removed the .45 from the inside pocket of his Armani blazer. Stopping less than a foot behind the black guy, he flicked off the safety and glanced around quickly to make sure no one was watching him. Didn’t want an audience for this, after all. Not yet, anyway.
Seeing that the coast was clear, Nicholas lifted the gun to the base of the black man’s skull and pulled the trigger once, somehow timing the action to perfectly coincide with a loud crash of thunder.
The ‘O.G.’ crumpled to the ground like a bag of dropped bricks, his backward-facing Atlanta Falcons baseball cap flying off his head as he tumbled to the ground. Blood rushed out of his shattered skull and onto the blacktopped pavement, pooling at Nicholas’s feet. Bits of white bone and gray brain matter sprayed onto the sidewalk in front of them.
Stepping over the shimmering pool, Nicholas leaned down to examine the lifeless body. No need for a second shot, that much seemed clear. The man was already deader than a doornail.
Putting away his gun, Nicholas checked his pulse by placing two fingers against his throat. His heart rate hadn’t risen above a hundred the entire time he’d been killing the other man. His hands were still steady; his palms still dry. The evenness of his breath made even him wonder what had just happened.
Turning away and walking quickly back around the corner of the building, Nicholas caught one last glimpse of his quarry before she left the parking lot. Fifty yards away, Dinah Leach was getting inside her silver BMW for her fifteen-minute drive home; blissfully unaware of the fact that Nicholas had just saved her from what most likely would have been a very brutal rape. The self-absorbed moron was much too closed off in her own little world to notice anything going on around her. Much too consumed with her own insignificant life, completely confident in the knowledge that nothing could ever hurt her. After all, she was famous, right?
Nicholas pursed his lips as he watched Dinah Leach drive away into the darkness; happy she’d decided to leave the nightclub earlier than usual. Normally, she’d have stayed out dancing until the early-morning hours, but tonight she was obviously in a big hurry to beat the storm home.
Nicholas closed his eyes and luxuriated in the feeling of the wind whipping through his hair. For a moment, he almost felt sorry for Dinah Leach as the wind picked up even more and fluttered his perfectly tailoured Armani blazer around his trim waist. No matter how hard you tried, though, you could never really beat the storm, could you? Of course you couldn’t. And Hurricane Allison was almost here now. Nicholas could sense her; feel her soft breath on his cheek; the moistness of her saliva in the spitting rain.
And that was very bad news for Dinah Leach.
Very bad news, indeed.
Tick, tick, tick…
CHAPTER 23
Wheeling her silver BMW out of the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway, Dinah Leach leaned forward in her seat and squinted ahead into the darkness.
The night was as pitch-black as a funeral veil, matching her foul mood perfectly. According to the weather reports, Hurricane Allison was headed directly toward them now, and Dinah knew that she never should have been out in this kind of weather in the first place. Not only was it unsafe, it was absolutely pointless.
Dinah flipped open her cellphone and hit the voice-activation feature. If she needed to be miserable out here, she’d have some company for the ride. And she knew exactly who to call. ‘Call Derrick Coleman,’ she said.
The Motorola Droid went to work dialing the number of her agent, a smooth-talking, almost heartbreakingly handsome man she’d first met while they’d both been studying drama at Spellman College back in the late-1980s.
Derrick answered his phone after five rings. His deep voice boomed over the car speakers via Dinah’s BlueTooth setup. ‘Dinah, baby! What’s the good word, sweetheart? What’s new and exciting in the life of my favourite reality-television star? Tell me something good, girl.’
Dinah rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight back a smile despite her dark mood. Derrick Chad been her agent for the past five years now and her friend for even longer – going on almost twenty years now, hard as that was to believe. When they’d first met, both she and Derrick had been fresh-faced teenagers hell-bent on taking the world by storm – or at least taking it and fashioning it to suit their needs as well