heart skip, and not in a good way. It knocked the wind out of me, and I stumbled, unable to break free of his grasp as he went down, choking on his own tongue or spit. The clatter of his breath coming out of his open mouth wasn’t good, but much like Marie, I really didn’t give a shit. One of the still unhealed cuts on my forehead split open, and hot blood ran down into my left eye. I fought to regain the function of my lungs, pulling away from Dutch’s thrashing body just to roll over onto my back as I tried to remember how to breathe.
That’s when Marie walked down between the parking spaces, her big-ass gun lifted up as steadily as she could and aimed directly at my head.
I couldn’t sit up. Hell, I felt like Dutch had just used a defibrillator on my chest, and it was all I could do to keep my stomach from crawling up my throat and emptying out onto the ground. Both the Lexus and Hummer had rims, so grabbing a hubcap and flinging it in an act of desperation was out. Marie was too far away to kick at, and judging by the smug expression on her face, she knew I was trapped. Behind me, Dutch’s heels were beating at the floor, his arms flailing about as if he were fully committed to his role as a dying replicant who’d fallen into Decker’s crosshairs.
“You’ve cost me a lot of money, asshole,” she squeaked, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she wiggled her nose and somehow sprouted whiskers. I was amazed at the stupid things my brain bubbled up with, especially when it looked like I was about to die. “Now I’ve got to figure out where to dump your body and how to get you into the van, because Stanley isn’t going to be able to do it.”
“Really? His name is Stanley?” I shifted on the ground, pulling up onto my side. Something crinkled in my back pocket, and I winced, knowing it was my broken phone. I wasn’t ready to die. Not when I had Jae at home and a lot of Christmases ahead of me with a niece I needed to spoil. Marie wasn’t going to be the end of me, not if I had anything to say about it. “Are you going to kill him next? That’s what you do, right? Pick off the people working for you so you cover your own ass? Ivan didn’t kill Adele. You did. Just like you killed the girl and him.”
“Wow, smart and pretty,” Marie mocked me with a whining drawl. “I should feel sorry about killing you, but I don’t. Say bye-bye now.”
Private investigators always seem to have some smartass rejoinder before they pull their final ass-saving move, but in real life, there’s really not a lot of time. Marie’s finger gently squeezed down on the trigger with the perfect pressure someone obviously taught her how to do, even though they didn’t school her on picking a gun inside of her weight class.
Growing up with Mike pretty much as my only playmate, we spent a lot of our time trying to figure out how to keep ourselves occupied. Back when we were kids, he couldn’t throw or catch a ball for shit, so we occupied our time playing politically incorrect games of gun-toting oppressors as well as Frisbee. Now, while a phone is a lot heavier than a plastic disk, Marie was a lot nearer to me than the standard distance people stood while tossing around the disk, so I was thankful for the up-close-and-personal approach she wanted to take to murdering me. I’d already taken my phone out of my back pocket, and as she squeezed down, I flung it straight at her wrist.
She got off the shot a split second after the phone hit her fingers.
That split second was all I needed.
She lost her steady grip on the stock, her hand loosening enough to put a dangerous flexibility into her wrist. The gun boomed with the third loud and deadly report in such a short time. I was hoping to God somebody heard this one, somebody with balls enough to send for the cops or a security guard or a fucking Girl Scout if there was one outside selling Thin Mints.
My ribs still felt like they were stabbing my lungs, and I fought to roll away, hoping to avoid getting plowed through by a hot