Chapter 8 - The Breaking Point
Derek stood in the doorway.
He looked like an apparition dragged up from the bottom of the lake.
His clothes were torn, soaked in black grease and diesel fuel from the truck’s crushed undercarriage. His face was streaked with soot and blood from a deep laceration across his forehead where his head had hit the steering wheel. His right arm hung slightly lower than his left, his shoulder clearly dislocated or fractured by the impact.
In his left hand, he held a heavy iron tire iron, its tip wet with mud and rain.
His eyes were completely wild, bloodshot, blown wide with adrenaline and madness.
“Mara,” he croaked.
He didn't look at Julian. He didn't look at the gun pointed directly at his chest. He looked past Julian’s shoulder, straight at me, cowering behind the walnut desk.
“Mara... you have to come with me,” he wheezed, his chest heaving under his torn jacket. “They’re trying to lock me up. They’re trying to say I’m crazy. Your sister wouldn't answer the phone. My dad... my dad called the lawyers... they took my cards...”
“Derek, stop,” I cried out, my voice cracking. “Look at yourself! Put the iron down!”
“I built a life for us!” he screamed, and the sound was raw, animal, stripped of every shred of his former country-club polish. “Two years! I gave you two years! You think you can just walk into this rich bastard’s house and throw me away like garbage? You think he loves you? He doesn't know you! He’s using you to punish my family!”
“Drop the weapon, Mr. Miller,” Julian said, his voice flat, monotonous, devoid of anger.
Derek finally shifted his bloodshot eyes to Julian. A hideous, broken grin spread across his face, exposing teeth stained with blood.
“Shoot me, then,” Derek hissed. “Go on, Callaway. Shoot me in your grandfather’s library. Let’s see what your high-priced board says when the press finds out you murdered an unarmed man in your house over a hospital nurse.”
“You are armed with a deadly weapon,” Julian said calmly. “You have breached a private residence using a commercial vehicle. You have caused catastrophic property damage and assaulted security personnel. Under Illinois law, I am fully authorized to use lethal force to prevent a violent felony in my dwelling.”
Julian’s finger rested on the trigger.
“Drop the iron.”
Derek shifted his weight. His muscles coiled. He was sixty pounds heavier than Julian, crazed by panic and pain, and he had convinced himself that if he could just cross those ten feet of oriental carpet, he could reclaim the illusion of his control.
“Mara!” he roared, and lunged.
He didn't drop the iron. He swung it upward with all the force left in his torso, aiming straight for Julian’s head.
The gunshot in the enclosed room was deafening.
A flash of orange light, an explosion of sound that hit my ears like a physical hammer.
Derek’s momentum stopped dead.
He didn't fly backward like in the movies. He simply hitched mid-stride, his breath leaving his lungs in a wet, hollow gasp. He looked down at his right thigh, where a dark, spreading stain of crimson instantly bloomed through his torn trousers.
The femoral artery was intact—Julian had placed the shot four inches lower, into the thick meat of the quadriceps, shattering the muscle without severing the great vessels.
The tire iron slipped from Derek’s fingers, hitting the floorboards with a dull thud.
Derek fell to his knees, his hands clutching his leg, screaming in high, thin agony.
Julian didn't lower the gun. He took two steps forward, his shoe kicking the tire iron across the floor toward the fireplace, out of reach.
He looked down at Derek with the cold, detached gaze of a surgeon inspecting an excised tumor.
“You missed,” Derek sobbed, curled on the rug, blood pooling around his knees. “You missed, you bastard...”
“I did not miss,” Julian said. “Had I wished to end your life, the round would have entered your eye socket. I placed it where it would prevent your locomotion while ensuring your survival for trial.”
The double doors of the library burst open.
Marcus Green and two security officers rushed in, their weapons drawn, their faces pale.
“Clear!” Green shouted, seeing the scene.
“Secure him,” Julian said, his voice as steady as if he were ordering a second pot of tea. “Apply a tourniquet four inches above the wound. Call an ambulance to the north gate. Notify the state police and the Cook County State’s Attorney that the fugitive Derek Miller is in custody.”
The guards moved in, their boots crunching on the broken glass from the pantry window. They forced Derek onto his stomach, applying the nylon strap to his thigh as he screamed into the oriental carpet.
Julian turned to me.
He lowered the hammer of the Glock, placed the weapon on the mantelpiece, and walked behind the desk.
His hands were steady, but when he looked at me, his gray eyes were wide, dark with an emotion he couldn't completely suppress.
“Are you injured?” he asked.
I looked at him. At the man who had stood between me and the nightmare. At the man who had calculated the trajectory of a bullet so that I wouldn't have to carry the weight of a man’s death on my conscience for the rest of my life.
“No,” I whispered.
Then I stepped forward, buried my face into the lapel of his tailored suit, and let myself weep until my chest felt empty.
May you like
His arms came around me slowly, tentatively at first, as if he were afraid of breaking something fragile. Then his grip tightened, holding me against him while the sirens began to wail down the long, wooded drive from Evanston.
***
