The Blonde (8 page)

Kelly leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Instinctively, he turned his face toward her, then caught himself at the last minute. Jesus. For a moment there, he’d thought it was Theresa. He’d almost kissed her on the lips.

But even if Jack hadn’t stopped himself, her recoil would have done the trick. She pushed herself away like he’d given her an electric shock.

“You don’t want to kiss me.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

The thought was the furthest thing from his mind for a number of reasons—not the least of which being he usually didn’t kiss people who had tried to kill him. But now that she had stressed it… of course, now it was all he could think about. Kissing her.

“Trust me, Jack. It’s a very bad idea. Remember the Mary Kates?”

“I wasn’t going to kiss you.”

“Just imagine I’d got a cold. A very bad cold. That’s how these damned things work anyway.”

“Okay,” Jack said, staring at her lips. Her natural, full, soft lips.

She turned her face away, then lowered her head onto his shoulder.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for someone to believe me. Someone who didn’t think I was crazy. If I weren’t infected with killer nanomachines, I’ve give you a blow job out of gratitude.”

Jack didn’t know what to say to that. He settled for “Urn, thanks.”

Her body started shaking, as if she had started crying.

No, it wasn’t tears. She was laughing.

“What?”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to resort to plan B. You would
really
have gotten the wrong idea.”

“PlanB?”

“Handcuffs.”

Behind the Edison Avenue House

N
ot good, not good. Kowalski could see the flashing cherries of the fire trucks filling the night sky. Wouldn’t be long before police started searching the immediate area, looking for survivors. Wouldn’t be long before the neighbors would pop their lights on, look out their front doors, wondering what the hell was going on at one o’clock in the morning.

And the tree house was empty.

His bag was gone.

Not a soul in the immediate vicinity. Bag wasn’t there long enough for someone to have “accidentally” discovered it. What, was he away three minutes? Four, tops? What the hell happened? Did Ed’s decapitated head sprout green hairy spider legs and go for a stroll?

Lights were flicking on in houses spread across the hills. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Kowalski noticed the opposite: a light flicking
off
.

It all came together within seconds.

He
so
didn’t have time for this.

Within thirty seconds, Kowalski was in the living room, staring at the guy who was staring at the stolen Adidas bag on his dining table. In the dim light, he looked like a young workaholic college professor, staying up late to do grades and putter away at a novel in spare moments. He had that bedhead look, even though he was still dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt a shade too tight for his age. The guy was so entranced by the bag—maybe he was thinking, Forget this novel stuff; I may have a bag full of stolen loot here. And that made sense. Who else would stash a bag in a tree house but a criminal? The prof, however, was in for a little surprise. Kowalski considered waiting until the guy opened it before speaking up. There you go, buddy. Put
that
in your novel. But the whole killing innocent bystanders thing was beginning to disturb him. He didn’t need another dead body on his conscience.

Not tonight.

“Ahem.”

The guy jolted, then froze. Only his eyes moved.

“Yeah, right over here, see?” Kowalski waved.

The prof nodded slowly.

“That bag does not belong to you. It does not contain cash or jewelry, or anything else you might consider valuable. Take a few steps back, let me take my bag, and I’ll be gone. No harm, no foul.”

“How do I know this is yours?”

“Because I say it is. And you should always believe a man with a semiautomatic pointed at your stomach.”

Kowalski had no such thing pointed anywhere.

The man’s voice cracked: “I want my cut.”

“Of what?”

“What’s in this bag. You can spare a little. Consider it a holding tax. I know how you armed robbers operate.”

“You don’t need anything in that bag.”

“
And you
don’t have a gun. No chance you’d be caught with the money
and
a piece. That’s another twenty mandatory. You ditched the gun the moment you left the job.”

The guy was a stubborn fucker. Definitely a college professor, thinking he could throw his intellect around like a sledgehammer. Always thinking he was too clever to get caught. He must have been sipping a cappuccino, up late, thinking amazing thoughts, and then watched Kowalski stash the bag in the tree house.

“You’re not worried about your children? Because once I kill you, they’re next.”

“What makes you think I have children?”

“Right before they die, I’ll tell them Daddy let this happen.”

“Oh, the tree house, right? That was here when I bought the house. I don’t have kids, asshole. Just like you don’t have a gun.”

Kowalski had been perfectly content to take the bag by force and leave this guy alive. That’s what he’d thought about as he broke the lock on this guy’s back door: Let him live. Because the body count was already high—hell, he’d just walked away from a dying woman in a shallow creek. No need to toss another body onto the pyre.

This, though, demanded a response.

“Go ahead. Take what you want out of the bag, and let me get out of here. I can hear the sirens.”

The professor smiled, then unfastened the bag. He looked down into it. His jaw dropped.

Kowalski closed the distance and slapped the man across his nose with an open palm. Better than a fist—less likely to break your own hand that way. The prof was stunned, but he threw a wild right roundhouse punch, which Kowalski deflected by snapping it to the side with the flat of his hand. Without losing momentum, he grabbed the professor’s wrist and yanked him forward, giving Kowalski a clear shot at the kidneys and base of the spine. He pounded his fist down repeatedly until the man was paralyzed on the carpet and sobbing.

“You’re probably a sociology professor, aren’t you? All that talk about mandatory sentencing.”

The guy squirmed, and moaned. Kowalski patted his pants pockets until he found what he was looking for.

“Tell me something. What’s mandatory sentence for dental floss?”

Sheraton, Room 702

K
elly was asleep. Jack could tell by her breathing, which had settled into a slow, comfortable rhythm.

Thank Christ.

Nanomachines? The Operator? The Olsen twins? A killer satellite? Proof in San Diego? Luminous toxin? Deflecting a kiss one moment, offering a blow job the next? What kind of con game was this?

But deep down, Jack knew this wasn’t a con. More likely, this woman was simply stone nuts. Some kind of research scientist who
had lost her mind, or stayed up one too many nights with a complex equation.

Boiiiiiing! Spring loose! Lets go out and kidnap a man nursing a boilermaker in an airport bar!
A sad substitute for a lost social life.

Jack slowly rolled off the bed and made his way to the other side, where she had stashed her bag. It was one of those vinyl messenger bags you see strapped to twenty-something hipsters. He opened the flap, and yep, she wasn’t kidding. Handcuffs. He gently placed them on the carpet, trying to avoid the sound of metal jangling.

They weren’t authentic police handcuffs. Unless some city departments had started purchasing restraints from a store called the Pleasure Chest. The name was featured on a purple stamp on the base of one of the cuffs. Hot-cha.

Still, they seemed solid enough. Sex games were no fun unless there was that element of realism.

Enough to cuff her to the bed while he called the police.

Let them arrive, and she can tell them all about the Operator and Alary Kate and Bob Saget and whoever else is in the Full Nut-House in her mind. They could force her to surrender the antidote. … In fact, wait a fucking sec. It was probably right here, in her bag.

As quietly as he could, Jack fished around in her bag, but he found only three items of interest, poisonwise. A bottle of CVS-brand contact lens rewetting drops. Clear liquid inside. Could she have used this to store the antidote? There was also a plastic tube with a Tylenol Extra Strength label on it. He twisted it open. It was full of round white tablets. He shook one out—they were stamped
OP
706. No idea. So maybe they were it. Finally, there was a sheet of foil-wrapped Imodium tablets. Or at least they looked like Imodium. Could be anything.

Was it one of these three? Did she even have it on her? Well, the police would be able to make her talk.

Jack picked up the handcuffs and crept closer to Kelly. She was the kind of woman who slept with her arms over her head, which was perfect. He placed one of the cuffs around her wrist and gently snapped it into place.

Her eyes opened. She breathed sharply. Then she screamed, “
No!
”

Jack hooked the other cuff around the bedpost.
Snap it, snap it, c’?non, snap it.
… Kelly yanked her hand away. The cuff clanged against brass, then slid free. Then she smashed her forehead into Jack’s nose. His face went numb. His eyes closed defensively. It was like someone had pushed him under chlorinated water before he had a chance to hold his nose. Burning liquid, up his nose and down his throat.

Then he felt a blow to his chest, and he fell backward to the carpet.

Kelly was astride him in seconds. Her thighs squeezed his rib cage, which was amazingly painful.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. Jack coughed; the burning in his nose intensified. “But you almost killed me. You have to understand that.”

She squeezed his chest again, and Jack felt the cool metal over his wrist. Then a click.

“I thought you
believed me
.”

Little Pete’s Restaurant, Seventeenth Street

T
he all-night diner was called Little Pete’s. It lived up to its name. It was a tiny rectangular wedge on the first floor of a seven-story garage complex. Just enough room for a row of six booths, a breakfast counter, a compact cashier’s station, and a stainless-steel kitchen in back. It was a greasy spoon as imagined by
Fisher-Price. But it was the only thing open this time of night in this part of town. And that’s where his handler had told him to go.

Good news was, the night was almost over for him. Sure, it’d had its bumps, but four hours of work wasn’t too hideous. He could get some sleep and resume his personal mission the next evening.

Kowalski had called his handler once he was safely away from the scene of his most recent crimes. One headless burned guy (not his fault!) in a burned-out shell of a house, one dead woman in a shallow creek, one strangled asshole in his own living room. He’d taken the asshole’s Audi—an awfully nice car for a young college professor. Maybe the guy—Robert Lankford, according to his ID—had had a sideline going. Stay up all night, hoping that armed robbers would wander by his backyard. Take a cut of the loot, buy some flashy wheels to impress the barely dressed undergrad criminal justice majors.

His handler’d had a rare bit of good news for him: “No need to travel. We’re sending someone to recover the bag from you.”

She’d given him the address of a diner two blocks from Ritten-house Square.

And here he was, Ed’s head stashed between his feet on the floor, plate of bacon, bowl of cottage cheese, bowl of mixed fruit, and a cup of chocolate skim milk on the table before him. Usually, he waited until after an assignment, but the running and killing and planning had left him ravenous. An infusion of protein would help.

He’d wanted to talk to his handler.

Maybe say, We should talk.

Or: I need to explain a few things to you.

Or even the classic: This is not what it looks like.

But how could it not?

Let’s say you’re her.

A handler in an ultrasecretive government agency. Your boyfriend—also your number-one field agent—disappears on a
long-term op, only to emerge with a pregnant fiancée. How’s it supposed to look?

Never mind that the fiancée is dead. That doesn’t help things at all. Not in your eyes.

Her eyes
.

Kowalski couldn’t even bring himself to think of his handler by name. Her lovely name.

They’d worked together for years, anonymous to each other, the passion growing. By the time they’d broken down together in Warsaw, in that violent thunderstorm, and she revealed her true first name, it was like bearing her naked body to him for the first time. It was the most intimate thing about her.

And now that he thought about it,
that
was supremely fucked up.

He used his butter knife to slice a strip of bacon in half. Surprisingly good bacon—not many globules of fat, not too burned.

Want some, Ed?

He could put the bag on the table, unzip it, unhinge Ed’s jaw and give him a little taste. Least he could do, after all he’d been through. Kowalski decided he’d been a little harsh previously. What was Ed’s crime? Flirting with a pretty blonde on a plane ride to Philadelphia?

Meanwhile, Kowalski had a stack of mafiosi bodies piling up this summer—an Italian holocaust. And
he
was the guy enjoying the bacon.

The worst thing was, he’d lost count of how many goombahs he’d snipered since ID’ing Katie’s body at the morgue. The local paper had it somewhere around thirteen, according to the last news brief he’d read. Speculation was that it was intermob warfare, a bunch of bargain-basement capos capping one another over worthless bits of turf left behind by the Russian mob. And he’d only read
that
brief because they had printed the anonymous tip he’d phoned in: “Yeah, somebody’s out there. He’s pissed. And he’s a good shot, too. They call him Mr. K.”