Текст книги "Tasting Fear"

Автор книги: Shannon McKenna

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

Chapter

10

It took a ridiculously long time to find the right effing button to push, since Nell could barely see, her eyes were so blurred with tears.

She finally got it, and held the phone to her ear. “Yes?”

“Nell? Finally! It’s Nancy. Sorry I’m calling so early, but I couldn’t stand to wait. I hope I’m not interrupting anything, you know, delicious?”

“No,” Nell forced out, after a pained little pause. “You’re not.”

Nancy was silent for a moment. “Um…is everything okay?”

“Fine.” Nell forced false brightness into her tone. “So what’s up?”

“I just got off the phone with Elsie.”

Elsie was Lucia’s sweet, kind, nosy next-door neighbor since decades before any of the sisters had come to live there. Nell was surprised to hear her name spoken. “But I thought Elsie went down to the Jersey Shore to live with her daughter after the burglaries!”

“She did. She just spent a full half hour telling me the horrors of sharing a bathroom with her teenage granddaughters. Alison brought her home last night. Elsie had the key Lucia had given her years ago, so this morning she decided to go over and check the place out for us.”

Nell sucked in a breath. “Yikes. Did you ask her to do that?”

“Hell no! I told her not to do it again. Could be dangerous. But you know how she is. Anyhow, she found a letter under the mail slot, from Elisabetta Barbieri, in Castiglione Sant’Angelo. Elsie opened it—”

“Good God,” Nell muttered.

“I know, but I wasn’t inclined to criticize, and besides, it didn’t matter because it’s in Italian, and Elsie’s Polish. So she called me.”

“I’ll go up there right away and get it,” Nell said.

Nancy made a suspicious sound. “With Duncan, right?”

Nell squirmed, pressing against the ache in her middle. “We’ll see,” she hedged.

“You be careful,” Nancy scolded. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied. She closed the call, trying to sound cheerful, and stared through the glass doors at him, leaning over the railing.

He’d asked her to marry him. She’d said no. She was nuts.

Could she risk it? She knew he had feelings for her. He just couldn’t admit them or articulate them. Could she accept a cool, practical “partnership”? With protection and money and lots of hot, excellent sex? Just hoping that someday he’d finally recognize his feelings for her as love?

No. She wasn’t made that way. Maybe she would always be alone. Maybe she was unrealistic. Or just plain dumb. Letting her one chance at true love and passion go by. For the sake of stupid semantics.

But she wanted her man to love her. With an open heart. That was not too goddamn much to ask.

She opened the door, and stepped out onto the terrace. A gust of wind blew the terry cloth bathrobe open over her legs. She yanked it closed. She was nude underneath. Nudity that had abruptly become inappropriate. In fact, it had become an agony of embarrassment.

“I, um, have to go,” she quavered to his rigid, muscular back.

“Why am I not surprised,” he said, without turning.

She told him the story of Elsie and the letter. Duncan stared out at the city. “I’ll take you up there,” he said, his voice stony.

“No,” she whispered.

“No?” He turned, and the fury in his eyes knocked her backward, like a punch. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Nothing has changed. You’ve still got criminals prowling the city waiting for your guard to go down. Am I supposed to cut you loose? Let you get wasted?”

She shook her head, helplessly. “It’s not your responsibility anymore, Duncan,” she said. “It never really was.”

“What a crock of high-minded horseshit,” he snarled. “I get the message, Nell. You can’t stand to be with me—”

“That’s not it!”

“—so fine, I’ll arrange for a car service and a professional armed escort to accompany you. When you get back with your letter, you’ll check into a suite at the Hilton. Twenty-four-hour bodyguard coverage. No more Sunset Grill shifts. Just your university work.”

Her mouth dangled, and her head shook helplessly back and forth. “Duncan. But…but that’s insane.”

“I’ll finance it until you’ve written your fucking thesis and gotten your precious Ph.D. At which point, we’ll reassess the situation.”

“But I—”

“Consider my position, Nell. Cold and detached as you think I am, I don’t want you to die. Even if you’re blowing me off, even if I’m not fucking you, I don’t want you to get hurt. If you got hurt, or dead, that would suck. Is that clear? Are we on the same page here?”

She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, and nodded.

“Good. Then stop arguing. I am sick of it. And I no longer need to bother trying not to piss you off. What a fucking load off my mind.”

Cold. Hah. He was anything but cold, standing there like some sort of raging, thunderous pagan god in the chill morning air, the towering cityscape as his backdrop. His face was rigid with fury.

He made a sharp gesture for her to precede him inside. “I’ll make the calls. Come on, let’s get this thing moving,” he said. “This shit is killing me. Go get dressed and packed. Fast.”

She scrambled to do so and dragged her suitcase out of his room into the living room. She overheard snippets of Duncan’s conversation with someone named Braxton as he arranged for the bodyguard. He turned, frowning. “What’s the address of this neighbor?”

“Twenty-one thirty-one Fairham Lane, in Hempton,” she said.

He repeated the address to Braxton. “Put this one on my personal account, not the corporate account,” he said into the phone.

His personal account? She’d be in debt to this guy for the rest of time. Well, hell. In essence, she already was. For her life.

Duncan escorted Nell down to the parking garage, where the car service was waiting, and bundled her into the vehicle. He lectured the bodyguard, a burly guy with long arms and a low, bulging forehead, about the mortal danger Nell was in for about fifteen minutes before he let the guy get into the car, still rolling his eyes. Fucking jerk-off.

He watched the car pull out of the garage, turn, and disappear.

It felt wrong. He wanted to run after the car, screaming and waving his arms. Something had been wrenched out of him. It left a bleeding hole.

He stumbled upstairs like a zombie, dropped onto the couch.

The sun got higher. His landline phone rang. His mother, for sure. Calling to give him hell about Ellie. The machine got it. His mother talked for five minutes onto the machine, her voice shrill. Not a word of it sank in. The square of sun on the floorboards inched along.

His cell rang. He checked the display. Bruce, wondering what the hell was going on. Nell had stood him up. He tossed the thing back down onto the couch, still ringing. Later for Bruce.

The only reason he didn’t turn it off altogether was because Nell was out there in the world without him. With just some jerk-off clown bodyguard to protect her. That phone was his last and only link.

Some time later, the phone rang again. This time it was Braxton. He pushed “talk.” “What happened?” he barked. “Is she okay?”

Braxton was taken aback. “Ah, yes. As far as I know,” he said carefully. “I haven’t heard from Wesley, so I assume things are fine.”

Duncan’s lungs released, allowing him to inhale. He felt stupid and hysterical. “Oh. Good. So, uh, what’s up?”

“Just letting you know that Teiko and Sam just presented their report about the apartment they bug-swept yesterday.”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“It was riddled,” Braxton said. “High quality, foreign made. Amazing stuff. There were cameras behind both air vents, and bugs and traces everywhere. Teiko’s convinced that they didn’t find everything.”

“Did you have them deliver the material to Gant for the evidence techs to look over?”

“As promised. One question. Did she bring any stuff with her when she came to your place? Suitcases, electronics?”

“Who told you she was at my place?” he snapped.

“Word gets around,” Braxton said patiently. “So? Did she?”

“She brought a suitcase,” he said. “But she took it away with her again. It’s in the car, with her and Wesley.” A cold chill began to prickle up his back. “Oh, my God. Oh, shit.”

“Probably tagged,” Braxton said. “So they know where she is.”

His eyes fell on her laptop, which lay where she’d forgotten it on the couch. The chill transformed into an icy cramp, squeezing his guts. “Fuck me,” he whispered, his voice a thread. “Her laptop. It’s still here.”

“Check it,” Braxton said.

He grabbed it. It was a big, clunky dinosaur of a thing, at least eight years old. He found a screwdriver and pried the case open.

There it was. A listening device. It had its own battery and a powerful microphone. It was transmitting in real time, as he watched. Everything they had said had been heard, clear as a bell. Including the address where Nell was headed right now.

Where she might have already arrived. It had been over an hour.

He yanked the thing out, detached its power source with a brutal yank. “Bugged,” he said. “They know where she went.”

“I just tried Wesley.” Braxton’s voice was grim. “He didn’t answer.”

“Fuck,” he hissed. “Call the cops for me, right now. The local ones. Have them check the place out. I’m on my way.”

“Wait! Dunc, don’t go alone. I’ll organize a—”

He clicked “stop.” No time. He shoved the phone into his pocket, sprinted for the bedroom. Tossed on a T-shirt, a pair of army-issue pants, shoes. Shoved his gun into the back of his pants, buckled on his ankle sheath and knife. Dug out the drug-treated throwing stars from his weapons stash, filled his side pants pockets with them.

Grabbed the laptop with the software to triangulate the GPS signal implanted in the cell phone he’d given her.

And ran like holy hell on wheels.

Nell kept her face averted in the car, so she didn’t have to see the bodyguard Wesley’s sympathetic glances. Her stores of dignity and restraint had been exhausted by the last scene in Duncan’s apartment. Now all she wanted was to crawl into a hole and stay there.

Funny. That was exactly the scenario she had in store for her, once she collected this letter, if she accepted Duncan’s help. Huddled in a hole. Cloistered in a hotel suite with the blinds drawn. She supposed she should be tough and brave and loftily refuse to do it, but that would mean fleeing New York, starting over. Abandoning everything she’d worked so hard for in the last decade.

But once she got her degree, what could she do with it, if the Fiend was abroad? Even if she changed her name and ran, she would still be barred from teaching literature. Colleges and universities would be the first place any fool would look for her. The Fiend was no fool.

No, it would be waitressing for her, with her new Social Security number, or being a cashier or an office temp. She’d survive, of course. She had so far. But oh, God. All those years of study. All that work.

Nell snorkled back her tears. She had to be practical. Break this problem into pieces, and tackle the pieces one at a time. She could not control the future, but she could do something useful right now.

Finishing her thesis, now. That was within her power. Maybe this awful mess could be an inspiration. After all, the poets she studied were all heart hungry, lovelorn. Bleak despair was the very stuff of creativity. Look at Emily Dickinson, the Brontës. There was a long, noble literary tradition of hunger for love and sex being sublimated into deathless art.

Perhaps, like them, she could salvage something from the wreckage. Transmute pain into useful activity. She was unemployed, homeless, rudderless. Too scared to walk out on the street by herself. Her days would be long, silent, boring. What excuse did she have now not to hunker down and write a kick-ass thesis?

She grabbed her big black shoulder bag and unzipped the central pocket where she kept her laptop. It was not there. She’d forgotten it.

Shit, shit, shit. She blew out a shuddering breath through trembling lips at the idea of having to face Duncan’s rigid face and blazing eyes and cutting remarks again in order to retrieve it.

Maybe she could have it sent over by courier. Uh-huh. With what cash? The cost of that courier would go right onto Duncan’s personal account. Ka-ching, ka-ching. And her debt to him was already crushing her.

Her laptop was gone, but the cell phone he’d given her was there. She picked it up, turned it off. He wasn’t going to call her on it. She slid it into the side pocket of her pants.

Onward. She dragged out the folder where she kept her tattered notes, outlines, and ideas. She pulled a fresh sheet out of her notebook and dug out a pen. She could just scribble. The old-fashioned way.

By the time they pulled up in front of Elsie’s house, she’d roughed out a pretty acceptable main thesis paragraph for “Sex, Desperation, Despair, and Death in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets.” She was even feeling a little bit better, after some useful activity. Hey. If she had to have a broken heart, at least let it be broken to good purpose.

Wesley got out and opened the door for her, peering around the deserted block. Nothing moved on the narrow lane. They climbed up Elsie’s stoop, which was identical in every particular to Lucia’s. She rang the bell, and waited. And waited. She rang again, and then knocked. “Elsie?” she called. “Are you in there? It’s me! Nell!”

Still no answer. Wesley muscled her behind himself, holding up a very large and businesslike-looking pistol.

“Nell?” It was Elsie, all right, though her voice was muffled behind the door. It sounded higher and thinner than usual.

“Elsie?” Nell knocked again. “Is everything okay?”

“Ah…yes, honey, everything’s fine,” Elsie quavered. “Come on…come on in. The door’s unlocked.”

Nell reached for the door handle, but Wesley gently pushed her hand away and pushed the door open himself. She stood on her tiptoes and looked over his bulky shoulder as he peered into the dim interior, through the foyer.

Elsie stood across the room, in the entryway to the kitchen. Wesley started inside just as Nell registered the look on the old lady’s face. The pallor. The stiff, frozen expression. The staring eyes.

She knew that look. She knew that vibe. Oh, God. Oh, no.

“Wait!” She lunged after Wesley’s coat, trying to yank him back—

Thhhpt, the thud of a silenced gun, and Wesley grunted, spun, and crashed heavily to the ground.

The room boiled with black-clad masked men, leaping for her. A burlap bag whipped down over her head. She struggled and screamed in airless darkness that stank of mold and rot, arms and legs flailing—

A sting like an insect bite in her arm, a sickening weakness sweeping through her with horrible quickness—

And it all went away.

Chapter

11

Duncan kept the car between 95 and 105, depending on the sharpness of the curves. He was glad that the road leading away from the city was clear. It was the opposite direction that was clogged with rush-hour traffic. The laptop was open on the passenger seat, GPS program running. The signal was stationary, fixed at Elsie’s address in Hempton. He wanted desperately to call, but the fact that Wesley no longer answered was reason enough to be terrified. Maybe they’d already discovered the phone and left it behind, since GPS traces in phones were so common. But maybe they hadn’t. If not, he didn’t want it to ring and give her away. That trace was his only hope.

Then the signal began to move.

The wave of fear made him want to retch. The signal moved along the main drag in Hempton and took a highway heading north and east. He had to change routes if he wanted to intercept them.

It was like walking a tightrope, driving at that speed while monitoring the computer and calculating possible shortcuts. A minute later, his cell rang, to add another ball and hoop to his balancing act.

Fortunately, he had his earpiece. “Yeah,” he barked.

“The cops are there,” Braxton said. “It’s bad. The old lady was tied up on the ground. Wesley’s shot. No sign of your lady friend.”

His gut cramped. “Her signal’s heading northeast,” he said. “Keep me informed. Later.”

“Wait. Dunc. I’m sorry about this, man. I let you down.”

“Not your fault,” he said curtly. “I miscalculated. She should have had a team. She shouldn’t have been let out at all. Gotta go. Later.”

“Gotcha.” Braxton hung up.

He pressed the accelerator harder, glancing over at the map on the screen. He had to close that gap. More speed. He let the powerful motor open up and breathe, humming at 115 mph.

Play it cool. Like a glacier. After all. As long as she was moving, they probably weren’t hurting her.

But when that signal stopped once again, man, he could fucking forget about playing it cool. He was going to be twisting in the flames of hell.

Stabbing pains in Nell’s head woke her. She was confused, terrified. It was horrifically dark. She couldn’t get any air. She was buried alive, dirt and rot in her nose. Air. God, she needed air.

She started struggling. Her arms were wrenched back, wrists bound. She was curled in the fetal position. She couldn’t move. Her own weight made her hyperextended shoulders burn and throb. The vibration confused her. A bump slammed her head against the floor.

Ah. Yes. She was folded up in the trunk of a car.

Panic would not help. She tried to relax, took the slowest, shallowest breaths she could. Lack of oxygen explained the headache. Or carbon monoxide, maybe. Or both.

The car began to rattle and bump. They’d left the asphalt and gotten onto a rutted dirt road. It stopped. A murmur of male voices. Car doors popped open. The vehicle shifted as men got out. She tried to remember how many she’d seen at Elsie’s. Four, maybe.

Elsie. A fresh wave of emotion jolted her. Oh, God, poor Elsie. And Wesley, too. They’d shot him.

The trunk opened with a hollow pop. Daylight filtered through the filthy, stinking burlap that shrouded her. Rough arms grabbed her under the armpits, giving her shoulders an agonizing jolt. She was jerked out, legs bumping over the lip of the trunk. The ground whipped up and smacked her a blow that loosened every sinew.

“Take her into the building,” said the harsh, cracked voice with a thick German accent. “And tie her to a chair.”

She was hoisted up and dragged, feet bouncing over rough ground, into an enclosed structure. The sunlight she’d felt outside did not penetrate here. It was humid, chill, as if she were in a cave.

The man dragging her dropped her onto a straight-backed chair. Her arms were jerked tighter, fastened to her ankles, twisting her into an agonized pretzel around the chair back. She gasped with the pain.

“The rest of you, out. Go keep watch,” the German-sounding man ordered. There were mutters, tramping feet, and a large door creaked, banged shut. The light filtering through the burlap diminished sharply.

A latch fell into place. Clunk.

Silence. Her teeth chattered. She shook, with huge seismic shudders, as if she were freezing to death. She trembled so hard, the chair vibrated against the floor. The two remaining men stood there, watching her. She could sense their enjoyment. Feel their smiles.

“Take off the bag, John.” The German-sounding man’s voice oozed satisfaction.

The bag was wrenched off, whipping her head forward against the brutal pull of her tied arms. She coughed, dragging in big gulps of air.

Her hair was over her eyes. She tried to shake it back, but the slightest movement made her head throb. She just stared through the veil of tangled hair, like a captured prehistoric cavewoman, face dirtied, mouth open, eyes staring and wild.

It was not bright inside that room, but it still took a moment before her eyes readjusted. By some miracle, her glasses were still clinging to her face.

Two men. One old and collapsed in on himself, with a flabby, jowly face. Watery blue eyes peered out from puffy bags of unwholesome flesh. His lips were an unhealthy purple. He leered at her.

So did the other man, who fit Nancy’s description of the Fiend. Burly, with piggish, deep-set eyes glittering in the flushed, tightly packed fat of his heavy face. His lips were wet from being compulsively licked.

Both were loathsome. Neither seemed concerned about her seeing their faces. They didn’t expect her to ever be able to identify them.

She shoved that unwelcome thought out of her head.

The old man stumped forward, and tipped up her chin. “Antonella,” he crooned. “In the flesh. And such lovely flesh.” His hand crept down her chest, groping. He found her nipple and pinched.

She did not allow herself to scream. “Who are you?”

“My name is Ulf, my dear. Ulf Haupt. And this is my assistant, John. But I am the one who will ask questions today. Not you.”

“Wh-what do you want from me?”

The light in his eyes was evil, insane. “Information, of course.”

Her stomach plummeted. That was a commodity of which she had so little. The other man, whom Ulf Haupt had called John, rummaged in her blouse, groping her boobs until he got his fist around her pendant.

He wrenched it until the chain broke. “We’ll add this to our growing collection,” he said.

“John’s been eager to question you,” Haupt said.

“Yeah, since this morning,” John agreed. “When you broke up with the prick.” He waited for a reaction, laughing at Nell’s shocked expression. “I heard it all,” he taunted. “I bugged your computer, you stupid cunt. You wanted him to declare his love, huh? You wanted him to grovel, suck your toes? I almost found it in my heart to pity the guy. If I hadn’t had to listen to him fucking you for the last two days.”

She recoiled. He leaned forward, until his face was inches from hers. “I heard it all. You dirty little slut. Heard you screaming and begging and coming.” He slapped her, rocking the chair so hard it teetered on two legs. “You love it, don’t you? Filthy whore—”

“Enough, John!” The old man’s voice was sharp. “Do not get carried away. She must not lose consciousness before we get the information we need. You can play later.”

John subsided, muttering something vicious under his breath about cunts, sluts. His fists were clenched, and his mouth was open and wet, breath rasping fast. Irrational hate shone in his eyes. God help her. She was tied to a chair in front of a pair of raving madmen.

Haupt patted the cheek that John had slapped, as if she were a little girl and he was some hideous parody of a benevolent grandfather. “So, my dear. Tell us what you know about the sketches.”

Sketches? She seesawed frantically, wondering what would get her killed the fastest—admitting ignorance or feigning knowledge. Either option looked bleak. “I don’t know anything about any sketches.”

Haupt’s eyes hardened, and his fingers tightened on her cheek, pinching. “Do not lie. We read the Contessa’s letter, stupid girl. She said the three of you could solve the puzzle, so you must know something!”

“But I’m alone. I’m not with them.” Nell shook her head to clear it, blowing hair up and out of her eyes. “And you took the letter, so we never got a chance to read it. And Lucia never had a chance to—”

Another vicious slap. Her head rang. Tears sprang into her eyes.

“So the Contessa never told you how her father died?”

Nell shook her head, gulping. “No,” she whispered.

“You want to hear the tale?” Haupt sounded eager to talk. “My father knew the old Conte deLuca, you see, back in their youth. In the thirties, before the war. They attended the art academy together in Rome, for a time. They became friends. Such good friends, the Conte even invited my father to visit his ancestral home. To show off the family’s art treasures.”

“Ah. I, um, see,” said Nell, although she didn’t.

“And then, the war. And the Reich,” Haupt went on. “My father was a high-ranking officer in the SS. He arranged to be headquartered in deLuca’s palazzo during the occupation. One of his duties was to appropriate the cream of the art pieces, for the glory of the Reich. But the Conte deLuca was greedy. He kept aside his greatest treasures. He hid them, but he wrote a map describing where to find them.”

Nell held her breath, hypnotized by the pale, mad eyes of the ruined old man. Spittle landed in her face as he talked. She silently begged him to go on and on. Keep on talking, all day, all night.

As long as he was talking, they would not tear her to pieces.

“The war ended,” Haupt went on. “My father fled to Argentina after the war, but he never forgot. He paid deLuca a visit fifteen years later, but the sketches were still hidden. Would you like to know what my father did to the Conte? In his efforts to convince him to reveal the hiding place?”

“N-n-no,” Nell quavered. “Thanks, but no.”

“Do not be insolent!” Haupt shrieked. “Perhaps if I tell you that you will share his exact same fate, it will spark your curiosity, hmm?” He slid his cold, puffy hand down over her arm, her breasts. “All that smooth, flawless skin. So pale, and soft and perfect. A pity, really.”

Delay, delay. “And, ah, wh-what about M-m-marco?”

“So you know about the Marchese Barbieri? Worthless old turd. He was the one with the map, little good it did him. My father and then I myself stationed domestic spies in the Palazzo deLuca for decades, watching him search, but he never found the sketches. And then, one fine day, he climbs on a plane! And flies to America! What a curious thing, eh?” He rubbed his hands together. “John was there to meet the old Marchese. That was how we finally located the elusive Contessa. But John has an impulse control problem. I call it, ‘kill now, ask questions later.’” Haupt shot a poisonous glance at John. “The Marchese and Contessa were dead before we could find out what he brought, or where he hid it. So be a good girl, Antonella. And maybe John won’t be so harsh with you, eh?”

She swallowed. “I will cooperate. As much as I can.” Which wasn’t very goddamn much. As they would discover, soon enough.

Haupt held up the necklaces. They swung and glittered in the dim light filtering through the dirty, cobwebby windows, the sapphire N, her ruby A. “Tell me the secret of the necklaces,” he commanded.

She winced. “I don’t know. I only saw an incomplete draft of the letter you took, and it said that only the three of us working together, using our love of art, could open some sort of key, but we never figured out exactly to what. I’m sure she meant to tell us more before she—”

Crack, another slap. Her nose was dripping blood.

“Do not lie!” Haupt screamed. “I know you know more! We have researched you, Antonella. The bitch Contessa had you study Italian and Latin. You were being groomed to take over the search! Admit it! Why else would you study a dead language? Have you seen the map? Have you read it? What does it say?”

“No! I-I-I haven’t s-s-seen…” She floundered, stammering. Her imagination was failing her, utterly. How could she describe a passion for language and literature for its own sake to subhuman monsters? They wouldn’t understand it. They didn’t even know what beauty was.

John stepped up, with a businesslike air. His next blow knocked her chair off balance. It teetered on one leg, tipped. The room swirled as she tumbled backward, onto her tied hands. Crunch, wood splintered beneath her, and oh, shit, oh, dear God, her hands, oh, that hurt—

A long broken shard of wood from a piece of junked furniture had stabbed into the pad of her thumb. She wrenched her thumb loose from the shard, again, groping with her fingers feeling blood flow, slippery and hot. Felt for the shard. There it was. Her hand closed around it, and clenched.

Snap. She broke off the tip. Small, but hers. Hidden in her fingers.

John hooked the back of her chair and heaved her upright. “Let’s try that question again, Antonella.” He leaned down, the whites of his eyes showing all around his irises, and slid the point of his knife under her blouse. A few sharp jerks, and the fabric gave, gaped. Buttons flew, skittering on concrete.

He dug the knife tip under the crossed silk cord that held her bra cups together, flicked the knife. This time, he nicked her skin. Blood welled up, trickled down her belly. Blood dripped from her wounded hand, as well. She clutched the splinter, hard enough to hurt, to ward off the squirming nausea, the waves of shimmering dark faintness.

The knife gleamed in front of her wide, hypnotized eyes.

“Now, Antonella,” he said, companionably. “Let’s talk about art.”

“Right on Connemara Drive, four point two miles. Hard left onto a dirt road, half a mile after you cross a creek. Her signal’s three hundred meters ahead of me, perpendicular to the main road and ten degrees to the right. I’m leaving the car. Tell the cavalry to hurry the fuck up.”

“Dunc! Hold on! Don’t just—”

He killed the phone and took off running. Glad for whatever instinct had prompted him to put on brown and olive drab. Her signal had been stationary for twenty minutes. Plenty of time to hurt her, if that was their intent.

He felt cold, his emotions flat-lined. A virtual figure in a video game, sent out to earn points, defeat goblins, gargoyles, basilisks, defeat the evil sorcerer. If he scored enough points, and made no wrong moves. But in the vid game, the player’s life wouldn’t be gutted if he fucked up. There would be no “game over” flashing on the screen. No invitation to try his luck again.

One chance. One.

He ran onward, darting from bush to tree, until the building came into view, and then the car. He hoped there were no infrared alarms. He doubted it. This was an improvised, last-minute snatch. This place wasn’t their turf. He hoped.

The building looked like an abandoned, crumbling barn. He spotted the first sentry, and sank down into the bushes. He recognized the tall black guy from Lafayette. Duncan dropped to his belly and slithered around the guy, keeping beneath his line of vision. When he spiraled in closer, the guy was turned, pissing against a tree. Good.

Duncan leaped up behind him. The guy spun around, mouth dangling, dick still in his hand. He sucked in air to yell, and took the heel of Duncan’s boot to the point of his chin. Crunch.

He toppled, eyes rolled back. Hit the tree, slid to the ground on his ass, slumped. Penis still drooping out of his opened pants.

Voices. He followed them, slithering toward the hushed murmur in the clearing around the barn. It was the blond dickhead from Lafayette, smoking a cigarette and talking to a stocky shorter guy. The blond guy had bruises beneath both eyes. Duncan crept closer, recognizing his reedy, whining tone before he could make out the words. He pulled out a couple of drugged throwing stars.