Moira exhales slowly. ‘Look, I know we got him, but you’re hurt and I . . . It’s just that, for a minute there, I couldn’t do anything. I froze.’
Rick turns a little more towards her, wincing from the movement. ‘You want to talk about it?’
The thought makes her feel worse. ‘No.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘You sure about that?’
The truth is she does want to talk about it – she needs to run through the play moment by moment; debrief what happened and dissect what went wrong. But she shouldn’t be revealing any more of herself to this man. She can’t get close. Moira meets his gaze. Knows she’s about to make a mistake. ‘Maybe.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I get these panic attacks. That’s why I retired early.’ She figures that’s enough information; it’s not like she can tell him the whole truth, but a partial view – perhaps that’s okay. ‘The first time it happened was in the aftermath of a raid that’d gone bad. We’d been tracking this criminal gang for months, trying to work out the chain of command to identify the real big player at the top. Finally, we’d got the kingpin’s name – Bobbie Porter – and their penthouse address. We couldn’t get much else – believed the name was an alias – so we planned the approach and made our move.’
Rick stays silent. Keeps his eyes on hers.
Moira continues. ‘So the subject’s apartment was the penthouse on the twenty-fourth floor of a fancy riverside apartment building. We go in gently – McCord takes the lead as he’s got an invite to meet the guy. It’s a business meet set-up, using an established alias of McCord’s, and he takes me and another of the team, Jennifer Riley, in with him as his associates while the other two main team members – Pang and Kress – hang back with armed response. We needed to get something solid to connect Porter to the gang. On the surface the meet started okay, but Porter wasn’t what we’d expected and things felt off to me. I had a bad feeling. But I knew the armed response team was standing by on the floor below if things went south.’
‘And they did?’
‘Yeah. Big time.’ She closes her eyes for a moment, remembering. ‘I’ve been over what happened thousands of times, but I still don’t really understand it. There was a moment where McCord and Porter’s conversation had stalled and the heavies at the door were looking like they were going to eject us from the apartment. I couldn’t let that happen, so I pushed the issue – asked Porter to let us in on a specific shipment we knew the gang had coming in. Made out we had the money to finance more like it.’
‘And how’d they react?’
Moira shakes her head. ‘That’s the thing. They hardly reacted at all. Just sat there, looking as if they were considering the idea. But, when I replayed the events in my mind I realised I’d missed something in the moment. There was something else in play.’
Rick leans closer. Eager for her to continue.
‘There was this look between McCord and Porter. It was so subtle I missed its significance when we were sitting there on the white sofas, but Porter blinked and McCord gave the tiniest nod, and a couple of seconds later everything went to shit.’
‘They were communicating?’
‘Porter was giving an instruction. Then they got up and made to leave the room.’ She pauses. Takes a breath. ‘That’s when McCord pulled a gun. He shouldn’t have been carrying it – he wasn’t firearms certified. At first I thought he was going to threaten Porter, then, as we all leapt to our feet, he turned away from Porter and shot Jennifer.’ Moira flinches, seeing it in her mind’s eye. ‘He just shot her, no hesitation. He’d been working with her for eighteen months. They were friends. It just didn’t . . .’
‘And Porter?’