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Here's story 293, of 300 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

Again

Widowed at thirty-three years old, she thought.

As if her age mattered. As if anything did.

Her name was Rebecca Haugen, née Parry and perhaps now Parry again. Her husband’s name was — or had been — Daniel. He had lived for thirty-seven years, fourteen of them with her, before his life ended on a Wednesday evening as he took his regular jog through their neighbourhood. The man driving the flashy SUV had the unlikely name of Taylor Walker the Third, which was two last names plus a number if you asked Rebecca. Walker had been drunk, to a degree that was almost impressive at the comparatively early hour of 7:45 PM.

The SUV left the road, and Daniel left behind a wife who had been working up the courage to ask if they could start trying for a baby.

Rebecca looked across the courtroom at Taylor Walker III, who continued to very pointedly not look at her under any circumstances. His extremely expensive lawyer was finishing up his closing statement now, parading before the jury in his extremely expensive suit, and using his extremely expensive words. Rebecca already knew how it would turn out.

Walker’s father, the real Walker about these parts, was a politician of some note. The family was powerful, and the papers had been full of sympathy for the public figure’s son and his struggle against the demon drink, with the help and blessing of our lord Jesus Christ. Walker II had offered his thoughts and prayers. Walker III had offered his abject apologies and condolences. And then, privately and via the same lawyer, Walker II had offered Rebecca three hundred thousand dollars to help her move on with her life after this tragedy, in the good Christian spirit of charity and forgiveness.

Rebecca had chosen to pursue a prosecution instead.

“There’s no question as to who lost the most that day,” the lawyer said, looking over at Rebecca with practice-perfect compassion for a moment, “but let us not destroy a second life by denying Mr. Walker his own chance at redemption.”

A couple of members of the jury even nodded, and something shifted in Rebecca’s stomach. She also had the oddest feeling of déjà vu, but it passed almost immediately.

It was strange, the tricks your mind played. For example, when the police officer had showed up at her door that night to tell her that Daniel wouldn’t be coming home — then or ever again — her first thought had been But we bought cinema tickets for this weekend. As if a higher power would frown, scratch its head, recheck its schedule, and then clear its throat in embarrassment. Ah, quite right; so you do. I can clearly see the booking here. My mistake. We’ll postpone his death until next week. Enjoy the movie.

Or like right now, here in the courtroom, where she noticed the police officer sitting only a few seats away from her, who had testified in a matter-of-fact way about what he’d found when he arrived on the scene. She wondered if he had his gun on him despite being in court as a witness. The thought made her glance over to one of the on-duty officers instead, and sure enough, this one did have a sidearm. She wondered what it would feel like in her hand. She wondered what it would be like to point it at Walker III and then pull the trigger.

The jury stood up to leave and begin their deliberations, and somehow it was the elderly Indian woman’s glance at her that caused Rebecca to make up her mind. The look had been full of a kind of pained sympathy; the kind where you’re going to acquit the man who killed the husband of the person you’re looking at, but your conscience won’t let you actually walk out of the room before taking one last glance at her.

It happened quickly. Rebecca got up, stepped into the aisle, lunged at the duty officer and actually managed to unsnap the restraining strap on the holster and grab the pistol. There might have been a scream, but she was too busy pointing it at Walker III and pulling the trigger; once, twice, three times. Each time it just clicked.

Then there were two sounds from somewhere behind her, both the same, and a force like a battering ram in the left side of her back and at the base of her neck, and then Rebecca fell down and died.

“There’s no question as to who lost the most that day,” the lawyer said, and Rebecca was confused for a moment; images whirling in her mind. The jury had left. The Indian woman’s pity. The gun that clicked. But apparently not.

This time, she didn’t wait for the summation to finish. She still died.

It took five tries to find the safety and disengage it, and Rebecca died without getting a single shot off.

On the ninth try, she discovered how poor a shot she was. The duty officers, however, were excellent marksmen.

Rebecca had died no fewer than seventeen times before she managed to put a fair-sized hole in the upper right arm of Walker III’s lawyer. She had been aiming for Walker III himself. But practice makes perfect.

Try 28 was a headshot, at last. It was the lawyer again. Honestly, in Rebecca’s opinion, he deserved it.

There was a brief aberration during try 40, when the off-duty officer — the witness — tackled her to the ground. No death that time, but to her great relief everything still reset.

Rebecca felt a burst of pride when she finally killed Walker III cleanly in try 52, right there in front of the whole damned courtroom. And that would have been the end of it, if she hadn’t glanced at his father, Walker II, in the fraction of a second before she was shot dead once again. The old man had staggered backwards in shock, and instead of reaching for his son, he had checked himself for any fresh holes. Rebecca’s final thought was white-hot disgust.

By her one-hundred-and-sixtieth try, Rebecca was a prima ballerina of death, dispensing a truer justice than this particular stage would ever provide. It was astonishing how many lethal things they allowed within a courtroom. The rest was just muscle memory, and a kind of logic puzzle like Daniel used to play on the computer.

How do you move these pieces around so that the water flows from the green pipe to the blue one? Or how do you kill one alcoholic murderer, one sanctimonious father, three wrong-place-wrong-time police officers, and one lawyer, using only the objects in front of you?

The lucky number was 287. Or maybe it was 288. It was difficult to be sure. What Rebecca did know, though, was that the room was now silent except for a lot of panicked, ragged breathing. Pairs of wide and terrified eyes looked at her in disbelief and horror. The old judge’s face was as white as his hair.

Then she happened to take a last look of victory at the crumpled corpses of Walker III and Walker II before him, and she caught sight of the younger man’s bitch of a trophy wife. Platinum from a bottle in her hair, and platinum from a conflict mine on her finger. Rebecca looked at her, and she saw that the other woman was actually glad. Maybe she was even happier at the outcome than Rebecca was, and that was just wrong.

The anger had been absent for dozens of tries now, replaced with a cold efficiency and a sort of mechanical pride that was entirely new to her, but now she felt the rage and disgust come back in full force. The audacity of these people.

Daniel had been a kind and gentle man, laid back and generous. They were a balance of opposites, because amongst other things, Rebecca was a perfectionist.

She raised the gun and pressed the still-hot barrel against her own temple, finger curling tight around the trigger once more. Her eyes stayed locked on the showroom blonde a few metres away.

Let’s go again, she thought.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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