She couldn’t.
She couldn’t kill Groot to save herself. So, the front door. She circled back through the kitchen to lure him away from it. She might be able to flag someone down along the road, and if this asshole gave chase in his car, she could hide in a ditch. Eventually, she’d get a cellphone signal.
“Stop right now, police!”
Not even a good try. Maybe if he’d knocked first, maybe if police had been the first thing out of his mouth.
She stumbled while turning into the kitchen and fell, smashing hard into the counter. Pain flared in her left side with the sharp snap of a rib cracking.
Shit.
But she surged back to her feet, heading for the other doorway. She’d spill back out of the kitchen three steps away from the now-open front door while Cue-ball was still pounding through the kitchen.
Except he’d anticipated her.
As she darted through the doorway, she sensed him, right beside her. He gripped her hair, twisted it, and yanked.
Her head wrenched backward and her feet flew out from under her. She slammed down to the floor, pain flaring again in her left side.
Cue-ball stood over her, the gun pointed at her face as he snatched her phone from her hand.
“Don’t move or I shoot you right through your brain.” His accent was thicker than she’d thought. “I have no problem with this, but is not my first choice. Understand?”
“Fuck off.” It came out as a whisper. It hurt to speak, or even to draw a deep breath.
Cue-ball placed the gun against her cheek and pushed, forcing her head to the side. “No. No fucking off. You have choice now. Get up—slowly—and sit on couch. You try to run, I shoot you. Understand?”
Keller nodded, understanding the man was here to kill her. Maybe do some other things first, but kill her in the end.
Taking shallow breaths, she rolled gingerly onto her right side, the pain in her left chest receding. Cue-ball backed off as she got to her knees.
“Too slow. Go to couch now!”
Outside, Groot must’ve heard the shout. He began barking again.
She looked toward the couch. And the coffee table. Interesting things he couldn’t know about there. One last chance.
On the TV, O’Toole / Lawrence was undergoing his own trials, captured and raped by the Turks. She was reminded of another line from the film. One she’d missed during her nap. “Certainly it hurts… The trick is not minding that it hurts.”
She groped her way back onto the couch, collapsed, and twisted painfully into a half-slumped position, a negotiation between the necessity of breathing and the pain in her chest. Her hand was only inches from the coffee table drawer. The drawer with the bear spray. The drawer that sometimes stuck a little.
She eyed Cue-ball, taking more short, shallow breaths. “What do you want?”
Cue-ball blinked, his gun still trained on her. She had a moment to contemplate the dark black hole of the barrel, death staring at her. Then Cue-ball was talking again and she forgot about the gun because focusing on the gun wasn’t going to keep her alive.
He pulled a zip-lock bag out of his pocket and threw it onto the coffee table. It was filled with pills—rounded blue-green tablets, fentanyl or carfentanil—or rat poison, for all Keller knew.
A rough date, but he brought desert.
Cue-ball backed away but the gun never wavered. His smile was a cold sculpture. He gestured at the bag.
“Take.”
Keller eyed the bag, the pills inside it, looked back at Cue-ball. “You first.”
Cue-ball tilted his head, examining her. She was acutely aware of her exposed legs, her belly where the T-shirt rode up.
“How this works,” Cue-ball said, “is you eat some pills. Or I do bad things to you. My choice would be you are overdose. Understand?” His smile was back, as if he were trying to sell her a better cellular plan. Bonus minutes if you eat all the pills at once.
She pondered the irony of getting what you wished for.
The no-more-nightmares thing doesn’t look quite so tempting now, huh?
She looked at the tablets again. If she took one and they were average strength, she’d start feeling something in about five minutes. Cool Smooth. Sweet lassitude. But Cue-ball wouldn’t stop at feeding her one. He seemed more interested in unconsciousness and apnea and death.
It was tempting to start babbling. “You don’t have to do this. Please let me go. It’s not right.” But pain and fear and adrenalin fatigue, plus maybe some remnants of the wine, were conspiring to numb her out a little, and she knew babbling wouldn’t help anyway.
“You work for Hunt, is that right?”
No answer, but not one iota of surprise in his face either. He moved forward, standing over her, pointing the gun at the zip-lock bag.
“Take one. It will feel good.” When she hesitated, he sighed and added, “Second option, I shoot you. No problem for me. My choice would be, you take pills. Is better for newspapers this way.” His smile slipped and he glanced at her laptop. “But if not? I will shoot you in belly, steal computer so looks like burglar. Understand?”
“You do work for Hunt, though, don’t you?”
“This is not James Bond, bitch. I don’t tell you secret plans… And you don’t escape.”
“But you do work for him.”
He sneered at her. “You get in way of things. Not your fault.”
“Your boss is a pedophile,” Keller persisted.
Cue-ball raised an eyebrow but remained impassive. “I am practical man. Take pill now, please. You feel better. I promise.”
She had been working saliva up in her mouth while he spoke and now she spat at him, was gratified to see the slick wetness land squarely on his cheek.
His smile disappeared and he pulled back the hand holding the pistol to strike her. She flinched and managed to fall between the couch and coffee table, and at the last second Cue-ball hesitated with his follow-through.
Her hand was only inches from the drawer with the bear spray, but this would be complicated. The bear spray would not be enough, nor would the combat moves learned in three or four months of spotty attendance at a Judo class in her teens. Hit him with her computer? A chair? No choice but to improvise.
“Take pill now.” He dug into the bag and handed her one of the pills. A crude-looking round thing, likely made in someone’s basement using raw drug smuggled up from Mexico or China. “Take pill now or I hurt you.”
She smelled tobacco on his clothes and breath, thick and cloying. He was far too close. She would never get the drawer open in time.
Hand trembling, she reached out and took the pill.
“In your mouth now.” His grin was back.
“You’re a pedophile, too, huh?”
That took care of the grin. His face darkened and he pressed the gun against her forehead. “Swallow, bitch.”
She put the pill in her mouth. It was surprisingly cold and tasted of salt.
“Swallow. Last time I ask.”
She met his gaze and saw nothing but truth in the cold eyes. She swallowed.
“Very good.” He patted her head as if she were an obedient child and held out another pill.
She took it and swallowed it as well. Cue-ball handed her a third.
This was no good. In a few minutes, she’d begin to feel euphoric. Not long after that, she’d go unconscious and stop breathing. She needed to make him move back.
“Couldn’t get it up for a woman, I guess?”
He frowned. “What?”
“Your dick. Your tiny little dick.” That was ballsy. Or dicksy, maybe. The narcotic was already tickling at her brain.
Holy crap, that was fast.
But she went with it. “Couldn’t get it hard for a real woman.”
“Oh, you think?” He grabbed at his crotch with his free hand. “Maybe I show you?”
“Don’t embarrass yourself.” She swallowed the third pill. “I know it’s tough for baby-fuckers to get
it up with a real—”
He lashed out, smashing his gun against the left side of her face, knocking her head hard against the coffee table. It was more shocking than painful, but stars danced in front of her eyes and she tasted blood. Her lip was split.
Not going to look like an overdose now.
But Cue-ball didn’t seem to care about that. As she shook her head to stave off dizziness, he stepped back, his eyes hooded and his mouth a tight line.
“Yes, I like fucking little sluts. Hunt’s little princesses. Like your little Indian princess friend.”
Robin. They found her. My fault. Should’ve told Decker everything.
But he’d said “princesses.” Palace. Palace Hunt? She could hardly ask him what it meant now.
“You should have taken pills, bitch.” He placed his gun on the side table behind him, then reached to unbuckle his pants.
That’s better.
She took a deep breath against the pain in her ribs and blinked hard, her muscles tensing. When his belt fell apart and he unzipped his pants, she grabbed for the drawer handle, ignoring the sharpening pain in her chest. The drawer stuck as she jerked at it frantically, and Cue-ball looked up, his mouth a crooked, puzzled line.
Another hard pull and the drawer flew open. She dug inside, pushing past coasters and pens, her hand closing around the metal cylinder of bear spray.
Pants sagging around his hips, Cue-ball hesitated, seemingly unable to decide if he should first zip up or grab his gun.
Keller surged to her feet, raising the bear spray as she stepped toward him, though every part of her screamed for her run instead.
No. This is your only chance.
Even if she made it out the door now, it would be a contest between bullet and narcotic at this point and she would lose either way. Quickly, too. She felt slow and her senses were fuzzy. Not just the blow to the head—the drug, in her bloodstream. Very potent.
Cue-ball made his decision, grabbing for his gun as his pants fell to his knees. Keller fumbled with the safety cover on the bear spray, her fingers clumsy. As Cue-ball’s hand closed around the pistol, the cover ripped free and she raised the canister toward his face and pressed the actuator. A jet of foggy liquid erupted from the nozzle straight into his eyes.
He shrieked and dropped the gun, both hands coming up to claw at his face. Her eyes were stinging, too, and the sharp smell of capsicum was in her sinuses, but she kept spraying, angling the jet into his open mouth.
He turned away from the pain, lashing out blindly at her. She backed out of his reach but her legs felt mushy, the narcotic digging into her brain. Her eyes were watering now, her sinuses raging.
Falling to his knees, Cue-ball swore and rubbed savagely at his eyes. In a second, she knew he would realize he ought to be focusing on retrieving his gun, and shortly after that she would have a bullet in her head. She dropped the bear spray, stumbled around him, and bent to grab the pistol, but he sensed the movement and snared her ankle in one of his fat hands, yanking hard.
She slammed to the ground, her cracked rib protesting in agony, but even through the pain in her chest and the capsaicin like needles in her eyes, a horrifying somnolence was creeping over her.
You’re going to pass out and he’s going to kill you.
She fought to hold on to her senses as Cue-ball shifted his body weight over her legs, throwing a hard punch at her belly that knocked the wind out of her. Breathless, through eyes blurred with tears, she groped for the gun.
“Going to kill you fucking slow, bitch.” He threw a second punch into her belly and the last of her breath went out of her.
Her hand fell against the pistol.
Arm trembling, her breath gone and her brain starving for oxygen, she closed her hand around the pistol’s hilt.
“Fucking slut, you’ll—”
She brought the gun up and fired blindly, the gunshot an explosion, impossibly loud in her ears.
Cue-ball collapsed over top of her and the harsh, coppery scent of blood was suddenly in the air, mixing with the acrid smell of propellant and the lingering odour of capsaicin. Keller felt warm wetness on her belly and realized with a grindhouse mix of horror and relief that it was Cue-ball’s blood.
Half blind with tears, she writhed to get out from under his slack body, the pain in her chest a knife helping to keep her conscious. The gun fell out of her hand, but that was all right. She didn’t hear breathing or any other sound, except Groot… The dog was going mad, barking and howling outside.
Strength fading, she managed to wriggle out from beneath Cue-ball and then flopped onto her back, taking deep shuddering breaths, blinking hard. She pulled up her shirt and wiped it across her face and could see a little clearer.
Cue-ball lay semi-prone on the carpet, his blood already a wide stain around his head. The bullet had entered his right eye and exited the back of his head in a splatter of gore and fleshy ribbons of brain matter, leaving her front door and the wall around it decorated in a pastiche of blood spray.
She felt her gorge rise and rolled onto her hands and knees just in time. Vomit spewed out of her and she heaved and gasped, crying as her stomach emptied.
Cleaning all this up is going to be a bitch.
Pure bravado. She’d killed two men in less than six months. Her father had never even drawn his service weapon on the job.
Think about that later. You’ve got lots left to do. You’re not done by a long shot.
Through teary eyes, she peered at the vomit on the floor. Sure enough, the three pills she’d swallowed were among the mess on the carpet, but two of the tablets were about half their original size. Some significant amount of opioid had made it into her system and she could feel it tugging at her, hard, pulling her out into a stormy sea to drown.
Choices to be made now.
She could dial 9-1-1, but there was no reason to suspect her phone would work any better now than ten minutes earlier, and she was riding the ripe ragged edge of unconsciousness and might easily pass out any second.
So, really only one choice.
She crawled down the hallway toward the bathroom, fighting to stay awake. The walls around her had taken on an indistinct cottony aspect and the floor was twisting and bucking slowly beneath her, a slow-motion earthquake.
On some far off, intellectually detached island, she knew she must be hypotensive, her blood pressure dropping with every second, but she couldn’t seem to recall why that might be important anymore. She was so sleepy… If she just lay down, maybe it would come to her.
Bathroom. Focus. Move.
She groped for the doorway of the bathroom and collapsed halfway through. Again her rib protested, but the tiled floor was cool and soothing against her cheek. Just a tiny nap…
No.
She rolled onto her left side, putting all her weight on the cracked rib until the pain in her side spiked and dragged her back from unconsciousness. Blinking hard against fresh tears, she hauled herself forward and tugged open the bottom drawer of the vanity, then got her hands around one of the syringes she kept in there and drew it out.
She’d never gotten around to tossing the Narcan she’d stockpiled, never truly trusted that she was done with eating tiny pieces of death.
Good thing I’m such a lousy housekeeper.
She rolled onto her back, staring up at the syringe. Four milligrams of naloxone. Ten times a normal dose, and at ten millilitres, too much volume for an intramuscular injection. No one gave addicts this much, but Narcan was a supremely benign drug. Side effects were rare and Keller had known months ago when she prepared the syringes that she’d never get a second chance at saving herself. If she OD’d, she’d have one shot.
Like now.
The fentanyl was dug deep into her now and unconsciousness was rushing in around her like a rising tide.
Cool Smooth. She laughed softly. It felt sooo good to be back in this warm, indistinct velveteen blanket, shielded from everything the world could throw at her.
Her right arm drifted up, almost of its own accord, nearly weightless. Sensation had ebbed out of her fingers and she nearly dropped the syringe, but she managed somehow to bring it to her lips, clenching her teeth around the plastic tip covering the needle and yanking it free.
Her arm fell back to the floor and she sighed, breathing what seemed like every last molecule of oxygen out of her lungs.
So peaceful here.
She willed herself to take a long, deep breath, forced her eyes open wide, and noticed a dead fly in the light fixture above her.
Have to do something about that, sometime.
She hefted the syringe and stabbed it into her leg, pushing down hard on the plunger. There was hardly any pain.
And then the narcotic took her and she closed her eyes and there was no pain at all.
Sixty-Nine
0108 hrs
Snow flurries began falling as Decker climbed into his car outside Major Crimes, on his way back to Herzog’s house for another look around the place, and he remembered the weather channel had promised a pretty impressive storm coming in from the west.
Murder scenes sometimes had a different vibe at night. There might be cars parked in places they wouldn’t be in the day. He could see which neighbours kept blinds open, who was walking dogs, if taxis or Ubers were coming and going. Sometimes all it took was one new piece of information.
And strangely enough, criminals revisiting crime scenes wasn’t just something out of the movies. Killers sometimes felt reassured by seeing that police had departed the scene, thought that started a kind of countdown to some random time after which they thought they were in the clear. Sex killers often revisited the scenes of their murders to masturbate. “A fucking thrill like no other” one of them had told Decker, a wide grin on his face, like he was sharing an off-colour story of conquest with one of his buddies at the bar.
So, Decker went back to crime scenes too.
Just not right then, it seemed.
When his phone pinged, he was tempted to ignore the text. Anyone on the team would phone him if something urgent came up. The message—Sanders’s number—read, Not so fast. He looked up to see her waving from a second-floor window, shaking her head.
The Beast in the Bone Page 30
