down without firing, without turning this passage into something neither of them could walk away from.

He wrenched his arm free and the pipe caught her across the ribs, not a full swing but enough to drive the breath from her lungs in a single sharp gasp. She staggered back against the wall, her weapon hand dropping for half a second as her body fought to pull air back in, her vision swimming at the edges from the impact.

He raised the pipe again, his arm cocked back as far as the cramped space would allow. She heard and saw the pipe strike the ceiling, not allowing him to pull back all the way.

Rachel knew she didn’t have much of a choice. She gritted her teeth and fired, aiming low for his left knee.

The shot was deafening in the enclosed space—a flat, cracking roar that seemed to fill the entire passage at once and ring on long after the sound should have faded. Pruitt screamed and buckled, his leg giving out beneath him as the round caught him in the knee. He staggered backward, off balance, his arms flailing for something to grab onto. He found nothing but air where the ladder shaft opened up behind him.

He went over the edge.

Wit her ears still ringing, Rachel lunged forward in time to see him catch a rung a few feet down. His head had already struck the wall of the vertical passage, knocking a hole in the wood; a small stream of light from the apartment beyond it radiated out. His body slammed hard against the iron, one hand gripping desperately while his wounded leg dangled useless beneath him. For a second it looked like he might hold on, his fingers white around the rung, his whole body swaying against the shaft wall. Then his grip slipped and he fell the rest of the way. His eyes locked with Rachel in the gloom, his body striking the rungs twice more on the way down before dropping out of the reach of her light entirely.

She heard the impact below her, a heavy, final sound that carried up through the shaft. It seemed to vibrate through the iron under her hands. Then there was nothing. n. No cry, no scrape of movement, just the building's low, constant hum settling back into the silence he'd left behind.

Rachel knelt at the edge of the opening, gasping, her ribs aching with every breath. Her shoulder throbbed where the first blow had caught her. She forced herself to focus, pulling her flashlight back up from where it had fallen and angled the beam straight down into the shaft as her hand trembled slightly around it.

It took a moment for the light to find him, the beam swallowed by darkness for several feet before it caught the pale shape of his body at the bottom. He'd landed wrong, his legs twisted at an angle that made her stomach turn even from this distance, his head was bent against the passage floor in a way that no conscious person's would ever rest. She couldn't tell if it was the fifth floor or the sixth from up here; the shaft was too dark and the angle too steep to be certain.

All she knew for sure was that he wasn't moving.

Rachel stayed where she was for a moment, her hand braced against the iron rung beside her. She had no doubt that Novak (and so many others) had heard the gunshot. She took out her phone and texted him so he wouldn’t worry.

Pruitt down. I’m okay. See you in a bit.

She sent it as her breath came hard and uneven in the close, dusty air. She looked down once ore into the beam of her flashlight, still fixed on the still shape far below.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

The bathroom mirror gave back a version of herself she barely recognized. Her hair was gray with dust, matted in places where she'd pressed against the passage walls during the climb. There was also a dark smear across her left cheekbone that turned out to be old grease from one of the iron rungs.

She ran the water hot and bent over the sink, working her fingers through her hair and watching the water run off brown before it went clear, then straightened and used a washcloth from the rack above the toilet to scrub her face and arms and the back of her neck. Her ribs ached when she twisted to reach her shoulder blades, a deep, bruised ache that she knew was going to be worse tomorrow. She worked as methodically as she could, not rushing it. When she finally looked in the mirror again, the person looking back at her was at least recognizable, if not exactly fresh.

She came back out into Irene Baxter's apartment to find it transformed.

Purcell and three members of her team were working the unit, two of them already in and out of the spare bedroom where the access panel stood open. Their voices were low and professional as they documented everything. The passage beyond it was lit now by portable work lights someone had threaded in from the entry point, casting a flat, bright glow into a space that had never been designed to hold light. A crime scene tech she didn't recognize was working the floor near the baseboard, photographing the boot prints pressed into decades of dust.

Conrad Hale stood near the living room window with his arms crossed and a look of agony on his face. He wasn't saying anything to anyone, just standing there taking it in, and when Rachel came far enough into the room that he could see her, his expression shifted into something she could only describe as grief. He opened his mouth once and then closed it again. She gave him a short nod and kept moving.

She found Novak near the hallway, standing with Neil Baxter. Neil looked hollowed out in a different way than when they’d last seen him. She crossed toward them, already calculating the hours ahead. She knew there were more feds on the way, and there would be statements to give, the building to manage, and then dealing with all of the residents who had started drifting into the hallway in ones and twos as word spread from floor to floor. She could only imagine the PR nightmare poor Conrad Hale was going to have to manage over the next few weeks.

As for her and Novak, it was 5:40 in the afternoon now, and the coming evening and night was going to be long and complicated.

Novak noticed her coming and said something quiet to Neil, who nodded and stepped back. Novak moved toward Rachel and pulled her slightly away from the doorway.

There was a fresh bandage at the back of his head, white against his dark hair, and someone had gotten him a clean shirt from somewhere. It was a bit too small, pulled tight across the shoulders. He looked better than he had an hour ago but still not entirely steady.

“Stitches?” she asked, nodding to his head.

“Eventually, They say no more than ten or fifteen. But, listen…I just got word," he said, keeping his voice low. "Pruitt died somewhere between getting wheeled out of the ambulance and into Intensive Care about ten minutes ago."

Rachel absorbed the news, and thought back to a moment just thirty minutes ago. Her, Novak, and Detective Purcell had dragged Pruitt's crumpled body out through one of the lower access panels, the three of them working in near-silence in the cramped space, while the paramedics waited. He'd still been breathing then, shallow and irregular, his face slack, the angle of his neck wrong in a way that had told her even then that the fall had done something beyond what the gunshot had. A fractured skull, a dislocated ankle, and a broken neck, the paramedic had said. And those were only the visible things, in addition to a bullet through the right knee.

Novak watched her face. "You good?"

"Yeah." She looked toward the spare bedroom, where one of Purcell's team was coming back out through the panel for the second time, brushing dust from her sleeves. "I'm going to go check in with Purcell. There's a lot left to work through tonight."

She was halfway to the bedroom doorway when her phone buzzed against her hip.