Cast the First Stone by David Warren (booksvooks txt) 📕

dives at Katia, tackling her away from the gun as I simultaneously grab Ramses and slam him onto the floor.

I haven’t forgotten yesterday, the fact that he’s big, wiry, and athletic. But don’t forget I have that twenty-eight-year-old body.

I’m also big, wiry, and athletic.

We land together, and he elbows me, but I’m quicker. I dodge the attack, get a knee in his back and grab for his hand, hoping for a submission hold.

Not in time. He rolls, knees me and lands a blow in my gut. But I shake it off, and hit him with everything I have inside me. My fist meets his face and pain shudders through both of us.

He howls out a curse and grabs me around the neck, pulling me down.

But my fists are free and I land two solid shots in his ribs. He grunts.

I don’t stop.

I know I should, but he’s still holding me down, still writhing and I have twenty-four years of fury roiling through me. I reach for his free hand, but it’s grappling for something between us.

“Rem!”

Burke’s shout coincides with a blinding flash of pain in my side.

Ramses has gotten his hands on a knife and speared it into my side.

The pain takes me apart, blinds me, and I suck wind.

He pushes me off. But I still have hold of his satchel and heaven help me, I’m not letting go.

Then there’s Burke. Where he’s been all this time, I don’t know, but as I grip the satchel with everything inside me, he trips Ramses, lands on his exposed back and gets him into that hold I longed for.

And I’m bleeding like a freakin’ stuck pig.

I still have a hand on the satchel and I drag it off him, scoot back to the wall, forgetting for a second my wound as I scrabble for a look inside.

For once, I’m glad to be right. Inside is a metal cylinder, like a thermos, and my guess is it doesn’t hold coffee.

My look of relief must transmit to Burke because he smiles as he begins to cuff Ramses.

“I told you to trust me,” I mumble, but my voice is strained. I just need to lay down.

“Call 911!” he shouts to Katia and moves to catch me. “Rem, stay with me—”

The room spins and as I crumple to the floor, strange ringing sounds echo through the shop, almost like an alarm. Or, maybe sirens.

A loud wind bullies the room and finds my bones, thundering through me. Drowning me. Time, spinning up. I close my eyes, letting it take me.

Then everything around me shatters, and I’m falling.

Voices sound a short distance away, but muffled, and when I open my eyes, I half expect to see paramedics, or even the glare of an ER.

It takes me a long moment—blinking into the fading sunlight cascading across a desk, leather chair and credenza—to realize I’m back. In my office.

Back to the life I worried I might never return to.

I’m still clutching my side, and now sit up, expecting the pain to tentacle around me, cut off my breathing, blind me.

But it’s vanished. I’m fine.

Not sitting in a pool of my own blood.

Not holding a satchel that contains a thermos filled with ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, and antimony sulfide.

Not watching Burke cuff Ramses Vega, the Coffee Shop Bomber.

My legs shake as I climb to my feet, my entire body trembling with the force of the dream. It had to be a dream, right? My empty whiskey glass sits beside my keyboard and I pick it up.

Smell it.

I don’t feel drugged.

On the contrary, every nerve is lit, the layers of my subconscious alive and vivid in my mind.

I remember the smell of the night seeping into the Camaro, the salty taste of Eve’s skin, the burn of Ramses’s fist in my gut, the explosion of my knuckles against his face. I can describe in detail my old apartment, along with Eve’s, and the expression on Booker’s face as he watched the second bombing. I even remember Laurie Stoltenberg, the witness from the first bombing.

Rich, vivid details to an event that feels as if it happened yesterday.

The kind of details that belong in my book.

My muse is back with a fist pump, and it’s lit my brain with what-ifs and twists.

An ending that just might work.

Voices draw me to the door, and I open it, listening.

The television. I picture Ashley, curled up on the sofa, where I left her, playing a video game, or maybe now she’s watching one of her kids’ shows. I debate going to her, pulling her into an embrace, but I know it’ll lead to tickles and my hunkering down with her to watch something animated and I’ll forget the muse for something richer.

I have a deadline, promises to keep.

I softly close my door.

I don’t hear any of Eve’s footsteps creaking across our bedroom above me which means she’s probably out on her run. I check my watch.

Booker’s watch. The hands are unmoving, stuck at three and seven, like before. I fiddle with the dial, but they remain lifeless.

Maybe it was all a dream.

My screen saver is spinning, so I return to my desk. I cap the whiskey bottle and shove it back into the drawer.

Powerful stuff, that Macallan.

Then, I pull up my manuscript.

The cursor is blinking, taunting.

But the muse is mine, and I’m right beside her as long as she wants to run.

***

Butcher found Gabby leaning over her microscope, her eye pressed to the lens, a dozen slides lined up beside her.

“Any luck?”

“You’d better have coffee when you slink in this late,” she said, not looking up.

“Why aren’t you at home?” He didn’t mean his tone. It just wasn’t always easy to keep his thoughts straight around Gabby. She wore her dark hair back in a ponytail, no makeup. Still captivating despite her shapeless medical garb.

“I found something.” She got up and went over to a table of twisted black wiring, plastic and other bomb debris, all labeled.

“The bomb was on a timer. I found the remnants of