less than ten minutes ago with a dark-haired woman—”
“Jane Linden,” Dylan said, sitting back down. This was still a hunting party, not the end of the line, and he needed to stay in charge of it all—and he needed to find his wife now.
“You see why I need you down here, Dylan? This is your boat taking on water, and I need you down here. Have you called Grant yet?”
He looked up and signaled Cherie again. “Grant,” he said, before returning his attention to Loretta. “Cherie’s getting him on the horn, and Hawkins and Creed will be there in less than three minutes.”
“Good—and Geronimo is telling me that J.T. and Jane went out the back door with two men, and I’m standing out here right now, and I’m telling you it is fucking brutal in this alley, Dylan.”
“What exactly are you looking at, Lieutenant?”
“Two dead men, each at two hundred pounds, their necks snapped, their heads damn near twisted clean off, all their legs broken. They’ve both been shot, and one of them has been shot up, the syringe still hanging out of his arm—the arm still attached to his body, that is—and his other arm, the left one, has been ripped right off him, right at the shoulder joint. Not sawed off, not shot off, not blown off, but twisted off like it was a damn chicken leg. It’s lying in the alley about two feet away from the rest of him.”
Geezus.
“Dylan?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“If J.T. really is alive, and he did this, then he’s insane.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Squinting against the pain of the lights, Monk pushed himself to his feet. He deserved the woman. For all the pain he’d been through and for all the pain ahead, he deserved the few moments of pleasure to be had with this golden creature—the soft tenderness of her skin, the sweet smell of her taking the stench of his own sweat out of his nostrils.
He picked up speed, lured by her struggles. He couldn’t have devised a more perfect trap himself. She was easy prey.
So close, so fragile, so very afraid—and rightly so. He was the unexpected death. The one no one had ever imagined—because no one had ever imagined him before Dr. Gregory Patterson.
Thirty yards and closing, and he felt saliva forming on his tongue. She had no chance, no chance at all.
The police were spreading out, circling around the neighborhood, the sirens coming closer. He could hear them on two sides now, but he had the seconds he needed to snatch her out of her world and into his, where he was the only thing she would smell, and feel, and hear, and see. He would consume her senses. If she bit him, and he’d been bitten by women before, she would taste him, as well, but he would allow only so much of that and then he’d break her jaw. After that, there would be no more biting.
Women. They were such a solace in a lonely world. He’d had women, lots of them, and they were all so endearingly helpless. Even the rare ones who fought him endeared themselves to him with the feebleness of their attacks.
Twenty yards.
Fifteen yards.
And a shot rang out.
Then another.
And another.
Con didn’t have any trouble finding the source of his quickly ratcheting fear—Jane, standing next to the junked truck, blasting away with her .380, shooting into the dark.
With two shots left, she stopped pulling the trigger but kept her pistol aimed straight ahead. Her chest was heaving, her body trembling.
“Jane!” He called her name and hoped to hell she didn’t have a knee-jerk reaction and just swing around and shoot before she knew it was him.
To the girl’s credit, she did not budge off target.
“J.T.?” she cried out, her voice tremulous.
“Yes,” he said, going along with the name. His gun was drawn, and he was monitoring his approach, coming in behind her, looking for whomever or whatever she was shooting at, and not seeing anything—but he sensed there was something out there. His hackles were up, his internal warning system on full alert. There were enough cops running around to give anyone a wake-up call, but he didn’t think any of them were lurking in the dark behind the dumpsters, waiting for another chance to get shot at by a beautiful girl in a slinky gold dress.
No, whatever was out there wasn’t a cop. A trace of unusual stench ran through the rank scents of garbage, gas, and rotting produce, a chemical smell of sweat and metal. It