Personal

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.

FIFTY-SEVEN

CHARLIE’S FUNERAL SUIT was soaked with blood all down the front, from when I had hit him in the face. His nose might have been crushed or broken, but it was hard to tell. His hair was all over the place. But he was vertical. Not bad, for a seventy-seven-year-old.

I said, ‘You lied to me. You told me you weren’t carrying.’

‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘This is Joey’s. I know where he keeps them.’

‘Kept them,’ I said. ‘He isn’t keeping anything any more.’

‘I know. I found him.’

‘Hard to miss.’

‘Put the whore down.’

Which I was happy enough to do, because it would free my hands. I laid the woman gently on the hallway carpet, and her head lolled towards Charlie, as if she was looking at him.

He said, ‘She’s a good one. Hours of fun. I mean it. She’ll do anything for a fix. Literally anything. You dream it up, she’ll do it. You have to see it to believe it.’

Then he lowered his aiming point, to the centre of my chest. He was about eight feet away. Less than a hundredth of a second. He said, ‘Hold your arms out wide. Like you were trying to fly.’