Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

minutes left to live.
    Bear barked again, a sound so frantic that she swung around to look at what had alarmed him. Now he was facing down the hill, where a dozen men were climbing toward them.
A man with a rifle above us. More armed men approaching from below us. We are trapped between them
.
    She looked down at the gun, which had fallen in the snow beside Rat. The deputy’s weapon. When this was over, when she and Rat were both dead, they would point to this gun as proof that they were cop-killers. No one would ever know the truth.
    “Mommy.” The word was barely a whisper. A child’s plea from a young man’s dying lips. “Mommy.”
    She bent close to the boy and touched his cheek. Though he was looking straight at her, he seemed to be seeing someone else. Someone who made his lips slowly curve into a weak smile.
    “I’m here, darling.” She blinked as tears slid down her cheeks and chilled on her skin. “Your mommy will always be here.”
    The snap of a breaking branch made her stiffen. She raised her head to peer over the boulder and saw the lone rifleman just as he saw her.
    He fired.
    The bullet kicked snow into her eyes and she dropped back to the ground beside the dying boy.
    No negotiations. No mercy.
    I refuse to be slaughtered like an animal
. She picked up the deputy’s gun. Raising the barrel, she fired high into the air. A warning shot, to slow him down. To make him think.
    Lower on the slope, dogs barked and men shouted. She saw the approaching posse scrambling up the mountain toward her. She had no cover against their gunfire. Crouching here beside Rat, she was exposed to the firing squad moving toward her.
    “My name is Maura Isles!” she shouted. “I want to surrender! Please, let me surrender! My friend is hurt and he needs …” Her voice died as a shadow loomed above her. She looked up, into the barrel of a rifle.
    The man holding it said, quietly: “Give me the gun.”
    “I want to give up,” Maura pleaded. “My name is Maura Isles, and—”
    “Just hand me that gun.” He was an older man, with implacable eyes and authority in his voice. Though the words were spoken quietly, there was no compromise in that command. “Give it to me. Slowly.”
    Only as she started to obey him did she suddenly realize this move was wrong, all wrong. The gun in her grasp. Her arm lifting to hand it over. The men watching from below would not see a woman about to surrender; they would see a woman preparing to fire. Instantly she released her grip, letting the gun tumble from her fingers. But the man standing above her had already lifted his rifle to fire. His decision to kill her had been preordained.
    The blast made her flinch. She fell to her knees, cowering in the snow beside Rat. Wondering why she felt no pain, saw no blood.
Why am I still alive?
    The man on the boulder above her gave a grunt of surprise as the rifle dropped from his hands. “Who’s shooting at me?” he yelled.
    “Back away from her, Loftus!” a voice commanded.
    “She was gonna shoot me! I had to defend myself!”
    “I said
back away
.”
    I know that voice. It’s Gabriel Dean
.
    Slowly Maura raised her head and saw not one, but two familiar figures moving toward her. Gabriel kept his weapon aimed squarely at the man on the boulder, as Anthony Sansone ran to her side.
    “Are you all right, Maura?” Sansone asked.
    She had no time to waste on questions, no time to marvel over the miraculous appearance of these two men. “He’s dying,” she sobbed. “Help me save him.”
    Sansone dropped to his knees beside the boy. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
    “I’m going to decompress the chest. I need a chest tube. Anything hollow will work—even a ballpoint pen!”
    She picked up Rat’s knife and stared at the thin chest, at the ribs that stood out so starkly beneath the pale skin. Even on that frigid mountainside, her palm was sweating against the grip as she gathered the nerve to do what had to be done.
    She found her landmark, pressed the blade against his skin, and sliced into the boy’s chest.

H E WOULD HAVE KILLED ME,” SAID MAURA. “IF GABRIEL AND Sansone hadn’t stopped him, that man would have shot me in cold blood, the way he shot Rat. No questions asked.”
    Jane glanced at her husband, who stood by the window, looking out over the medical center parking lot. Gabriel neither contradicted nor confirmed what Maura had said, but remained strangely uncommunicative, letting Maura tell the story.