Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels)

by J. A. Konrath

  He rummaged through a kitchen drawer and pulled out a knife. A smile snaked over his lips. “Ah, this’ll do.” He slipped the sharp blade between the cups of my bra and sawed upward. The honed steel sliced elastic and lace. My bra flapped open and cool air rushed over my skin.

  He took a nipple between thumb and forefinger and pinched hard.

  Another wave of sweat bloomed over my skin from the pain, but I stared back at him as if I didn’t feel a thing.

  He gave the other breast the same bruising treatment. “Your nips are erect. You enjoying this, babe?”

  “Sure, Cory,” I said, laying the sarcasm on thick. “I’m thinking of all the things I want to do to you.”

  He gave me a big-ass grin, as if he actually believed those things might bring him pleasure…or involve sex of any kind. “Do you know what I’m going to do after I fuck you?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re dying to tell me.”

  He scraped the flat of the knife blade against one breast. “I’ll cut off your nipples first. Then your whole tits. Then I might just fuck you again before I slit you down the middle.” His nostrils flared. His scalp pinked under the short, graying stubble. He unbuckled his belt and lowered his fly.

  “Cory…”

  “I’m busy, Di.” Leaving his jeans gaping open, he spun around to the girl. “Watch the door.”

  She glanced at me, then down at Cory’s pants. A flush crept up her neck and blazed in her cheeks. Her lips tightened into a hard knot.

  I locked eyes with her, then forced myself to look at Cory. “Come on, big boy,” I said. “Give it to me.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I know you want it, bitch.”

  Turning his back on Di, he started on my jeans.

  With Cory hulking over me, I heard the snapping hum before I realized the girl had moved.

  Cory lurched forward, his back arching, a loud growl grounding out between clenched teeth. Tendons stood out in his neck.

  Di kept the stun gun’s juice going.

  He stumbled forward, hitting the counter. When she finally relented, he collapsed.

  She stared down at the weapon, as if suddenly realizing what she was doing. Jerking her hand back, she let it clatter to the floor. She stared at him for a few seconds, as if she wasn’t sure what she was seeing, then tears swamped her eyes, and she covered her face with her hands.

  “It’s OK, Di. It’s OK.” The situation was ridiculous. Here I was strapped down, half-undressed and unable to move, and I was trying to soothe this confused, jealous girl who’d just zapped her boyfriend and more than likely wanted me dead.

  She lowered her hands, sniffing, her thick lashes spiked with tears. “Aw, Christ, he’s going to be so mad when he wakes up.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “What the hell do you know?”

  “I was in your place, remember? I used to be you.”

  She glared at me, as if she remembered far too well and wanted to make me pay for that sin.

  I pushed ahead anyway, taking a chance. “I can help you get away from him. All you have to do is cut these ties.”

  “Get away from him?” She shook her head. “You just want me to get away so you can have him yourself.”

  “Trust me, that’s not it.”

  “Like I would believe anything you say. I should just kill you.”

  “Cory won’t like that, and you know it.”

  Her lower lip trembled.

  If she didn’t want to escape Cory, there wasn’t much I could do. Even if I could convince her to leave, she’d likely find her way back to him. And when she did, he would make her suffer for it. “Listen, if you free my hands, you can say it was my fault. Tell him that I stunned him.”

  She shook her head and sniffed. “He knows you didn’t have the thing.”

  “Stun guns cause something called critical response amnesia. He won’t remember anything from the thirty seconds or so before the attack.”

  My statement wasn’t exactly true. While some people experienced amnesia, it was far from all and generally didn’t encompass that much time. But at fourteen, I doubted Di was well versed in such things; at least I hoped not. And since she needed a way out, I hoped desperation would override skepticism.

  “He won’t know it was you who pulled the trigger.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself as if she was cold. But although her body language suggested she was closed off, I could see her mind working.

  I pressed on. “If you help me get out of here, when he wakes up, you can tell him I stunned him and got away. He won’t blame you, and I’ll be gone. You can have him to yourself. All you have to do is cut the zip ties on my wrists.”

  She looked at my hands, then at Cory.

  “Hurry. He’ll be waking soon. Then it will be too late.”

  She took a step closer. The fact that she didn’t pick up the stun gun or the knife Cory had dropped and use them on me seemed encouraging, but the hate in her eyes hadn’t faded. “He’ll keep looking for you,” she said.

  “Let me worry about that.”

  She shook her head. “He always talks about you.”

  “That’s only because he’s been in prison so long, and I helped put him there. The more he gets to know you, the more opportunities he has to see how perfect you are for each other…he’ll forget me.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  She nodded, as if trying to talk herself into swallowing the bullshit I was feeding her.

  “It’ll work out, Di. I’ll make sure he doesn’t find me again. I’ll disappear and you two can be together.”

  She held out her hands, palms up. “I don’t have anything to cut the ties.”

  “Check the drawers.”

  She opened drawers and raked through their contents. Finally she held up a pair of utility scissors.

  “That should do it,” I encouraged.

  Below me, Cory groaned.

  The girl froze.

  “Hurry,” I whispered.

  The sound of my voice seemed to snap her out of her paralysis. She slipped the scissors’ blade under the tie binding my left wrist and cut.

  Needles of pain raced through my fingers. I pulled my arm free of the board and moved my hand, willing the blood to return. Then I took the scissors from her. My grip was weak and it took me several seconds to cut my other hand free.

  “What the hell is going on?” Cory’s words were sluggish, but the anger behind them rang loud and clear.

  Blood tingled through my right hand. I clawed at the Velcro straps pinning my head and shoulders to the backboard.

  “Di?” he bellowed again.

  She stared at me with wide eyes.

  I ripped the straps free and struggled to sit. My neck was still immobilized in the cervical brace. I hit my head on the overhead cabinet before I could scramble upright.

  “Di? I’ll fucking kill—”

  I swung off the counter and landed on him, straddling his body.

  He tried to bring his hands up, to grip the collar, to fight me off, but he was still recovering from the stun, and his moves were clumsy and pathetic.

  I gripped his skull in my hands. I’d practiced the move many times, and I barely had to think. I gave a hard twist and felt his neck pop.

  He slumped back against the cabinets. His hands spasmed slightly before falling limp by his sides.

  “Cory!” Di screamed. “What did you do to him?”

  I climbed off his body and took off the cervical collar encasing my neck. I tossed it to the floor and started out of the kitchen.

  Di blocked my path. She held the scissors up in front of her, brandishing the blade like a knife.

  “Put the scissors down, Di.”

  “You killed him! You killed Cory!”

  “I just did you the biggest favor or your life. Someday you’ll thank me.”

  “No!” She flew at me, the scissors leading the way.

  I dodged the blades and answered w
ith a solid right cross to the jaw.

  Di hit the table and crumpled to the floor beside Kaufmann. I hesitated for only a second and then walked from the kitchen without looking back.

  “Drugs are tools,” The Instructor said. “Like any tool, they can be beneficial, or deadly. To know the effects these tools will have on your body, your training will require you to sample a wide variety of them. So get ready to get high with your Uncle Sam.”

  My thoughts were scrambled eggs, my fragile emotional state further degraded by pain, exhaustion, and an insurmountable list of things I had to do. Add in the norepinephrine I’d been injected with, and I was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

  Or perhaps it already had.

  Not that it mattered. I couldn’t let grief and helplessness overwhelm me again. When I’d lost Kaufmann, I’d wanted to die. Cory’s girl had made me realize I couldn’t allow myself that luxury. Things needed to be set right, and I was the only one who could do it.

  It didn’t take long to find one of Hammett’s bras tucked in the back of Victor’s drawer. I pulled it on, along with a long-sleeved tee, and added the jacket I’d worn to meet The Instructor. The yellow bag of cash was still tucked in the back of the closet. I shouldered it and wiped down everything in the apartment that I or Hammett might have touched, then called 911 to report a multiple murder and left.

  I took the stairs to the parking garage. The Instructor’s car was just where I’d left it, but the man himself was gone. I’d given him a big enough dose of amobarbital to still be asleep, so either Hammett had taken him or he’d had backup that I’d missed.

  The underground garage was dank and cool, chilling my damp hair and the new sheen of drug-sweat that was covering my body like an oily shroud. After checking the car over, I opened the door and slid behind the wheel. I reached under the seat. The Instructor’s computer was still there, so I fished it out it and woke it from sleep.

  Blips flickered to life on the touch screen. This time, an additional speck of light moved up Lake Shore Drive on her way to the John Hancock Center.

  Hammett was smart. It would take her a while to discover my hiding place, but eventually she’d find the transceiver. The same thing that had hamstringed me could work both ways: we both had trackers implanted in us. If she did get my cell phone, I’d still have a chance to figure out what she was planning to do with it and stop her.

  I focused on the blip north of Chicago in the ritzy suburb of Lake Forest. I’d lost Kaufmann, been set up by Victor, and had misplaced The Instructor. The only other person I had ties to in this world was Jacob.

  Jacob, who was under siege.

  I needed a weapon.

  Though there were more Stretchers health clubs in the area with guns stashed in the lockers, I was thinking of something with a little more oomph. And I knew just where to get it. But before I could get anything, I needed to get my head straight. And the only way to do that was to neutralize the shit in my system.

  I started the car and headed south. Like many large cities, the line between affluence and poverty was often just a block. I followed West Cermak to South Martin Luther King Drive, drove past Washington Park and the adjacent University of Chicago, and then left onto Sixty-Third. It took five minutes of circling the area before I found my first dealer.

  A black teen, in a 4XL white tee, wearing baggy jeans that would be around his ankles if he didn’t keep holding them up with his free hand. He had that thousand-mile stare of someone who had seen combat, and perhaps this kid had. I parked ahead of him, grabbed some bills from my bag, got out of the car, and approached slowly with my hands at my sides. He probably had eyes on the street, covering him, and sure enough I spotted a shorty—a child no more than eight years old and dressed the same way. He was on his cell phone, no doubt talking about the white woman approaching.

  Though I’d never bought drugs in this neighborhood before, I was shaky, and no doubt looked strung out, which meant I shouldn’t arouse suspicion.

  “Coke,” I said, stopping two feet away from him. “Blow or crack, I don’t care.”

  “Well, what we got here?” He made a show of looking me up and down while he whistled through his teeth, showing me a gold grille. “You lost, little girl?”

  I blew a stiff breath out of my nostrils. This should be a simple transaction. I had money. He had product. Let’s make a deal. “You deaf, little boy? I want to buy cocaine. That’s the reason you stand here all day, right?”

  In a life undoubtedly plagued by bad choices, this dealer added one more. He decided to mess with me.

  “You look like you need it bad, ho. Maybe I make you suck my cock for it.”

  “Sorry, I already blew a sociopath today. One’s my limit.”

  “Then maybe you don’ get no rock.”

  “I have money,” I said, fighting the tremor in my voice. “Sell me something.”

  “Then get on yo knees, bitch.”

  “I have a better idea.”

  My palm hit him right in the upper lip, breaking both his nose and his fourteen-karat dental appliance. As he staggered back, I whipped a leg around, caught him on the side of the head, and dropped him to the street. His skull bounced on the asphalt in a way that didn’t look healthy. The shorty watching took off in a run, and I squatted and searched the dealer’s pockets, patting him down, rifling through nickel bags of weed, balloons of heroin, and finally a vial of crack and a glass cigarette pipe. Even bleeding like a stuck pig and with a lump on his head big enough to rappel from, homeboy made a half-assed attempt to grab my wrist. He received a broken arm for his efforts.

  “Got a lighter?” I asked him.

  “B…back…p…p…pocket.”

  I dug it out, tossed a crumpled twenty-dollar bill onto his crying face, and hurried back to my car. When I was a good ten blocks away, I pulled into a shopping center and prepared my fix.

  During training, I’d sampled a wide variety of drugs. The human body was a complicated machine and could be made to run better, or worse, with the right combination of substances. I tapped the crack rocks out of the vial and into the end of the glass tube. Then I used the lighter to heat them to the melting point and quickly sucked in the vapor they emitted.

  The effect was instantaneous. But rather than the euphoria normally associated with narcotics, instead I got quick relief from the norepinephrine that was causing havoc in my system. Cocaine blocked neurotransmitter receptors, preventing the reuptake of catecholamine. As a result, the shakes stopped, and I was able to concentrate for the first time in what felt like hours.

  I needed one hundred percent of my focus for what I had to do next.

  “Everyone is the enemy. You can put your trust in your handler, and in God, and that’s it. You may need to make allies to complete a mission, but these relationships should be abandoned as soon as the mission ends. Trust no one.”

  I circled the block two times where my apartment building was located, the first in the car, and the second on foot after parking next to a fire hydrant. I didn’t see any signs of cops or enemy combatants. My tablet showed no blinking dots in the vicinity.

  Maybe I’d get lucky for the first time today and be able to get what I needed from my place without having to fight for my life.

  As the sun dipped into the west, it grew cooler. My senses weren’t functioning at peak level due to all the crap still in my system, but the familiar smells of my neighborhood were somewhat reassuring. I did a brisk reconnoiter of my building, then ducked into the alley and discreetly counted bricks in the wall until I reached twenty-five across and six up. The mortar there was actually a loose mixture of sand and clay, and hidden between bricks was a spare key. I used this to open the back door and paused before entering.

  The building felt normal. No unusual sounds or scents. Not the hotbed of activity it must have been earlier. I padded in softly, making sure the door didn’t slam, stopping every few steps to listen. The elevator was out of service, yellow police tape stretched ac
ross it. I slipped into the stairwell and climbed quickly, staying on the balls of my feet. When I reached my floor, I was slightly winded and had broken out in a good, healthy sweat. So far so good.

  More police tape across the elevator, the doors still bent outward from the explosion. The spot where I’d killed the hit man had been cleaned. No chalk outline. That only happened in old movies. I thought back to the DOD report on him. Former KGB. Victor spoke flawless Russian with a native-born Pomor dialect, so I guessed there was probably a connection. This operation may have been too big for Hammett, and she’d brought in some hired help. Or worse, she had sided with the enemy. I didn’t want to know what she’d promised those assholes in return for their cooperation. Those ex-KGB goons were bad news.

  My apartment door was closed, the wall next to it still pocked with bullet holes. I crept up silently, placed an ear to the door, and when I heard nothing out of the ordinary I slipped the key in and entered.

  I closed the door behind me, took two steps into my living room, and immediately all the hair stood up on my forearms. It was my proximity sense telling me I wasn’t alone in the apartment.

  I spun, raising my fists, falling into a fighting stance, and found myself staring at a woman with a gun.

  But this one, surprisingly, didn’t look like me. She was older, midforties, my size, long brown hair, a strong chin. Although her clothes were designer and her shoes expensive, I immediately made her as a cop, and a good cop at that. Calm and in control, with an assured, professional aura about her. As usual my mouth went dry, as it did whenever someone pointed a firearm at me, and I had to force myself to stand still.

  “Relax,” she said. “I’m one of the good guys.”

  I didn’t relax. Instead I found myself studying her posture, looking for an opening.

  “You’re calling yourself Carmen Sawyer,” the cop continued. “I’m Lieutenant Daniels, homicide. Are you armed?”

  Not yet “I don’t want to shoot you, Carmen. But you’re making me uncomfortable the way you’re sizing me up, and I wouldn’t want to get nervous and accidentally pull the trigger, which, as you see, is fully cocked. So please answer me. Are you armed?”