Certain Prey

the kitchen counter and carried it back toward the bedroom. She followed behind him and he knelt by the closet door and pushed the shoe away and, wrapping his thumb and forefinger with Saran Wrap, picked up the cartridge.
    “A twenty-two,” he said. He looked at her. “A fuckin’ twenty-two.”
    “You put that there,” she said.
    “Bullshit. You know I didn’t put it there. And I’ll tell you what—I bet it’s got your fingerprints on it. I bet it’ll check out when they do the metallurgy, won’t it? What’d you do, drop a box of twenty-twos in the closet? Shuck out a clip or something? How’d the cartridge get into your closet, Carmel?” D AVENPORT SEEMED to recede from her. He loomed over her in real space, but the pressure on her was so great that he seemed to squeeze down, until he looked like a little man seen through the glass peephole on an apartment door. Carmel’s brain stopped: she couldn’t bear this. She said something to him, but she didn’t know what, and walked stiff-legged out of the bedroom. He was talking to her, at her, reached out to her, but she batted his arm away.
    She was screaming back at him, but a broken, isolated part of her brain seemed to be in control now. She walked straight across the living room, picked up a fistful of car keys from the entry table, and went out the door, leaving the door open, Davenport staring after her, saying something incomprehensible at her back . . .
    Out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, pushing blindly at the buttons, out the door at five, into the parking ramp, down the ramp to the blue Volvo, into the trunk, into the gym bag, out with the gun.
    Because this is where she’d put the gun she got from Rinker: the car, with her mother’s registration under her mother’s new married name, nobody to know, nobody even to look at such an out-of-character non-Carmel-like motor vehicle.
    She marched back through the door, propelled by the rage, got the elevator where it waited, the gun solid in her hand. L UCAS WATCHED HER go out the bedroom door, thought, Whoa. He followed after her, holding the shell. He had to tell her that he was taking the shell with him: she had to see the shell go in his pocket. But something about the way she was walking, robotlike, across the front room. And suddenly he feared she’d had some kind of a stroke, and he said, “Carmel? Carmel? Are you all right?”
    Then she was gone down the hall. He stood uncertainly in the bedroom door for a moment, expecting her to come back, then flipped out his cell phone, punched a speed dial button and said, when Sherrill answered, “This is me. I think something’s happened to Carmel. She just went out of here, acting weird.”
    “Want us to come back up?”
    “No. I’ll . . . Well, maybe. Yeah. Come on back. Think of some reason to come back, I’m gonna check on her.”
    Lucas walked across the living room, out into the hall— and she was gone. Either through the door into the stairway, or the elevators. Lucas walked down to the elevators and pushed the button. He bounced on his toes for a moment, thought about going down to look at the stairway door, then thought about the apartment door and hurried back, checked that it wasn’t locked and started to pull it shut. At that precise moment, an elevator ding ed, and Lucas stepped toward it. “Carmel?”
    She stepped out of the elevator: Lucas didn’t see it as it was coming up, didn’t instantly recognize it in the context, but then . . .
    • • •

    C ARMEL FIRED at him as the sights crossed the line of his face and saw the surprise and the gun jumped and Davenport was moving sideways and down and she felt the rush of a kill and tracked him with the barrel and fired again and again and then . . . L UCAS FELT the first shot sting his neck and then he was moving, diving back into the apartment, felt another shot across his shoulders, and then, back in the living room, he was rolling across the fabulous carpet as a hornet’s nest of bullet fragments ricocheted off the door a few feet away. As he fought to get upright and oriented, his cheek stung, then something hit him in the thigh, and his own gun was coming out and Carmel was in the doorway . . . L UCAS FIRED ONE SHOT and Carmel felt as though she’d been hit by a baseball bat. The .45 took away a fist-sized chunk of skin just below her rib cage, and she staggered back. Hurt. Bad hurt. Hospital. She still had the keys to the cars in her left hand, and