Her first thought is to calculate where her own gun is. The office building's security gate blocks her from carrying to work, though, and reaching for the glove compartment would earn her a bullet to the throat. She just needs to get out in the open, she supposes, onto a busy street; there's only so much he can do there.
"Turn right," he says. "Stay straight."
He laughs when he says that, and the sound of it makes Kalinda take another glance at his eyes. He's high, she realizes, higher than she's ever seen him.
Her heartbeat fills her ears. She could handle Nick when he was high because she so intimately knew his patterns when he wasn't. This is another matter altogether. Logic won't work here, at least not the kind Kalinda is used to using. Pulling over on Michigan will get her nowhere but dead.
As if sensing her fear and pleased with it—he's certainly not had the upper hand in their most recent interactions—Bill digs the gun a little deeper, metal tucking itself beneath her jawbone. There's nothing she can do about it, not without taking the car off the road.
"Turn right here," he says quietly, his voice as coiled with tension as Kalinda is herself. "Then left. Then straight."
She probably shouldn't have started driving. She starts running through her options, but anything she can think of at the moment risks other drivers, risks pedestrians. She has to wait until he lets her stop.
He's taking them onto Lower Wacker Drive, which at night is creepily surreal enough even without a weapon to your neck, drips and shadows haunting its walls, the adjacent river ghostly. In a weird, unconscious, automatic gesture, Kalinda looks down at her phone to see if she's still getting a signal.
In fact, she sees, she's still on a call.
She lets nothing about her face change, looks away from the phone smoothly, not too quickly, and hopes the spikes of dopamine in Bill's brain are sufficiently distracting. "Where are we going, Bill?" she says, breathing over the thrumming of her heart.
"Shut up," he says. "I'll tell you when we get there."
Kalinda keeps driving, lets a minute pass, hopes Alicia knows to hang on. She struggles to think of the right questions, struggles not to think of Alicia listening, Alicia reliving her own fear and her own pain. All of Alicia's pleading looks of the last two weeks pass through Kalinda's head in a rush. She can't keep hurting Alicia, can't keep putting her through this.
"How did you get into my car?" Kalinda asks. She doubts Alicia knows much about her car, but it's registered, legally, to Kalinda Sharma. That could count for something, make it easier to find.
"Decrypted. He showed me."
"Nick showed you?"
"He never showed you?" Bill laughs. "Turn right."
"We're going west?" That question runs the risk of being too obvious, but Bill ignores her. He tenses when they re-emerge aboveground on Harrison Street, but it's dark and late enough that none of the few pedestrians are really paying attention. Nor do Kalinda's tinted windows benefit her in this case.
"I told him he needed to get rid of you," Bill mutters, half to himself, jabbing the barrel into Kalinda's neck at a more aggressive angle. "Not the lawyer bitch. Couldn't convince him."
"You were part of it? Of what—what Nick did to my lawyer? To—to Mrs. Florrick?" Kalinda wouldn't mind attaching an attempted murder charge when Bill is caught. She's sorry Alicia has to hear her say anything about it, though.
"He kept saying that was how he'd get you. With the lawyer. That would be the worst for you."
Kalinda bites her lip. His grip on the gun is slackening, just a bit.
"I said if he wanted to make things bad for you, why not just make things bad for you?"
"You wanted to shoot me," Kalinda says. "And Nick didn't."
"He said the lawyer. I asked him why bother with the lawyer?"
"He—Nick didn't listen to you."
"He should have," says Bill, his hand shaking (with adrenaline, Kalinda presumes, feeling it course through her own veins like jet streams).
"Yeah, he probably should have. Because then he'd be okay and you'd be okay, yeah?"
"Then we would have had the money," Bill says, almost whines. "Where the fuck is the money now?"
Kalinda makes a split-second decision. It will give her time when they finally stop driving. "I've got it." She says it softly, a little seductively. "The rest of it. I've got it for you."
"Where?" Bill sounds like a bloodhound might if it could talk. She likes the distraction, getting him off the subject of killing. There's no reason Alicia should have to listen to that.
"I'll show you when we stop. I—I was going to run too." She's not sure why she says that; an attempt to establish rapport, she supposes.
For a second, it seems to work: he meets her eyes in the mirror like a person, like the man she knew only a time or two. But then he breaks it and his breath and words are more jarring than before.
"He should've just killed you." Bill is agitated. "When we had the chance. It would've been so much easier."
Kalinda keeps her voice calm, even, quiet. "What would have been easier?"
"Our work, bitch!"
He smacks the gun against Kalinda's throat for emphasis, hitting her at a sharp angle. The cracking sound is so close Kalinda doesn't quite hear it. She's dizzied by the pain; it takes all she has to keep driving.
"What am I supposed to do now? My name is shit for anyone who's running."
"Yeah," Kalinda says; even saying that much hurts at the moment, and it's proving extremely difficult to collect her breath. She wonders what Alicia is thinking, hearing the noise, not hearing Kalinda's voice.
"My name is shit!" he says again, this time shooting the glove compartment for emphasis. Kalinda jumps but only swerves a little. She needs to say something, so Alicia won't be afraid, but she can't do it; she can hardly even exhale. "His suppliers think I was the one who told the cops. I gotta get out of here," he mutters. "I gotta get out of here."
Well, that explains something, Kalinda thinks. Bill lacks the acumen to do any street-level running or dealing. Probably, since Nick left, he's been running through what remains of their supply himself. She thinks about that, two weeks on a bender. Where that would leave your brain, your instincts. The pain resonates out from her throat, and she hears a strange noise when she breathes. She hopes that noise is quiet enough that Alicia can't hear it.
He collects himself, shifts the gun to the base of her skull. "Turn left."
Unable to speak, struggling for breath and terrified that her trachea is swelling, Kalinda keeps following his directions, including a prod or two demanding that she speed up. She can't panic, can't lose control. She's lost if she does. She floors the accelerator hoping someone will pull them over.
No one does.
They pull into a dirt-packed lot somewhere southwest of McKinley Park (for the last few minutes, it's been harder to keep track of directions) between two dilapidated three-story buildings. The neighborhood looks vaguely familiar; she realizes that the towing lot, Nick's lot, isn't far away. She wonders what Bill knows about this place, what else is waiting for them.
It's late—she's not really sure how late, how long they were driving—and dark, and everything seems pretty quiet on this block. She can see a light in the window in one of the adjacent buildings, but she's pretty sure this is an area where the sound of a gunshot wouldn't cause residents to blink. She tries hard to assess her options. Running, at the moment, is definitely not one of them.
Kalinda exits the car when Bill prods her, just managing to slip the phone into her pocket. She lacks the strength to close the door. Her struggle for breath is clearly visible, and she catches confusion on Bill's face; he's high enough not to know how hard he hit her throat. She leans against the hood. Bill edges over to her and holds the gun below her left ear.
"What's the matter with you?" he asks, for a second the wheedling right-hand man she knew for years. He sounds almost concerned.
Kalinda shakes her head. That hurts, too.
Then he looks at her right hand, which she's neglected to remove from her jacket. "What's in your pocket?"
Kalinda freezes.
"Take your hand out."
Kalinda does. She tries to turn away as he reaches into her pocket, removing the phone. Unable to hold herself up, she sits heavily back down on the driver's seat.
"Who have you been talking to?" His voice is still, oddly, a little wheedling, a little teasing. She wouldn't hear the threat under it if she didn't know it was there.
If nothing else, Kalinda's grateful that she called the hospital room number, that Alicia's name doesn't appear onscreen. She doesn't say anything.
Bill drops the phone to the ground and shoots it. Kalinda starts, still lacking the necessary breath to jump up.
"Are you trying to get out of this? Don't move. Don't fucking move. You can't get out of this. For once, you can't get out of this." Bill pushes her chin up with the gun. His hand is shaking a little. Although possibly that's Kalinda's body, the pain of the new angle on her throat. He may be right.
Kalinda blinks. The sound of the gunshot would have been the last thing Alicia heard before the call went silent.
"I need your keys," he says.
"I—" Kalinda tries to take a deep breath, forces the words out. Her voice is hoarse and painful. "I have to move then. Okay? Move my hands."
She turns, just a little, trying to watch both him and the car's interior as she reaches towards the ignition. The gun is following her movement too closely. She doesn't know how to change that.
"And the money," he says. "You said you had the money."
"I do, Bill." She stops, holds the dashboard, and he presses the gun in a little harder. "Let me get it."
She goes, slowly, for the glove compartment, trying to plan her next move.
He hears the sirens just a second before she does, all his senses sharpened. "Did you call the cops?"
"I didn't." The sirens sound far away; for all she knows, it's an ambulance headed somewhere else completely, some other shots, some other victim.
"I have to get out of here," he says. He sounds panicked, and seems distracted enough. Enough.
Kalinda slips her own weapon into her hand, relieved to know where it is by feel, relieved at her own fastidiousness. Relieved, for once in the last two weeks, to feel prepared.
Bill's eyes are jumping up and down the street, trying to discern where the cops may be coming from. By the time he notices what she's holding, she's already fired.
She pulls the trigger once more, for good measure, and drops it to the ground almost immediately, unpleasantly breathless and weak.
Kalinda leans sideways against the driver's seat and watches the blood spill out onto packed, sandy dirt, reflecting a streetlight a block away and the bulb that's still bright inside the car. It's hard to take her eyes off the blood, flowing from him freely. She takes a shaky, painful breath as she listens to the sirens, which seem to be coming closer and closer.