His senses were focused on the van as he waited for the man with the scar to unleash another round of gunfire. Only at the last second did a breath of motion alert him to a deadly new threat behind him.
The young woman with the pink-and-blond hair pounced from the alley. She swung a long-bladed knife toward his neck, and he jerked back in time to avoid having his carotid artery cut open. He lashed out with one leg, kicking her in the stomach, driving her backward. She shook off the blow, bared her teeth, and charged again, leading with the knife aimed at his throat. He had a split second to grab her wrist and twist hard. The bone broke; the knife fell to the street. Before he could bring his gun around and fire, she uncoiled like a spring, driving her skull into the base of his chin with a loud crack. His head snapped back, and he tasted blood in his mouth. He let go of her, momentarily dizzy.
More pops, like muffled fireworks, exploded around him as the man with the scar leaped from cover and fired again with his injured arm. One shot shattered a window in the stone building on the other side of the street; another ricocheted off the sidewalk. He grabbed the young woman by her broken wrist and yanked her in front of him. She screamed in pain, but the scream cut off as the next bullet, which otherwise would have landed in the middle of his chest, burned into the back of the woman’s head.
The man who’d been kissing her on the boardwalk a few minutes ago had just killed her.
Still holding on to the woman, who was deadweight, he raised his own gun and fired a precise shot that struck the man with the scar under his chin. A kill shot directly through the throat.
Just like Sofia Ortiz.
He stood there, the pungent smell of smoke filling his nose. The dead woman dangled at the end of his arm like a grotesque doll, and he lowered her body to the wet street. Her eyes were open and fixed, staring at him. Blood pooled behind her head, but the rain quickly washed it away into the rivers that flowed along the curb.
Get away! Get to the car!
The jaws of the trap were springing shut.
He saw the shimmer of the boardwalk lights at the east end of the street. He headed that way, staying close to the stone walls. At the next corner, he surveyed the cross street and assessed the trees scattered like soldiers through Governor’s Park. He wasn’t alone. He felt it. But he couldn’t see where the threat was. He measured out his breaths one by one, then burst from cover, sprinted across the street, and dove into the muddy grass of the park.
Bullets spat at him from two directions. As he slithered through the grass, he spotted one man on the steps of a guest hotel behind him, another in the darkness of a parking tunnel under the Château Frontenac. He got up, zigzagged as the cross fire zeroed in on him, then swiveled and fired four shots into the blackness of the tunnel. The assassin in the parking garage collapsed, but the man on the hotel steps continued to fire. When a hot spike burned in his upper chest, he knew he’d been hit. He dragged himself to the shelter of an ash tree and ripped open the flap of his shirt to see the bloody ring of the bullet hole.
More fire rained down from the man on the steps. He waited until there was a pause as the man emptied his magazine, and at that moment, he broke from cover and fired back, six more shots.
The other shooter rolled down the hotel steps to the street.
There was no time to tend to his wound. More men would be here soon. He swapped his gun to his left hand and applied pressure to his chest. He was numb, but that wouldn’t last long. Marching through the park, head down, he passed the Château Frontenac and hurried down the steps to the boardwalk. Lights gleamed on the far shore of the river. The rain and wind assaulted the cliffside. He limped to the far side of the boardwalk and clung to the metal railing to steady himself. The rock of the cliff face went down more than one hundred and fifty feet below him, with a nest of bare