Page 72 of Virago

She leaned over and popped open the glove box. She pulled her Beretta 92X compact out. Zelda reached for it, but Gia pulled it to her chest. “This is for me. You use Cammy here to get to safety if you need to.” She checked the mag and the chamber.

Gia had never shot anything but a target, but she was an expert shot under shooting range conditions. With multiple weapons. And her parents had made her shooting range experience more chaotic than most, introducing a host of distracting and startling visuals and noises so her hand would be steady under pressure. Not to mention her competitive mounted marksmanship experience.

This was shaping up to be the first time she’d put all her training to a real test.

“Lock up behind me. Get the fuck out if anybody sus shows up.”

Zelda nodded. She looked scared but not fully freaked—and that was impressive as fuck, considering what she’d been through only hours before.

Gia took a moment to consider her approach: stealth? Or should she proceed as if she were unaware of any possible trouble? Which was more likely to catch a predator off guard?

They’d been sitting here for a few minutes now, and somebody had been close enough to the door to close it right after it swung open, so surely they’d seen the Camaro pull up and park. Stealth, then, would alert them to suspicion.

Straight up the deck steps it was.

First, though, she sent a text to her mom: I’m at Zaxx’s. Might be trouble here, might be bad. Don’t know yet, but FYI. Going in now. She sent it and immediately silenced her phone, even turning off the vibrate alert. She did not want it to have any chance of distracting her.

“Be careful,” Zelda said as Gia gripped the door handle.

“I will be. You, too.”

Her heart pounding hard but steady, she got out of her car.

~oOo~

As she crossed the driveway to the paving-stone walkway, Gia wondered ... an innocent neighbor with permission to be in the house would be curious about an unknown car pulling into Zaxx’s driveway, right? Wouldn’t such a neighbor have come to the door and opened it, to see who it could be? Or at least peeked out when the door swung open and they went to close it. Not that mysterious push from the shadows.

Walking to the deck and up the few steps as if she were only a friend dropping by was among the hardest things Gia had ever done. Her gun was in the back of her waistband (a terrible place to put a gun, but she hadn’t had any better options in the moment), she had pepper spray on her key—shit, her keychain was in the car with Zelda.

Okay. She had a gun and she had a black belt in taekwondo. Maybe she also had the drop on these guys, if that was who she was about to face.

Who was she kidding? She knew it was them inside.

Keeping her strides confident and smooth, she climbed onto the deck, crossed it, stepped around the screen door and knocked.

She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one. She knocked again. “Zaxx!” she called, as if she were a bud coming over to hang on a Saturday morning. “It’s me. You around?”

Tucked between the two doors, out of view of any windows or from the street, she pulled her Beretta from her jeans and released the safety. Then she tried the knob. It was locked, but the door was loose. She noticed the damage on the jamb as the she pushed on the door and it swung in.

The room the door opened into was tidy and bright, so Gia made quick sense of everything she saw.

The first thing she saw was a dog lying on the floor, near the entry to the kitchen. Doofus. His tricolor coat was stained red around his head, and that head lay in a congealing red pool.

Her heart broke for that poor baby she’d never met, but she set the grief, for Doof and for Zaxx, aside at once and stepped around the door.

A man dressed all in black sat in the middle of Zaxx’s sofa. He was older and on the heavy side. A smashed cast, one of those with pins and metal braces, covered his right hand and forearm, which he held protectively across his round middle. His face and balding crew cut were thickly smeared with dark, caking red, and a flap of skin hung oddly from the side of his head.

Nightstick, Gia thought.

He was pointing a pistol at her, holding it in his left hand. His hold wasn’t strong.

She’d catalogued all those details in the split second it took to face him. Gia raised her Beretta and fired without another thought. The bullet hit him in the forehead and sent a significant chunk of the back of his head and the contents within it to the wall in a splashing plume.

A door crashed open from somewhere beyond the kitchen, behind her, and footsteps thundered toward her. Gia spun and saw a big redhead charging down the hallway.

Tasha had found red pubic hair during her examination.

Gia was firing before she saw that he was aiming a pistol of his own.

---