Target: Alex Cross (Alex Cross #26) - James Patterson Page 0,11
music picked up.
Singing the chorus, she took a few steps back and let the coat fall open. “Like what you see?”
“I’d have to be an imbecile to not love what I’m seeing, lass.” He chuckled.
She liked that. She danced over, trailed her hands across his chest again, then slipped around the back of the chair. She leaned over and nuzzled his neck, letting her hair fall against him.
“This is going to feel so good,” she whispered in his ear. “So good.”
He shivered when she ran the tip of her tongue along the top of his ear. “It is good right now.”
“Just you wait, doll,” she murmured, then she straightened and flipped a loop of piano wire over his head.
CHAPTER
12
DURING HIS SEARCH , Lawlor had not detected the length of piano wire that had been slipped into the lining of the right sleeve of Kristina Varjan’s coat. But the instant Lawlor felt the wire touch his throat, he seemed to know what he was in for.
Like the professional he was, Lawlor did not thrash or reach up and try to grab at the wire as Varjan cinched the loop tight and wrenched it back. Instead, he arched hard in her direction.
Gun at the small of his back, Varjan thought, remembering the way he’d shifted when she’d straddled him. Gun now!
Lawlor’s left hand came up with a small Ruger pistol; he twisted it her way and fired a split second after she flung herself to her right, still holding on to the wire. The pistol barked. The muzzle blasted so close to her ear, she thought her eardrum had ruptured.
Years of training forced her to swallow the pain and fight. As Lawlor choked and tried to aim at her again, Varjan let go of the wire with her left hand and used it to chop savagely at the curve of his neck, right where it met his shoulder.
The blow stunned his whole arm. The pistol went off a second time, but the bullet flew well wide of her. She chopped again and again until Lawlor dropped the pistol.
Varjan grabbed hold of the piano wire with both hands this time and threw her knee into the back of the chair; she heard Lawlor choke hard, and then the slick sounds of the wire cutting through his skin and into muscle.
Lawlor arched again, came up with a knife from somewhere, and tried to stab her. He missed.
She stepped away from the blade and wrenched and twisted the wire as hard as she could, then heard a noise like melon rind separating as the garrote broke through Lawlor’s trachea. He made gurgling and gasping noises, stopped trying to stab her, dropped the knife, and began to thrash and try to dig the wire out of his neck with his right hand.
Every movement made the wire cut deeper; the struggle made the end come that much quicker. Thirty seconds later, Lawlor collapsed and died.
Varjan let go of the wire and fell to her hands and knees, chest heaving, her fingers numb, sweat boiling off her brow. She stayed that way, panting, for several moments before her instincts kicked in.
The gunshots had changed everything. She was aware of time and of the impending threat. She glanced at her watch: 4:12 p.m.
Still breathing hard, she went to her purse, which had fallen to the ground in the struggle, and retrieved the latex gloves and the shower cap. She stripped off the leather gloves as she hurried back to the apartment door and put on the latex gloves and the shower cap while taking glances out the peephole and listening. No doors had opened. No one was in the hall looking. But what if people downstairs had heard? What if they’d made a call?
She looked at her watch again. A minute and forty seconds had passed since she’d checked, and it had been perhaps a minute before that when the pistol was shot twice. She left the door, crossed to the drapes, and looked out; she saw a few pedestrians on the sidewalks below but heard no sirens.
Just in case, she pushed up one of the sashes so she could hear the street and returned to stand in front of Lawlor, who was bent over to his left, his eyes dull and bugged wide, his face a pallid blue.
The piano wire had severed his carotid at the end. The blood was all down the front of him, pooled in his lap.