First Class Killing

I stared at him kneeling in the ruins of his audio equipment, gasping for breath. I hadn’t come intending to hurt him. I certainly hadn’t pla

I put my finger on the trigger and lifted the gun to his head to see…just to see what that might feel like.

“Don’t.” More whimpering. “Please, don’t. You lied to me. You said we would fuck, and then you walked out.”

It didn’t feel real. It felt like TV or the movies. Bo had warned me that it was a light trigger, so I touched it gently, caressing it with my finger. In my mind, I felt the gun kick. I felt his blood and brains blow back on me. I breathed in the smell of cordite and felt it burn my nasal passages. But then the smoke cleared, and it was quiet, and all I felt was the big void that would open up in that room if he were dead and I was the one who had made him that way. If his soul departed, leaving me standing alone with a smoking gun in my hand, there would be too much space around me, probably forever.

I dropped the C drive on the floor, the one with all the dirty movies, and stomped it hard. That felt so good, I stomped it again. And again. I stomped it until Jamie’s mistake was pulverized and my mistakes were demolished, until what I had done with Stewart was ground into powder and grit and tiny metal shards embedded in the hardwood floor. I kept stomping until I could barely raise my leg, while Stewart cowered next to me in a classic duck and cover. Then I dropped into the swivel chair to figure out what to do next.

I reached down under the desk, grabbed a handful of the wires and cables, and gave them a vicious yank. All the electronic toys they were supplying jumped and flinched and popped and eventually went dark.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

He did so promptly. I put the gun down, wrapped one of the cables around Stewart’s left wrist, and tied it off. As I tied his left hand to his right, I gave him his instructions.

“I’m going to call Angel now. When she answers, I’m going to put the phone to your head and you’re going to give her a message from me.”

“What about my D drive?”

“I’m holding on to it. I don’t want you calling her back after I leave. That’s how you keep me from stomping it, too. Do you understand?”

“What do you want me to tell her?”

Chapter 44

ANGEL’S CABIN WAS COMPLETELY DARK. I looked through the window, and it reminded me of looking through Monica’s apartment window. For a moment, I expected a face, maybe Angel’s face, looking ghoulish instead of gorgeous, to pop in front of me.

I listened to the stream flowing nearby and tried to calm down. My heart was barely keeping up with me. I had left Stewart tied up on his floor, then gone out to my car and pointed it toward this place. On the way, I had called and checked on various quarters. Bo and Tristan and Monica were fine. They were playing Trivial Pursuit, guns at the ready. When I told Tristan where I was going, all he said was to be careful. If Stewart had kept his word and not called her back, Angel would be looking for me at the Ritz-Carlton, but we both knew there was no guarantee that Angel had believed him.

I went back to the window, took a deep breath, and rammed my elbow through the glass. It wasn’t easy. I had to hit it a few times. Fortunately, the window cracked before my elbow did. I pushed the glass into the house. It fell onto an un-Angel-like yellow quilt that was lying neatly over a single bed below the window. I reached in, found the lock, unhitched it, and scrambled through, careful to crawl around the glass on the bed.

No one was around, but still, I winced when I put my feet to the floor and heard the floorboards creak. Using my flashlight, I found my way to the bedroom door and out into a hallway. With one hand glued to the wall and the other holding the flashlight on the floor in front of me, I made my way to the den.

I probably could have turned on a light but felt more comfortable down on my hands and knees with the flashlight. Every piece of furniture had a rug underneath it. I found one that looked as if it had been moved recently. It had a minor speed bump in it. The chair that sat on it was heavy, but once I got the right leverage, it tipped right over. I grabbed a corner of the rug, flung it completely out of the way, and found what I was looking for. Cut into one of the wide planks of the floor was a small, neatly milled, rectangular trapdoor. I stared at it, breathing hard. I hadn’t realized how winded I was. I mopped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, but it didn’t do any good. I was damp again immediately.

The opening was the width of my shoulders. It had two half-moon crescents carved out of the sides so you could put your fingers in and lift it out. I got down on my knees and tried to pry it out, but it was heavy and wedged tightly into its opening. I got up and framed the opening with one foot on either side. I wormed my fingers in, gave it a quick tug straight up, and it came out.

The hole it covered was about six inches deep and lined with metal. Inside were stacks and stacks of jewel cases. I pulled up the first stack and flipped through it. Using my flashlight, I saw the codes that labeled them. There were about forty per disc. Each code representeda man, each man a life. He had a wife or kids or a girlfriend. A career to be lost. A reputation to be tarnished. Maybe Angel would say that’s what they deserved. Any man who had made the choice to cheat on his loved ones deserved to have that choice used against him. I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure all that out. All I knew was that one of them was Jamie’s, and Angel shouldn’t have them. I reached down to take them away from her, and the fireplace roared to life.

It was like a grenade going off in the dark room, and I couldn’t keep from turning to look at it. When I did, I knew she was behind me. I felt her there. I dropped the boxes and reached for the gun, but it was too late. As I turned back, her arms were already on the way around, driven toward my head, it seemed, by the accelerating force of her guttural scream. I dropped to my knees with both hands to the floor. A vicious tear opened in the space above my head. I could tell by the sound that she was swinging a fireplace poker, an iron sword that was flying toward me again from her backhand side, this time with lower trajectory and better aim. I tried to flatten and roll away, but she caught my elbow with the downward hack, and the gun went flying. The pain from my elbow shot straight up my arm, across both shoulders, and down to my stomach, where it lurched around and threatened to blow straight up the back of my throat. Jesus, it hurt. I cradled it to my side. My body wanted to wrap itself around the injured limb, but she was coming, moving through the field of furniture with the poker over her head.

I scrambled into the nearest cover, a crawl space between the couch and the coffee table. She hacked off the corner of the glass tabletop. It was a clean break and a deafening pop right next to my ear. Her second try was a direct, shattering blow to the heart of the thick glass plane. I turned away. Shards flew. Large sections of glass dropped like heavy rocks straight to the floor. I kept moving. She kept coming, tripping around the furniture, chopping and hacking at me, strangling on her screams. I pulled pillows and cushions from the couch to cover my head as I went. Anything I could put my good hand on-ashtray, statue, magazine, potted plant-I tossed back at her, trying to slow her down. Something finally did. The poker tangled in the table’s low legs. I grabbed for it, wrapping my good hand around the tip, the only part I could get to, but she had all the leverage and ripped it away, nearly taking the skin off my palm in the process. I crawled over the field of broken glass and skirted around the end of the couch.