Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense) (120 page)

She’s fast, too goddamn fast. I catch one wrist and feel a hot bite in my side. She tried to stab me but the blade slid over my ribs instead, opening a two-inch-long gash that’s currently sending way too much blood running down my leg. I try to pull her into an armlock but she’s too damned slippery, and it’s only by a hair’s breadth that the tip of her knife doesn’t bite right into my chest and slide into my heart, and then the other one is coming at me.

The edges are so sharp I can’t feel the cuts until my arms are bleeding and there’s another gash in my leg. She darts back, lunging and feinting at me with the knives, and somehow her sinuous naked body is still beautiful, even with splatters of my blood on her face and chest.

“You should have let me tie you up,” she hisses, circling me. “I’d have let you come again before I cut your throat.”

“Thanks, that’s really sweet of you.”

“You do have a nice cock.” She shrugs and then comes at me slashing and stabbing, a whirlwind of sharp steel and silky, naked skin.

This time I’m ready. I twist and know I’m going to take a cut, but it’s enough. I get her feet out from under her and get ahold of her wrist, capture her momentum, and redirect it onto the floor. Her breath flies out as she hits the carpet under me, and the knives drop from her hands.

I throw my weight on her to pin her down, and now that I have her, it’s a matter of size. My ground game is good, hers isn’t, and I’ve got her. Once I get ahold of the rope it’ll be easy.

I could do to her what she did to me. With my knee in her back and the rope in my hands I’d just have to slip it around her pretty pale throat and twist, and that would be the end of it.

I could, but I don’t hurt women. I have a code.

Instead I drag her wrists together and loop the rope around them, and tie it tight, enough that it starts to turn her hands purple. She’ll wriggle out of it, but it’ll buy me some time.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Tying you up.”

The rope is just long enough to pull her legs up and bind her ankles, too, and leave her hog tied. I lurch off of her and grab my pants, drag them on, shove my feet into my shoes, and pull on my shirt. Blood is already soaking through.

“You’re not going to kill me?”

“Nope.”

“Are you crazy? I’m going to come after you again. I took a contract.”

“I know.”

“You’ll have to kill me the next time.”

“Nope.”

She laughs. “No wonder Santiago is so disappointed in you. You should hear him talk about what a bitter disappointment the great Quentin Mulqueen turned out to be.”

“Tell him I said hi,” I pant, lurching into the bathroom. I grab a towel and press it against my side, and use my belt to hold it in place. The wounds on my arms aren’t bad, just scratches. I slip into my holster and pull my jacket on, and hope I can get out of the hotel without somebody asking why I’m bleeding all over the place. I stumble out of the bathroom, straighten up my clothes as best I can, and watch her wriggle on the floor a little bit.

“You’d better hurry up,” she says, smirking at me. “The longer you wait, the less of a head start you have.”

I stumble out of the room and let the door close behind me.

The fuck am I going to do now?

Okay, first, get the hell out of here. I head for the stairwell and lurch down, wincing at the pain in my leg. I’m not sure how deep that cut is. I didn’t get a good look and I’m not going to stop to get one now. Each step is a jolt of agony, until I finally reach the bottom and stop, panting. Fuck, I can’t go out through the lobby like this. I’ll attract too much attention. I turn away from the door and go down the next flight of stairs, into the ground level of the hotel. I just need to find my way to the parking garage, and I’m set.

Down here it’s all bare concrete and harsh florescent lighting. I blink a few times as I walk out into the hallway, and stop. I’m feeling pretty hazy, and my leg is damp with blood. I’m bleeding elsewhere, too. I keep forgetting. A touch to my coat sleeve and it comes away red, soaked through the fabric.

Fuck.

I swipe my hand down my side and start following the glowing red exit signs, hoping the exit will be in the garage. When I finally shove the door open and lurch out into the light, it’s like two hot pokers in my eyes. There are fucking cameras everywhere. No hiding this.

Stumbling, I leave bloodied handprints on my way down to the car, thankful I parked it on the ground floor, and slink behind the wheel. I have a first-aid kid in the glove box. I yank it out, sweep it open over the seat, and use the dull-tipped safety scissors to cut open my pant leg and peel away the blood-soaked towel.

It’s not a deep cut, but it’s a nice long gash and it needs stitches. For now all I can do is grit my teeth and put some field-dress bandages over it, to pinch the flesh closed. If that bitch had hit an artery there, I’d be dead already. Once that’s done I wrap it up tight and cut and tear away my jacket and sleeves, and shove my gun under the seat, and bandage up my arms in a hurry.

Goddamn, I’m a mess. I look like I’m a cow that got lost at a hamburger convention. She landed a cut on my face, and I didn’t even feel it until I saw the drying blood on my cheek. Not a bad cut, though.

Fuck me, what if she put poison on the blades?

There’s a ragged ligature mark around my neck, too. I look like death warmed over.

Once I get the car started I jab the call button on the steering wheel with my finger, and shout my way through the tedious commands to make a phone call through the car’s speakers.

“Dale,” I bellow.

“Dialing,” the cheery lady robot voice says back.

It rings five fucking times before he picks up.

“Quent?” he says. “I wasn’t expecting—”

“Me either. I’m hurt and shit’s gone south. I’m on my way to you.”

He swallows. “Yeah, alright.”

I drive. Slowly, carefully, methodically. I use my goddamn blinkers, I’m careful as hell of red-light cameras, and I keep it five under the speed limit, forcing my eyes open as I drive. The sun is too goddamn bright and my leg is on fire.

Not far now.

Traffic is on my side, which is great, because I would be dead if it wasn’t.

Dale’s place is in a seedier part of Philadelphia, on the edge of Chinatown where it blurs into a less savory place. Located in a triangular two-story block building topped with concertina wire, he’s got a garage in the back, facing a power substation. I wheel the car around the back and tap the horn, and the heavy garage door rumbles up, opening a great black mouth.

I let the car roll inside and remember at the last second what brakes are for, and manage to stop before crashing into the far wall. I manage to get the car in park and get the door open before I collapse rather heavily onto the concrete floor, and hear Dale calling my name.

Next thing I know I’m lying on his couch. There’s whole blood in a bag on an IV stand next to me and I’m too stiff to move. He’s got me down to my skivvies, and as I sit up I notice that he’s doing something interesting to my leg involving a really big, hooked needle.

“Don’t move.”

For a dumpy, five-foot-six guy who looks like the poster child for computer-science classes, Dale has something of an air of command about him. I flop back against the arm of the couch and wince every time I feel the needle slide into my flesh and the thread draw the wound tight. He takes his freaking time before finally wrapping a clean bandage around my leg.

We’re in his living room slash office, a utilitarian space with concrete walls, used couches, shelves and shelves of gear, computers, and enough firepower to overthrow the Bolivian government. Harsh lamps burn at my eyes when I lie back, so I drape my bandaged arm over my face.

“What the fuck happened, Quent?”

I wince at another stitch. “I met the contact at the hotel. The contact sucked my dick, then tried to kill me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Tried to strangle me with a bondage rope, then went Benihana special on me.”

“I’d say so. You’re a lucky man, Quent. So she sucked your dick.”

“She tried to kill me afterward.”

“Still counts, man.”

I start to sit up, only to fall back.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

“Yeah, so,” he says, rising. He presses his glasses up his nose. “They tried to kill you. What’s the story on that?”

“I don’t know,” I lie.

It was because the girl looked at me. She had green eyes, full of fear, and resignation. It’s come to this.
I’m next
.

“When they try to kill you, that usually means unsatisfied customer.”

“Yeah.”

“You have a reputation, man.”

“Yeah. She said she’d be coming after me again.”

Dale sputters. “Jesus, Quent. You didn’t finish her off?”

“No.”

Dale gives me that look and shrugs his round shoulders. “Fine, whatever. Even if you had it wouldn’t take them long to figure out something went wrong. You’ve just given yourself less time to get gone before they come after you.”

“Right,” I sigh. “It’s time, Dale. I need to disappear.”

“Got it. I’ll set you up,” he says.

Dale is one of the best forgers on the East Coast. In this era when everything is so heavily hooked into everything else and there are databases of government information detailing everything from your favorite porn sites to the last time you shaved your ass, it’s tough to create a fake identity. The main problem is that the identity will be clean, and that’s more suspicious than a lifetime of dirt.

If you just suddenly walk onto the world stage and say, “Here I am!” like you’ve been living off the grid your whole life, it raises more red flags than if you’d just gotten out of prison. Dale is the solution to that problem. He does more than work up a fake driver’s license and passport. He can fake a whole history behind a name given enough time. Besides identity papers he’s my major supplier for weapons, and so on, and so forth.

He doesn’t hand me a driver’s license. Instead, he hands me a key, drops it on my palm. Attached is a little tag with an address on one side and a pass code on the other.

“I knew this one was coming for a while,” he says sadly. “You’ve been lucky so far, but…”

“I know,” I say sharply.

This is something of a sore point between the two of us. I have scruples. Dale…doesn’t.

By the look of him you’d think, oh, what a dumpy little geek. Thing is, that dumpy little geek worked for some very shady people until a back injury took him out of the game. I’ve been trying to pry his story out of him for years, and succeeded at only chipping away at it. Sometimes he mentions El Salvador, or Saudi Arabia, offhandedly with the familiarity of someone who’s been intimate with a place.

Bloody intimate.

Deep sigh.

“I need a place to stay.”

“All taken care of. I took the liberty of charging your account and I’ve set up a transfer to your backup holdings. You can’t take it all. Did they pay you before they tried to kill you?”

“Yeah.”

He nods. “Insurance. If the one they sent after you failed her job, they can trace it if you try to move their payment into another account. It’s gone, Quent. Let it go.”

I nod. I’m going to miss that half a million dollars, but I have enough saved up to get by on in a pinch. You don’t do a job like mine without a lot of insurance policies, contingency plans, and a few Hail Marys to throw if shit really hits the fan.

“How long can I stay here?”

“It’s better if you go as soon as possible. Take a nap, see if you can walk okay when you wake up. I’ll be over in the other room.”

I let out a long sigh as he flicks off the lights and let my head fall back against the pillow. Sleep lands on me heavy and hard.

When Dale comes back I’m already sitting up, having removed the intravenous line he put in by myself. He kindly left me a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt and hoodie. I pull all that on and test my weight on my leg. I should stay off it, but it’s not gushing blood. That works for me.

“Get your weight off that when you can,” he says. “I’ve got some cash. Bus fare. There will be everything you need at the dead drop.”

“Yeah. Thanks, man.”

“It’s always been a pleasure working with you.”

“Yeah.”

Do I say goodbye? We just sort of stare at each other before I lurch back out. The sun is too low; my nap must have lasted all day. At Dale’s direction I walk two blocks south and flop on a rickety bench and wait for the bus to pull up, checking the route number to make sure I have the right one before I board and pay the fare in cash, fling myself into a seat, and sit back, fighting fatigue.

Karma, man. Karma is a bitch. As my head bobs with the motion of the bus I can’t escape the feeling that this is going to be it.

You know how they say old soldiers never die, they just fade away?

Old hitmen never retire, they get their brains blown out.

It’s not a long bus ride. The mini-storage place is in a slightly nicer part of town, richly appointed with barbed wire around the fence. I have to walk up and tap in the code, and trust that Dale isn’t screwing me.

There’s a half second when I think I’m really in trouble before the gate rumbles open and I walk inside, staring up at the numbers painted over the plain metal doors before I find the right one. The key unlocks the padlock and the door rolls up with a rumble.

Inside, there’s a metal wire utility shelf with the rudiments of a new life. A little metal box too small for a pair of shoes holds the keys to the car and a new driver’s license, passport, social security card, the works. An envelope holds several credit cards and bank information for my emergency funds.

There’s also an address and a set of house keys.

Oh, and my Impala. Hello, beautiful.

I sit in the front seat of the car and try to figure out where the hell I’m going.

Rose

I hate teeth.

I spend my days behind a counter, which sits at roughly eye level. Sitting on that counter is an oversized model of the human mouth, propped open to proudly display big fake pearly whites.

Something about that bothers me more than it should. I want to close the damn thing, or better yet pitch it across the waiting room and watch it fly apart when it hits the painting of the sailboat on the far wall.