Page 70 of Girl, Reborn

Baxter froze, hammer twitching. For a longmoment, they just stared at each other down the barrel of her Glock. Two dogs,one bone.

For a single, surreal moment, she thoughthe might comply. Those mad eyes flickered, some long atrophied shred ofrationality struggling to the surface. The hammer wobbled and began to dip.

‘Move and I’ll shoot,’ Ella said. ‘I meanit.’

Baxter’s expression twisted into a mask ofpure transcendent rage.

Then he charged like a bull out of achute. No thought, no strategy – just raw, screeching bloodlust.

Ella squeezed the trigger.

And pulled again.

And pulled and pulled.

Click. Click. Click.

The sound of her death sentence, writtenin impotent dry-fires. The barrel was wet.

The water. It jammed it up.

Time seemed to slow as Seth barreled downon her, close enough to count the capillaries in his bloodshot eyes. Closeenough to read her own stunned incomprehension reflected there.

Reflex took over. Pure primal-brainedfight or flight. Ella barely had time to bring her arms up, to brace forcollision. They hit the dirt together, Seth's weight crushing every molecule ofair from her lungs. Something crunched wetly under the meat. Collarbone, maybe.Or the delicate architecture of her scapula crumpling like tinfoil.

The pain sizzled out every sane thought.Seth rained down a series of wild and uncoordinated blows – the kind of blowsshe could dodge had this son of a bitch not sent her world spinning on anambush. Ribs cracked, air whooshed from her lungs in a frothy gout. Her alreadyabused shoulder took the worst of it, bones splintering like brittle tinder.

Ella jackknifed and tried to buck him off,but Baxter had a hundred pounds on her. He rode her like a cowboy on athrashing bull, bringing down fist and hammer blows into every inch of fleshthat she couldn’t cover. It clipped her cheek and sent blood sheeting into hereyes. The world suddenly swam out of focus, swallowed by a red tide.

But Ella wasn't going down easy. Time toplay dirty. She reached out and clawed at Baxter's face. She dug her nailsanywhere she could find purchase, raking eyes, stabbing temples, anything toget the advantage back. After catching something soggy and fleshy with hernail, Baxter bellowed like a branded calf and reared back. Ella torqued herbody hard left and rolled them together in a tangle of limbs.

Ella ended up on top, straddling Baxter'schest. She thumped a fist into his throat, and he gagged, hammer falling fromhis grip. She dove for it, scrabbling in the dirt. But Baxter recovered tooquick, flipped them again with a twist of his hips.

And then it was Ella on her back oncemore, choking on blood and dust and the stench of Baxter's insanity. He loomedover her, legs pinning her arms, a nightmare figure haloed by the pregnantmoon.

The hammer, slick with her own blood,pressed against her chin. ‘Not… so… tough,’ Baxter cried, punctuating each wordwith brutal shoves that forced Ella’s head back at an impossible angle. Sheheard vertebrae pop and tendons strain to the snapping point.

Ella bucked, tried to twist away. Broughther knee up hard into Seth's crotch. He grunted, flinched, but didn't let up.The hammer bore down, grinding against her windpipe. Black spots swarmed hervision, lungs screaming for air that couldn't come.

She scrabbled at his wrist, pried at hisfingers. But it was like trying to bend rebar, like grappling with a statuethat had come horribly to life. Seth was a man possessed, driven by somethingbeyond pain, beyond reason. There was no stopping him, no reaching through theblack fog of his rage.

Ella's strength was fading. Her struggleswere growing weaker.

The world had narrowed to a tunnel, to thesoulless void of Seth's eyes and the cold kiss of steel at her throat.

This was it, the end of the line. Noclever play, no last-minute Hail Mary. Just a whimper and a gurgle, then thelong fall into the dark.

Except – in that final, fading instant,something flickered across the screen of Ella's mind. A life, her life,unspooling in fits and starts. The whole sordid reel, the good and the bad, thebrutal and the beautiful.

Her dad, broad and beaming on a long-agoafternoon. Dappled sunlight, a soccer ball, the dizzying swoop as he scoopedher in her arm. Working a desk at Virginia PD. The Academy, all spit-shinedshoes and naïve bravado. Then a slideshow of every psychopath and sicko she'dput in the ground or slammed behind bars. The ones that had slipped through herfingers, scurrying back to the shadows to kill and kill again.

It played out in the space betweenheartbeats, an entire existence reduced to snapshots and freeze frames.Thirty-odd years of blood and guts and grime, the whole tangled skein of loveand loss and sacrifice. What a strange, vicious, wonderful thing it had been,this life of hers. What a wild, careening ride through the underbelly of theworld.

A cop’s life. The only one she’d everknown.

All those years, all those deaths. And forwhat? To end here, beaten to a pulp by some backwater whackjob with a murderboner for municipal water rights? Ella supposed there was a certain poetry toit, perhaps a grim sort of symmetry. Live by the gun, die by the bluntinstrument. The law of the concrete jungle.

Ella blinked grit from her eyes andfocused on Baxter. He stared down at her, lips skinned back from his teeth in aderanged grin. The hammer rose high, eclipsing the moon. A killing blow aimedstraight for her temple.

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