FIFTY-SIX
I KEPT MY eye back from the crack, like a sniper keeps his eye back from the scope, because I didn’t want Kott to sense a sudden subliminal darkening, or hear the huff of breath through a narrow channel. He was sitting on the end of the bed, half turned to face the door. He was easily sixteen years older. He had lines around his eyes, and lines around his mouth. He was all ground down, and all wised up. He was wearing brown pants and a brown shirt, cheap items, like I might have chosen. His hands were resting easy in his lap. He had a gun. A Browning High Power. The local favourite.
Next to him on the bed was a naked woman. I didn’t know her. Her skin was white and her hair was yellow. She could have been anywhere between eighteen and forty. Her arms were twisted behind her and bound at the wrists. Her ankles were tied. She had a rag in her mouth.
Her arms were twisted with the insides of her elbows facing outward, and they were not a pretty sight. Green and yellow bruises, and scars, and clots of old blood.
Kott picked up a syringe and showed it to her, and then moved it near her elbow. She twisted her neck and watched, eyes wide. Kott touched the needle to her skin. She watched, and watched, and hoped, and hoped.
Kott moved the needle away again.
The woman slumped and gasped the same frustrated gasp I had heard before. Anguish, disappointment, and pain. She needed to get something. But she couldn’t.
I stepped back one long pace, staying exactly in line, and I put my own Browning in my back pocket, and I stood feet apart, and I raised the Glock two-handed, an easy, natural motion I had made a thousand times before, and I fired through the crack, at the real John Kott, not his reflection. But I hit him just the same, in the centre of his forehead. Fifteen feet. An eightieth of a second. I saw a neat black entry hole, instantly there, and then equally instantly the back of his skull blew off, which was anything but neat, and the roar of the shot rolled up my arms to my ears, and Kott just sat there, still as a statue, and sat, and sat, and then finally he toppled sideways and fell off the bed.
I didn’t check Kott’s condition. He had fallen on his face and I could see the inside of his brain. Which told me enough. Instead I went straight for his pockets and found a phone just like mine. Then I untied the woman’s ankles, and her wrists, and I pulled the rag out of her mouth, and I half turned to look for a robe or a sheet or a towel to cover her with, whereupon she shoved me out the way and grabbed the needle and stuck it in her arm.
She closed her eyes and pressed the plunger, slowly, slowly, all the way there.
She waited.
Then she made sounds I hadn’t heard from her before, a hum of contentment, a sleepy giggle, a yawn of pure happiness.
She stood up, slow and dazed, a little wobbly.
She said, ‘I want to leave here.’
She sounded foreign. Eastern European. From Latvia or Estonia, probably. Her accent shortened certain syllables. At first I thought she had said, I want to live here.
Maybe she had.
I said, ‘Take the needle out of your arm.’
She did, and she dropped it on the floor.
I said, ‘Where are your clothes?’
She said, ‘I don’t have any.’
So I hiked across to the bathroom, and I found a towel the size of a twin-bed mattress. Probably just a hand towel, in Joey’s world. I carried it back to the woman and draped it around her shoulders. She got the message and pulled it tight in all the right places.
I said, ‘What’s your name?’
She said, ‘First you have to give me money.’
She staggered a step, and I put the Glock in my pocket, and took her elbows, and steadied her. I said, ‘Can you walk?’
She took a breath, and I knew from the shape of her lips she was about to say yes, but then her eyes rolled up in her head, and she passed out, with another murmured hum of sheer contentment, and I caught her as she fell and hoisted her in my arms. I figured I could carry her downstairs and leave her somewhere, until I found Bennett. He could call for an ambulance after Nice and I were gone. The woman could survive a short delay. She didn’t need urgent care, and she wouldn’t, not until she started coming down again.
I got her comfortable, for me and for her, and I carried her out to the weird little anteroom, and I turned into the hallway. Where I came face to face with Charlie White. He had a gun in his hand, yet another Browning High Power, and he was pointing it straight at my head.