of steps down her walk to sense him in the shadows.
Her outside light had a motion sensor, but it didn’t kick in because the bulb had blown. Something else Chew had noted when he’d scoped out where this was going to go down.
She was probably ticked at her man because he hadn’t changed that too, when the woman had two working legs, two working arms, and all ten fingers were functioning, and she could change the damned bulb.
She stopped and looked through the dark, right at him.
“Well fuck me,” she said snidely. “You got balls after all.”
Okay.
He was done.
He lifted the gun in his hand, aimed and pulled the trigger.
She fell flat on what was left of her face. Dead before she hit the ground, the barely filled white plastic bag of garbage drifting to the ground at her side like a big, sad, deflated balloon.
Chew pulled out his little Maglite, searched the ground, found the casing, picked it up with his gloved hand and palmed it. The metal was too hot for him to pocket just yet.
He’d dump it somewhere nowhere near there.
He saw a light go on next door, doused his Mag, shoved the flashlight in his back pocket, turned and slipped through the gate.
He stayed close to the shadows cast by the back fences in the alley until he hit the street where Harrietta’s car was parked.
He got in, started it up and drove off like he had nowhere to be.
And he did all of this not thinking of the body he’d just left behind.
Not that first thought.
Harrietta
Harrietta Turnbull listened to the phone ring.
Then she listened to what she’d heard a fucking million times over the last coupla months.
“You got Rush. I know you, leave a message. You’re tryin’ to sell me something, fuck off.”
Beep.
“You want to talk to me, asshole,” she bit into the phone. “Call me back.”
Then she took it from her ear, hit the button to disconnect and threw it across the room.
The phone slammed into the wall and dropped to the floor.
Tarantulas all over the place scattered.
She shivered at the sight despite having seen it a fucking gazillion times over the last too many fucking years.
“Where is that asshole? It’s fucking four in the morning,” she snapped at her phone on the floor.
Goddamn it, it had to be Chaos that took Chew down.
If Chaos was behind it, the years he’d rot in prison would eat him alive.
He’d hate it, motherfucking hate it, if she gave him to that girl. That Tallulah. It’d drive him crazy if some pussy turned him over to the cops.
And it was getting tough to string that bitch along.
She wanted done with porn, Valenzuela, the whole gig.
Harrietta didn’t blame her.
She wanted done with all that shit too.
But it had to be Chaos.
Harrietta didn’t think on the fact she took it in stride that not only had Chew been stepping out on her, stepping out with a girl that was only slightly older than Harrietta’s own daughter, a daughter Chew helped raise (if you could call it that) then got murdered, but also, he’d ended up getting rough with her (his norm, the sick fuck) and killed the snatch.
No, she didn’t think about what it meant, taking that in stride.
She had to admit, it sort of stung the bitch was a porn star junkie with a cunt so used, half the skeeves in America had seen it in close-up.
But even if he didn’t do it, he was going down for Cammy’s murder.
He was also going down for that other bitch, Natalie’s murder, and he didn’t do that either.
And he was going down for the porn junkie’s murder, something he did do (she was relatively sure seeing as those two cops that kept showing at her other place told her his fingerprints and DNA were all over the scene, cripes, how stupid could the dickhead be?).
Last, he was going down for killing whoever those two skulls belonged to that had been in the body bag with that Natalie chick, and Harrietta didn’t even know who those sad, dead fucks were. She just knew Chew did and it had something to do with his years with Chaos.
Oh yeah.
He was going to go down for them too.
Harrietta was going to see to it he took the fall for all of it, went away for good, not that first shot at getting out.
And she was going to see to it that not only Chaos took him down, but in the end, he’d know it