Page 39 of A Daddy for Christmas 2: Kitt

I eased back out in the hall, peeked around the corner and saw him. Ed was an older guy, but he had a large frame, and right now, he looked like a stranger, dressed in all dark clothing and with a grim, determined look on his face. He was still standing by the door, his eyes darting around the room.

“I said, where’s Rio?”

“I-I don’t know,” Kitt said, sounding scared. It broke my heart to hear him. If Colton so much as touched him…

“He’s gone out.”

I could see that he was holding a similar Glock to the one I now had in my hand. His gun was trained on Kitt, who was crouching down beside the sofa on the floor, hugging himself, his eyes wide. He looked scared out of his mind.

Don’t move, baby, I kept saying over and over to myself in my head, scared for both of us, but mostly Kitt. That gun was big and lethal and pointed right at him.

I knew I had only one chance and that it wasn’t even a good one. I had to draw Colton’s fire away from Kitt long enough for me to take him out, which meant I had to take him off guard. Not easy with someone who was well trained, especially when he was surely expecting something. And when and if I got a chance to take my shot—probably the one and only chance I’d be getting—it had to take him out the first time. I had to kill him first and ask questions later.

The idea that a person could or should aim for an arm or leg anyway is the result of people watching way too many cop shows on television. It also greatly overestimated most people’s sharpshooting skills and mine in particular and reflected a misconception of real-life dynamics.

In reality, hands and arms are the fastest-moving parts in the human body. The average trained shooter could move his hand and his forearm across his body to aim at me as I came around that corner in a twelfth of a second. Of course, he could pull a trigger on the gun he already had pointed at Kitt in far less time than that. There’s just no way I could react, shoot and reliably hit him in the time it would take to keep him from killing one or both of us. No fucking way. My only chance was to aim for his center mass, hope I could eliminate the threat, and keep shooting until he wasn’t shooting back. Period.

My plan, such as it was, was to dive around that corner shooting and hope for a fucking miracle. I had about a tenth of a second to react to him once he pointed his gun in my direction, which I knew he’d do the second he saw me.

I took a deep breath and tensed myself to go. It was at that exact second that the ringer on my phone went off, blasting outJingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock!

The phone had been in my pants pocket the day before, and at some point, I’d taken it out and put it on the kitchen counter. Then I’d forgotten all about it. Kitt must have found it and been up to his old tricks again of changing my ring tone.

Colton whirled and fired off a shot in its direction, blasting the phone all to hell, but I was already diving out from around the door, twisting my body and aiming for his center mass. I dropped the son of a bitch where he stood.

The aftermath of any sudden and shocking event is always a little chaotic and this one was no different. My ears were ringing with the sound of the shots still reverberating around the room. I wondered if anyone would come to investigate or if the neighbors had called the police. Kitt was shaking so hard I thought he was somehow hit at first, but a quick check proved that he was just scared out of his mind, and rightly so. If it hadn’tbeen for that stupid phone going off when it did and distracting Colton for that split second, we’d both probably be dead.

A glance at him as I’d passed by him on my way to Kitt showed me that he had to be already dead, but I went back over to check his pulse anyway. There wasn’t one. Colton was dead, and the wounds were on his chest. Though they were messy, they were relatively small. I knew the exit wounds would be so much worse.

I went back to get Kitt to his feet and I sat him on the couch, pulling his head down to my shoulder so he wouldn’t have to see the body.

“I need to call the police,” I told him.

“He shot your phone.”

It occurred to me suddenly that Ed Colton might not have been acting alone and someone else might be on the way to finish the job. I went to the door and looked outside, but the hallway was empty. A quick check of the immediate area proved there was no one else around, though I hoped someone had called from another apartment and help was on the way.

I went back in and found Kitt still where I’d put him and told him to come with me. We’d go down to the security desk in the lobby to make sure the police were coming.

I hadn’t wanted to go to the police yet, but a dead body had a way of changing plans. We made our way downstairs and found the security guard playing on his phone, completely oblivious to the shots we’d fired several floors up. After he called for the ambulance and the cops, I asked him to call Lucas and to tell him to get over there as soon as he could.

“I’d still like to know how the shooter got in the building,” the security guard said, as we waited for the police to arrive. “Did he have the code?”

“Who knows? You tell me.”

“Other than residents we only give the combination out to cleaning services and the pest control people. But they’re the only ones who have it, other than people who live here.”

“It’s out there, then, so someone may have been paid off to give it out.”

“It needs to be changed then. Hopefully, the police can figure this mess out, but in the meantime, we’re changing the front door lock codes.”

“Fine by me.”

The police arrived minutes later as well as the ambulance and from that point on, I was answering questions. I told them what I knew over and over again. Kitt did too, but they kept asking.

Lucas arrived and things went from bad to worse to terrible once he found out about Ed. The detectives wanted to take Kitt and me down to the station, and we left while Lucas was calling his wife to break the awful news. I didn’t want to hang around for that anyway.

Chapter Nine

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