Devil's Bargain

Around an hour and a half later, the assistant broke into his routine to remind him he had some kind of set visit, which marked the end of the administrative portion of the day, and Jazz gulped down the last of her coffee as Santoro tidied up and prepared to depart.

Apart from having heard half of a conversation—the wrong half, unfortunately—with Joh

She picked up the still camera and shot a couple of angles of his car while she was waiting for him to emerge from the building.

Her cell phone rang. She flipped it open without taking her eyes from the entrance.

“Anything happening?” Borden. She actually felt a little electric tingle at the sound of his voice, caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and realized that she was smiling. That kind of smile. She wiped it off her face and glared at her reflection, as if it was to blame.

“Not a damn thing,” she said. “Your friend’s doing fine.”

“That’s good.” He sounded relieved. “How about you?”

“Not a damn thing happening to me, either,” she said, “except that I’m about to OD on caffeine. You know the biggest problem about stakeouts without a partner?”

“No conversation?”

“No bathroom breaks,” she said. “Gets pretty difficult.”

“I can imagine.”

“You at the office?” Because he’d have to be, it was almost noon in New York.

“No. I was in court earlier. I have the rest of the day off.”

“Do you ever work, Counselor? All I ever see you do is stroll around your office looking sharp, taking meetings, and fly around bugging the hell out of me.”

“It’s a filthy job, but the compensation’s pretty good,” he said blandly. “So I look sharp, eh?”

“Don’t get cocky.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

She checked the monitor. Santoro’s office was empty, except for his assistant cleaning up the coffee cup and restraightening piles of paper. He hadn’t come out of the front door yet.

“I’m going to have to go,” she said to Borden.

“Anything wrong?”

“No,” she said. “Go help a corporation hide its ill-gotten gains in an offshore account or something. I’ll call later.”

Maybe Santoro had stopped off at the bathroom. Hell, she was starting to regret the second cup….

Another full minute passed. No Santoro. No activity in his office.

Jazz drummed her fingers on the steering wheel again, this time more from nerves than any enjoyment of the pop jingle on the radio. She watched the digits crawl on her clock.

He was taking way too long.

“Dammit,” she whispered, and got out of the car. She grabbed her still camera—nothing odd about a tourist with a camera in L.A. — stuck her collapsible baton in her back pocket, covered by the windbreaker she threw on, and moved quickly toward Santoro’s office building.

She kept expecting him to pop out at any moment, as she got closer, but all remained quiet. Something tingled at the base of her spine, like a gun pressed close. She walked faster, took the three short steps up to the glass doors and walked in.

No security in the lobby. There was a desk, but it was empty. She checked the elevators. Nothing was moving. Santoro’s office was on the fourth floor, and both elevators were on the ground. If he’d come out here, he’d have walked out the front. There weren’t any other places for him to have gone.

Except for the stairs.

Jazz cracked the door to the stairwell and listened, and heard a dull scuffling noise. Grunts of effort.

She shoved the camera in a pocket, grabbed the baton and snapped it out to its full length as she ran up. She took the steps three at a time, feeling the burn in her thighs and a sharp twinge in her side, but if she was right, there wasn’t time to take it any easier.

She burst around the third-floor landing and saw, on the flat halfway point to the fourth floor, Lowell Santoro being strangled.

He was still alive, barely—face congested dull purple, eyes bulging, mouth open and tongue protruding. Fingers still scrabbling weakly for the cord around his throat that had dug in so deep she couldn’t even see it. The cord was all that was holding him upright.

Jazz yelled—she didn’t even know what—and the sound bounced and echoed sharply from the concrete all around her.

The man standing behind Santoro, both gloved hands twisting a black rope, met her eyes. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type—something missing in the eyes, a kind of animal vacancy that marked a bad life and a worse end coming. He was tall, blond, California-pretty, with an off-kilter nose that had seen somebody’s fist close up in the not-too-distant past.

He let go of Santoro and let him pitch forward, right into Jazz as she bounded up toward him. Santoro’s weight—she didn’t dare think, dead weight—bowled her over, and the world became a confusing, hurting blur as they fell. Jazz landed flat on her back, Santoro half-crushing her, and saw California Guy heading back up the stairs, fast.

She rolled Santoro over. His eyes were blinking, and he was whooping for breath. His mouth was bloody. He’d bitten his tongue.

“Stay here!” she shouted at him, and lunged to her feet, digging her cell phone out of her pocket as she started up the steps in pursuit. She yelled out the office’s street address to the 911 operator, craning her neck to try to see where California Guy was on the stairs. She paused to listen.

No sound. Either he was waiting, or…

She hung up on the operator, who was trying to get her to give her name, and took the next few steps slowly, quietly, feeling cold sweat slide down her back. She wished for a gun, or at least a good coating of Kevlar. California Guy might like to use his hands, but that didn’t mean he was a conscientious gun objector, either.

She had an unpleasant flashback of her blood glittering on asphalt, of the strange liquid feeling of being shot, and shook it off to ease up one more rising step. She was scared, she realized. Scared of being hurt.

California Guy was waiting for her around the blind corner. Or rather, California Guy’s powerful kick was waiting for her, and it caught her squarely in the stomach and slammed her back against the concrete wall, seeing stars and out of breath. She hung on to her baton, somehow, and saw a black flash coming at her; she ducked, and heard his fist make hard contact with the wall, followed by a loud, yelping grunt of pain. Since she was safely braced, she yanked up a knee, missed his crotch, kept going and planted her foot flat against his chest and uncoiled with a shout. He went stumbling backward.

She blinked the last disorientation out of her eyes and took a surgical swing with the baton. Whap. Right in his undefended ribs, which she felt crack. As he hunched over in reaction, she gave him a hard smack to the side of the head, too.

His knees buckled, but instead of falling down unconscious, he lunged from a kneeling position, got hold of her and slammed her back against the wall again. Her head impacted with a dull thud. She tasted blood and damn, that hurt. She could barely get her breath, but his hands were yanking at her waistband, fumbling for a gun she didn’t have, and then he pulled her off balance and down, his weight on top.

He liked to use his hands. Jazz didn’t particularly mind that. She gri

This time his head hit the wall.

It was lights out, sweetheart, and he slumped sideways, breathing heavily through his mouth as his rebroken nose leaked a steady stream of red.