Lone Wolf, page 7
The entrance wound near the top of his head was small and neat, and there was no visible exit wound. Blood trickled from his parted lips to feed a widening spot in the rug. Open eyes stared back at Evan. The left bottom lid fluttered, but Evan knew it was just a trick of the nervous system.
A faint movement on the third floor drew his eye, spiking his adrenaline. As his gaze jerked upward, a compact human form swathed in black peeled away from the swept-back column of black curtains, differentiated abruptly from the matching backdrop.
Benjamin Hill’s killer, still in the house.
14
Desecrated
Aiming up the three stories of the foyer, Evan pinned the black form in the high-profile Straight Eight sights of his 1911. The black fleece balaclava hood covered all but a crescent of face—feminine bone structure and piercing eyes that held no panic. The dead steadiness of the return gaze told him this wasn’t an average robbery-in-progress. She was a seasoned operator.
She was backlit against the sliding glass door. As she shifted, something glinted at her right hand; since he’d caught her off guard, she hadn’t had time to lift her weapon. He couldn’t be sure from this distance but he guessed it was a .22 revolver, which would have two advantages. A revolver would leave no incriminating shells to pick up. And a .22 wouldn’t provide enough bullet velocity for the round to exit the skull, leaving it to bounce around, scrambling the brain. He thought of that neat entry hole atop Dr. Hill’s head auguring the damage within.
“Move forward,” he said.
She took a moment, but despite the three floors separating them he had her and she knew he had her. With a single elegant stride, she eased to the waist-high panel wall of the catwalk. She was short, maybe five three.
“Drop the gun over,” he said.
Robotically, she moved the revolver over the railing, careful to hold it sideways so as not to draw fire. She stared down, gauging him, and he stared back.
He jerked his muzzle once: Go.
She let the gun fall.
It tumbled through the core of the town house, plopping onto the sectional across from Loco. The tiny dog bolted upright and snarled at the gun. Evan let his eyes dip, confirmed that the revolver was a .22. A low-end choice of weapon for an operator of her composure unless she was staging a crime scene: home invasion gone wrong.
Evan said, “If you move, I’ll put a round through your face. Understand?”
The ninja-like mask dipped in a nod.
ARES steady, keeping her in his sights, he moved forward cautiously, foot over foot. Up the first flight of stairs, his boots peeling off the glass tread with a faint suctioning noise, his body rotating to hold target acquisition. The crisp modern space desecrated with death and damage, the streams of sunlight, and the abattoir smell turned everything to a dream.
She didn’t move. Didn’t seem to breathe. Just a band of face staring down at the bore of his pistol as he drew himself carefully to the landing of the second floor. To one side, an open door into a bedroom; to the other, a modern kitchen with a butcher-block island.
Now only one floor separated him from the intruder. “What’s your business here?” she asked.
His breathing steady, his hands steadier, he started up the second flight of stairs on the left, the town house seeming to spin as his twisting rise shifted the perspective between them. Again he felt that dizzying sensation, the world spiraling around the fixed point of his muzzle, the frozen woman above rotating with painstaking cinematic slowness, everything controlled, a surface tension that refused to pop.
She took a step back toward the sliding glass door, and he said, “No.”
She halted. To her left: the elevator doors, a bedroom with lavender walls, and the facing flight of stairs. To her right: him, rising.
He was halfway to the third floor, aiming up at her across the atrium, each step bringing them closer to level. If she blinked he did not notice.
Another step. Now he could note the rise and fall of her chest. She was compact, strong, her posture aligned.
“What are you going to do when you get to me?” Her tone was calm, even slightly bored. “Citizen’s arrest?”
“We’ll figure that out,” he said.
Her eyes swept the open space below her, and he sensed her calculating a leap onto the opposing stairs, a swing onto the second-floor catwalk, a plummet to the couch below.
None were great options, and he had a clear enough sight line to hit her no matter which way she broke.
She floated back a step so smoothly he barely registered it, easing herself toward the elevator, the raked-aside black curtains.
His boot set down on the next glass step, everything so still he heard the rubber sole crinkle as it bent. “Lace your hands behind your head. Now.”
She obeyed.
Eight more steps would bring him to the third floor, across the landing from her.
“Looks like you got your prize,” she said. “Now come unwrap me.”
Steady hands cupping the 1911, no wobble, no shake. He lifted his boot, prepared for the next step.
A mechanical click shuddered the building, and then came the deep vibration of the elevator. Her backup, rising to the rescue?
The black fabric over the woman’s mouth shifted into what he guessed was a smile. “Uh-oh.”
His eyes flicked to the floor indicators. G for garage was lit up. Then 1.
The rumbling kept on. The woman was close enough to the elevator doors that she could have reached out and knocked on them.
Now 2 was illuminated. The glow faded, the car in the space between floors.
Arms tensed with a slight bend at the elbows, he padded swiftly up a few steps, acquiring more of her critical mass and putting her body between him and the elevator. If one of her partners opened fire from the car, she’d absorb the rounds first.
Her back was pressed to the bunched curtains, her shoulder blade nearly touching the frame of the elevator doors.
He stayed four steps down to cut his profile from the elevator’s vantage. He was merely a head, the top of a torso, two arms aiming a gun. That was all of him they’d have. And yet they’d be clumped neatly before him. Once the doors parted, he could aerate her and the elevator with a tight grouping.
Now the third-floor indicator glowed.
A ding.
A forever delay before the doors peeled wide.
Evan took the slack out of the trigger.
A teenage girl stepped out.
The very motion brought her to the edge of the catwalk. Alarm in her eyes, staring down at the wreckage below. And then a single word muffled by emotion: “Dad?”
Evan said, “Get ba—”
The woman sprang behind Jayla Hill, wrapping her up with an arm across her throat.
Jayla cried out. Her head twisted back, the intruder’s face hidden behind hers. She had braces on her teeth, a spotting of acne on her chin. Seventeen years old.
The intruder’s shoulder dipped as she reached behind her and entwined a hand in the curtain. Gripping it in a gloved fist, careful to keep Jayla between herself and Evan, she moved slowly across the face of the sliding glass door, pulling the curtain from the rod, each wooden hoop giving way with a ping.
Evan came up another step, iron sights level, front post pegged on the rear notch, both aligned with the slender edge of the woman’s forehead peeking out just above Jayla’s shoulder. The woman was precise, leaving little of her to hit.
More curtain rings gave way: Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Steady,” he told the woman. “She’s a kid. She’s just a kid.”
Ping. Ping. Ping.
The girl was breathing hard, hyperventilating.
“Let her go and I’ll let you go,” he said.
The woman kept on, leaving no separation between herself and the girl, moving with greater vigilance yet.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
The curtain tore free, heaping on the catwalk with a sigh of fabric.
The woman unlocked the sliding glass door and flung it open behind her. The November chill crawled inside, curled itself through the interior, wound itself around Evan on the stairs.
Twisting her hand, the woman took up the fabric around her forearm.
Evan sensed the gears turning, a premonition of what she was about to do, but he couldn’t catch up to it, not all the way.
“Hang on,” he said, as much to himself as to her.
The woman remained skillfully hidden behind Jayla, Evan tracking the visible parts of her with his pistol. A flash of elbow, a sliver of leg, and then the woman’s hand flared up into view, holding a flex-cuff prepped in a loop. The noose lowered over the girl’s head, fastened around her throat, and zippered tight, the noise strident.
Jayla cried out, a strangled wheeze, flecks of saliva flying from her mouth. Her fingernails dug at the strip of plastic that had embedded in her throat, cinching off her airway.
Evan had a split second of denial, of disbelief that the woman was willing to sacrifice the girl to enable her escape.
With a whoosh like a flung cape, the curtain whipped out and around Jayla’s midsection in kimono-belt position. The effort brought the woman’s head barely visible to the side of Jayla’s head—two inches of the edge of that balaclava hood.
Evan fired.
A burst of red exploded from the side of the hood, black fabric flapping, glittering flesh showing beneath. The woman grunted once low, animalistic. The force of the round knocked the balaclava askew, the torn section widening the eye gap and exposing most of the woman’s face. Plain, clean features pinched with pain. Twisting in her grip, Jayla looked up at her with bulging eyes.
For a single suspended instant they were face-to-face in an intimate tableau vivant, the assassin’s identity laid bare.
Staggered from the shot, the woman tumbled back onto the balcony holding both ends of the curtain, pulling the band of fabric tight against Jayla’s midsection.
And then she slid backward gymnastically, tipping onto one hip, slipping straight through the wide-set rails, and whisking out into the open air above the alley.
Evan sprang up onto the third-floor landing. A frozen instant as Jayla stared at him with parted lips, face lurching with dry heaves, suffocating. Behind her a sense of whistling, of falling, of slack being taken out of the line.
And then the curtain pulled tight around Jayla’s waist and ripped her backward off her feet across the threshold and onto the balcony, slamming her against the railing.
Evan flew forward. The air was vibrating, metal rungs singing like a Tibetan bowl from the impact of Jayla’s shoulder blades. The girl was wedged against the railing in a sitting position, flex-cuff crushing her throat, band of fabric biting into her stomach. The woman swung somewhere below on the ends of the curtain, her weight pinning Jayla in place.
There was no choice but to cut the woman free. Evan grabbed for his Strider, hooking the shark fin atop the blade on the edge of his left pocket and snapping the knife open as he drew it. Skidding forward on his knees, he dug the knife into the slender stretch of curtain between Jayla’s side and the railing. The curtain gave way, the fabric popping loose, ripped away through the rails. Below he heard a crash of the woman landing on something—car hood? trash can?
Jayla toppled into him, arms contorting, head thrashing, oxygen gone. Redness came up beneath her dark skin, rouging her face. Fingernail gouges marred her neck where she’d tried to get at the flex-cuff.
But the woman had yanked it tight, burying it in the soft skin too deep for Evan to get the tip of the Strider beneath without slashing the girl’s throat in the process. She pawed at his shoulder, eyes staring up pleadingly.
She was going to die in his arms and there was nothing he could do about it.
Over the wail of wind through the alley below, he heard the sound of sirens closing in.
15
Human Matter
Jayla Alexis Hill.
A junior at Grand Arts High School.
Same age as Joey.
Shuddering in Evan’s arms, lips guppying, trachea cinched shut. Oxygen all around with no way to get it into her body.
Two stories below, her father lay sprawled, his gray matter annihilated by lead, his killer relentless enough to destroy his daughter calmly and tactically in order to escape.
Jayla’s lashes, curled and long, parted wide. Evan could see his reflection in her deep brown eyes. He hadn’t reacted for one full second, perhaps two, and there was no more time to not react.
His body was moving before his brain caught up to the plan, gathering her up in his arms, racing back in off the balcony, banging his shoulder on the edge of the sliding glass door. Sprinting down the stairs, their body heat mingling, Jayla jouncing against his chest and staring up at him with a stunned calm that felt like surrender. The sirens sounded closer now, right up the block. Too fast a response for his gunshot—a neighbor must have alerted to the crashing sounds earlier.
He nearly tripped on the second-floor landing, kept his boots beneath him, stumbling into the kitchen. Raking an elbow across the island, dumping her onto the butcher block. Flinging open drawers—silverware, steak knives, spices, and then there like a miracle, an aluminum drinking straw.
Snatching it up, back over to Jayla, her head rolling from side to side in an ecstasy of pain. He ignored her suffering. It would get in the way of what had to be done.
He pressed his fingertips to find her larynx, just below the band of embedded plastic. Easing his touch down, finding the gentle give of the cricothyroid membrane. As the Strider blade came up, Jayla’s eyes flared with terror at the sight of it and she began thrashing anew. With an elbow, he pinned her forehead down—“Got you, I got you”—and pressed the tip of the blade to her soft skin. It dimpled for a moment and then broke, Jayla stiffening on the butcher block.
Red and blue lights strobed the foyer now, compounding off the endless panes of glass and reflecting through the wide doorway of the kitchen. They mapped phantasmagoric shapes across the surfaces, making the room crawl.
Blood washed across the knife tip, glossy rivulets. With a measured jerk of his wrist, he sliced a vertical slit in Jayla’s throat. A burst of air erupted, speckling his face with blood.
Swiping at his eyes with his forearm, he made out the scuffle of foot traffic on the foyer below. He’d left the front door ajar, and the cops would have seen Dr. Hill’s body and begun their slow and low search of the house.
“Third floor,” he shouted. “Unarmed. Woman down. Roll EMS!”
In response, two sets of footsteps pounded up the stairs.
Jayla rattled on the island and he forced her still—“Sorry, I have to just”—his eyes watering, blinking away her blood. He tried to wipe the crimson wash from the slit for visibility. As she sucked for air, the hole closed again and he parted it with his fingers, readied the metal straw.
Shouting from the kitchen doorway: “LAPD! Hands hands. Show me your hands.”
Burly cop, pistol raised, aimed directly at Evan’s chest. Behind him, another patrolman shouldered to the jamb, service weapon drawn as well, shiny nameplate reading JEONG.
Evan hesitated, the straw hovering above Jayla’s throat. “I can’t.”
Jeong now: “Back off her!”
“I’m the one who called 911,” Evan said.
Burly cop: “Back the fuck off and step away.”
They were bulked up in full patrol gear—5.11 Taclite gloves, Blackhawk flex-cap knee pads, military-grade tactical belt laden with pouches. Flushed faces, adrenaline revving, fingers inside the trigger guards. The standard-issue Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0s in 9 mm had a 5.5 pound trigger pull.
Not a comforting fact at the moment.
Evan looked up at them and put a full measure of calm into his voice. “If I don’t get this straw into her windpipe, she’ll die.”
“Hands now! Hands!”
A rising heat from Jayla’s gaze. A purple splotch of petechial hemorrhage in her right eye, her lips bluing, her gaze going glassy.
“I’m going to do this,” Evan said. “Please don’t shoot me.”
He leaned over, widened the incision once more, and slid the straw in. Though he clamped it at the base to firm it, it still bobbed grotesquely, giving off a whistle.
“Okay,” he told her. “Breathe slow. Breathe slow. You have enough air now. You just have to catch up to it.”
His hand was drenched red and his sweat-dampened shirt clung to him. He kept his eyes on Jayla’s, holding her forehead gently with one hand and the straw in place with his other. Mimicking deep steady inhalations and exhalations until her breathing matched his. Life creeped back into her cheeks, her face.
The cops remained frozen in the doorway.
“Come here,” Evan said to the burly one. “Take this.”
The burly guy lumbered forward, holstering his pistol. But instead of moving to Evan’s side, he grabbed his arm to cuff him, yanking him back. Jayla sputtered and folded upward, the straw clattering to the floor.
Evan stomped the cop’s boot, elbowed him in the gut, slammed him into the refrigerator. The cop coughed and came upright, drawing once more and aiming at Evan’s chest. Evan stepped off line, knocked the pistol aside with a left-hand kenpo parry, and poked him in the eyes with his right hand. He finished the spin, slamming his back into the cop, banging them both into the refrigerator as he peeled the gun free. Clenching the gun around the barrel, he drew his arm back, ready to smash it into the cop’s face.
He barked, “I’m UC, Robbery-Homicide. Help me help her.”
The cop staggered and sank to the floor. Evan grabbed the straw off the floor, steadied Jayla once more, and reinserted it. The cop strained to grab Evan’s leg, tugging him away from the butcher block. Evan kept the straw steady and kicked his foot free.
Jeong hadn’t moved from the doorway. He was aiming at Evan but Jayla was between them and his partner was in the kill zone and he stared at the tableau with confusion, trying to piece together what the hell was going on.
