Cut and Run

He slipped the razor away, unfastened his belt and let his pants down. Let her see what he’d done to himself. If he had seen fear in her face before, now he saw terror.

She humped her way backward, thrusting her bottom off the floor, trying to distance herself, but the humping motion of her hips only served to stimulate him all the more.

“That’s it,” he said. “Just like that. Don’t run from me…”

Then he crawled forward and went to work.

Paolo rubbed a few small drops of blood deeper into the green fabric of his sweatshirt before knocking. An older woman he took to be Mrs. Blanchard opened the door. It had to be her: gray blue hair, cloudy ice blue eyes that sparkled with a hunger for companionship, even the companionship of a stranger knocking on her door.

“I think you may have known Alice… my dear, dear, friend,” Paolo said by way of introduction, speaking as politely and calmly as possible.

Mrs. Blanchard took note of his color; he’d seen that look a thousand times before. “Yes?” A fragile voice. He was reminded of little glass horses on windowsills.

“I wonder if you might be able to help me find her? I have no other address for her than this.”

“What dear girls, those two,” the old woman said.

“Do you know where I might find them?”

“No… no, I don’t. Just up and left one day. Not even a good-bye.”

That fits.

Paolo cocked his head slightly, inviting himself in. “Would you mind? I’d love to hear anything you can tell me about them.”

“I’m sorry,” she said as sweetly as possible. “But I don’t admit strangers.”

“But with both of us their friends?”

She seemed to consider this. Then reconsidered. “I’m sorry. I’d be happy to meet you at Pete’s-the diner next door. Say, twenty minutes?”

Her head tilted in curiosity as she heard the snap of latex on his left wrist, and she looked down. He calmly slipped his right hand into the second glove.

“What on earth?” She made a play to shut the door.

Paolo’s shoe blocked it.

She looked up, her mouth gaping like a fledgling, too terrified to cry out.

“We just need to have a little talk.” He seized hold of her, the loose skin of her throat rolling over the latex, lifted her off her feet by her neck, and stepped inside, nudging the door gently shut behind him.

“Nice place you have here,” he said.

When it was all over, out of habit, Paolo chased down a vanilla milkshake and drank it slowly so that it wouldn’t give him a headache. His temptation was to use the cell phone to call Philippe, but he could put that off a while. A second, much stranger compulsion overcame him: a desire to call Mother in Italy -a woman he hadn’t seen in fifteen years. But the time zones were all wrong, and perhaps she wasn’t even alive, though if she was he knew she’d be pleased to hear from him, just as she’d be pleased to hear from any of the dozens of boys she raised along with him.

Instead, following the milkshake, he gave in and placed the call he was required to make. The line rang three times and went silent. He typed in the code, *9645, waited for two beeps, and pushed 1.

“Go ahead,” said the male voice on the other end of the call. Philippe.

“It got wet. It’ll make the news and bring the dogs.”

“Go on.”

“She’s not here. Moved on. There’s a daughter named Pe

“Do we know where she is? Where they are?”

“She worked at St. Luke’s Hospital here. Maybe still does. I’m heading over there now.”

“The girl… the daughter. We just doubled our odds of finding them,” Philippe said.

“Yes,” Paolo agreed, still not liking the development.

“When you get to the hospital, focus on the child. She’s unlikely to change her daughter’s name. Not her first name. Kids don’t go for that. And that helps us-you. Use it. People love kids. Love to talk about them.”

“True enough.” Paolo liked kids himself.

“We’ll see if there’s anything we can get you from this end. Report back after the hospital.”

Despite Philippe’s businesslike tone, Paolo hung up feeling he’d let him down. For the past several years, Paolo had been top dog at the compound, Philippe’s right hand. He had no intention of giving up that position.

If there were information to be gleaned from the hospital, he’d find it. If Alice still worked there, he’d find her and kill her. Reminded of his attack on the bus all those years before, he had no intention of repeating that failure. He was older now, more seasoned and experienced. He made it a point never to repeat a mistake.

CHAPTER SIX

Mi

Burn victims were the worst, like fish skin left too long on the barbecue. The patient arrived sedated, rushed from the ambulance to the ER. Alice Dunbar watched the blur of blue scrubs pass as the ER nurses took possession and the paramedics surrendered control. A male nurse broke off the cavalcade to handle the paperwork; three others, all women, stayed with the patient, ru

As the emergency room administrator, Alice could observe all this with a certain degree of detachment. She kept the health care machine working: admittance, insurance, scheduling, on-call assignments, and she attended administration meetings to convey the inherent problems, the personality conflicts, the budget overruns-all part of her daily life. The job had nothing to do with her technical expertise, but that had been the case for most of the past six years. As a former systems analyst and fraud investigator for Jamerson Ltd., a British-owned insurance underwriter, her computer skills had once proved incredibly valuable. Now those talents went unrecognized and uncompensated for, until a colleague had a problem with a PC. Alice was the unpaid computer geek of the emergency room administrative offices.

She’d chosen Mi

Alice had been a redhead for the past six months-a fairly convincing color given that it was out of a box. Beneath the red was natural blond. She’d tried to gain weight, but to no use-her metabolism, her nerves, burned it off as fast as she could eat. The result was a slightly gaunt look, sunken eyes, pronounced cheekbones. Unflattering, she thought. She looked a little sallow, unable to spend the time she wanted outdoors, simply because she felt safer while inside. They were out there somewhere. She never forgot about them-not for a second. Not in the shower, not on her way to sleep, not now as she worked in St. Luke’s. Anybody, anytime. This mantra had been drummed into her during WITSEC orientation. She could make friends, but she could not trust them. She could tell no one. She lived like the bubble boys on the sixth floor of this same hospital, insulated, isolated, and completely alone. Except for Pe