I stopped dead in the lobby. He went three more steps before he realized I wasn’t beside him. He turned around and nodded. “We’re dismissing the charges against you. And we’re charging Ingram Barrett with obstruction and making a false statement. Not that he’ll serve a day in the state penitentiary. The federal case will preempt ours.”

I let my breath out in a big, slow exhalation. Everything hanging over my head, every burden dragging me down—they were all gone. I had only one more spinning plate to catch before this whole ordeal would be over. I felt lighthearted and a little light-headed, too.

Riley held the door for me. Outside, dusk was settling over the street, but the air was balmy. It was a beautiful May night. “Thank you, Detective,” I said. “I owe you for this. For all of this.”

“You don’t owe me a damn thing. We did screw up. We never sourced the gun to you, and we swallowed Barrett’s lies about motive. Gun!”

When he yelled the final word, I thought he was talking about the ghost gun in the elevator, and I was shocked as he rammed against me and knocked me off my feet. A pop sounded, and a light flashed, and the hospital doors behind us shattered into a geyser of twinkling shards of glass.

I landed hard on the sidewalk with Riley sprawled half on top of me. An alarm began to screech in the hospital lobby, and through the fading light I could see a line of smoke curling from the muzzle of a gun. Behind it was a man, small and Asian and running at us with the gun pointed straight at my head. He was only yards away when a big Black man made a flying tackle through the air and slammed him to the ground.

The gun went skittering across the pavement. I wrenched myself out from under Riley and scrambled to my feet. He rolled to his back with his phone out and panted, “Shots fired,” as the Black man dug his knee into the other man’s spine and wrenched his arms behind his back.

I squinted at them through the dusk. “Lester?” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What are you—?”

“He’s been following you for days,” he said. “And I’ve been following him.”

Something else went skittering across the pavement. A pair of handcuffs, tossed by Riley to Lester, who grabbed them and snapped them on the other man’s wrists.

“NYPD’s on the way,” Riley called. He was still flat on his back, and I went over to grab him by the hand and haul him up. He got to his feet with a loud groan.

“I guess I owe you now,” I said.

He rubbed his shoulder with a wince of pain. “You got that right.”

Chapter 32

I’d always suspected that Mark’s keycard opened every lock in the building, so I wasn’t surprised when I got home that night and found him sitting at my dining room table. He shot to his feet when I came in. “Where the fuck were you?” As he took in what I was wearing, he added, incredulous, “Running?”