Page 62 of Scorpion

He grunts. “How many guards?”

“Twelve that I’ve seen. Armed.”

“We’re three minutes out.”

Just then, the bald man torturing Mathijs turns. My lips curl into a sneer. “Goldchild’s here.”

“You have a shot.”

I hesitate. “Affirmative.”

“Wait for my signal.”

The line stays on as he fires instructions to everyone else.

“Aiden, watch my six. Josh, head down to assist. You’ve got three minutes to get there.”

I don’t check if he listens, focusing on calculating the shot. The nerves wracking my body make it hard to keep a steady hand. My pulse is running rapidly, my head is pounding, and my breaths are unsteady. A rookie would have a better chance at success compared to the state I’m in.

If I fuck up, he dies. If I don’t get it together, he dies. If I can’t get a grip, then years of training and duty were for nothing.

Closing my eyes, I let myself imagine that TJ is next to me, silently giving me instructions and keeping me up to date on the world outside of the pinpoint I can see. When that doesn’t calm my nerves, I picture him looking down on me, wherever he is, doing just the same with a beer in his hand.

“Eh, I don’t think you can make the shot, Scorp,” he’d say with a grin every time we were going long range. “How about you give it up and let a real man have a crack at it. Thirteen hundred feet? A woman couldn’t pull something like that off.”

TJ would always goad me into things, and tease me until I wanted to beat him up, but the challenge fueled my spite, amping up my need to prove him wrong. After all, it’s the same words he said to me when I made my record.

“How about this, you shoot the fucker dead and I’ll do your laundry for a week. You miss, then you do mine. I should warn you, girly. I’ve got some nasty ones for you to deal with.”

His incessant shit talking filters through my head as my body slowly relaxes, and I become in tune with every beat of my heart.

“Thirty seconds,” Sergei says through the phone.

I go through the motions, triple checking my calculations based on the conditions; wind speed and direction, alleviation, humidity, and spin drift.

“Twenty.”

I wince when Mathijs’s body folds from Goldchild’s strike.

“Fifteen.”

The kingpin stays in his spot, laughing and waving his arm about.

“Ten.”

Inhale.

“Five.”

Exhale.

“Four.”

One heartbeat.

Two.

I pull the trigger.

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