Bibi kept the P226 on the professor, who was nearer than the chief of hospital security (and whatever the hell else he might be).
Judging by her reaction, St. Croix was no less surprised by Coy’s arrival than was Bibi. “What are you doing here? You have no right. This is my home. First this sneaky little bitch and now you? I won’t tolerate—” She failed to finish the sentence before Coy shot her twice in the chest.
For an instant, Bibi thought that Chubb Coy had meant to shoot her, but, as a consequence of being a poor marksman, had killed the professor instead. However, when he declared, “She would have been a better woman and teacher if someone had been there to shoot her every morning of her life,” his intention was no longer in doubt.
Bibi had seen the terrible aftermath of murder but never the act committed. Whatever she might have imagined about such a moment, all that she had written or considered writing about a homicide, failed to capture the shock of it, the piercing and hollowing wound of being witness to a life ended prematurely, the immediate sense that a world ended and with it all the experiences of she whose world it had been. The horrible convulsive reflex of the body as each bullet impacted. The light of being at once extinguished in the eyes. A collapse so different from the fall of anyone with still a spark of life, the hard and undignified drop not of a person but of a thing. Solange St. Croix, no friend of Bibi’s, nevertheless evoked in her a pang of grief, not all or even most of it for the professor, but for herself, too, and for everyone born into this world of death.
That she had any compassion at all for St. Croix was remarkable, considering that, when the woman fell, a knife slipped from her sleeve. A switchblade, judging by the operative button on the handle.
The suppressed sound of the two shots did not crash wall to wall, but was like quick words whispered in some incomprehensible language, absorbed without echo by the layered fabrics and the plush upholstery of the Victorian parlor. Even in that muffled moment, as Dr. St. Croix changed from person to remains, Chubb Coy lowered his weapon, thereby making it clear that he would not shoot Bibi, though he did not holster the gun.
“What the hell?” she said, letting the words out in a rush of pent-up breath. “Why?”
Coy said, “Such rage. The foolish woman lost control of herself. That babbling. Tongue so loose it might have fallen out of her mouth. I’ve got interests to protect.”
“What interests? She was one of you. You had breakfast with her this morning.”
Those blue-flecked steel-gray eyes, which previously were as sharp as scalpels, carving in search of lies to reveal them like tumors, were now blunt bulkheads keeping secret all thoughts that lay behind them. “You don’t understand the situation, Miss Blair. There are many factions in this. Some factions may be allied with others now and then, but we aren’t all on the same side. This is a high-stakes game, and in a high-stakes game, most people are out for themselves.”
“What game?” Bibi demanded. “What’s all this about? Where is Ashley Bell? What are they going to do to her?”
His round and amiable face produced an infuriatingly charming smile. “You don’t need to know.”
“I do. I need to know. People want to kill me.”
“And they will,” he assured her. “To keep the secret, they will kill you six ways at once.”
“What secret?”
He only smiled.
When she aimed the pistol at him, he continued to smile—and put away his weapon. “You don’t have what it takes to kill a man in cold blood.”
“I do. I will.”
He shook his head. “Cop intuition. Anyway, I’d rather die than share anything with you.”
Bibi lowered the pistol. She said, “Ashley is just a child. Twelve? Thirteen? Why does she have to die?”
He shrugged. “Why does anyone? Some say we’ll never know, that to the gods we’re like the flies that boys kill on a summer day.”
She hated him for his studied indifference. “What kind of bastard are you?”
That smile again. “Any kind you want me to be, Miss Blair.”
When he started to turn away from her, she said, “Are you with him, with Terezin?”
His blunt eyes sharpened briefly as he turned to her once more. “That vicious fascist creep and his crypto-Nazi cult? Miss Blair, you almost make me want to kill you for that suggestion. I despise him.”
“Well, then, the enemy of your enemy—”