Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [84]
He stood and yawned.
“See, Jeanine, women, even wives, come and go, but friends are forever. Best friends, anyway. We were in the Rangers together. When he needed someone to watch his back, I was the one he called. I’ll admit that he really wasn’t too happy with me when he saw you in New York. But he finally relented and gave me a second chance to take you out. I almost had you at your hotel room, too.”
The Jump Killer walked to the door and opened it.
“Don’t worry, though. I’m not going to blow it this time. When these boys are finished with you, before your burial at sea, I’m going to put two bullets in the back of your head to make sure you stay dead. Once and for all.”
Chapter 107
THE DOOR CLOSED. A quotation popped into my head as the electric guitar riffed between hip-hop bass thumps next door.
The hard way is the only way.
Whether it was from a writer or the Bible, I couldn’t quite recall. All I remembered was that I never understood it. Why would someone choose for things to be hard?
But as I lay there, my face drenched with tears, an ironlike fear clenching every sinew of my body, I finally knew what it meant.
It meant there were no shortcuts. You had to pay for things. Sometimes, it was your job to go down no matter how unfair things were. Meeting Peter had allowed me to avoid my fate for killing Ramón Peña, at least up until now. Today I was going to pay for that crime with interest.
I remembered how shocked I’d been when I’d seen how resigned to die Justin Harris had been. I wasn’t shocked anymore.
Someone knocked on the door.
But instead of stiffening with a soldierly stoicism like Justin, I went into a full-body twinge of revulsion and horror. My tendons felt like they were about to pop.
“Hola!” said a jolly whisper as the door opened.
The man who stepped in looked more French than Mexican. He was swarthy and tall and lean with long, lustrous shoulder-length black hair. A cigar jutted from his stubbled jaw. In his tailored pinstripe suit coat, an open-throated banker’s shirt, and nice jeans, he looked European, a sophisticate, a rich ne’er-do-well dandy ready for a night on the town.
When he took off his suit coat, I saw that he wore a pearl-handled automatic in a shoulder rig. He smiled at me from around his cigar as he selected a bottle and glass from the bar and poured himself a tall drink of whiskey. He pointed to the drink and then at me in a gallant gesture, wondering if I wanted one.
The handcuffs started click-clacking off the wood as I started to shake.
He shrugged his shoulders in an oh-well gesture. Then he puffed elaborately on his cigar, blew smoke up at the coffered ceiling, and approached the bed.
He was sitting at the foot, pulling off one of his cowboy boots, when there was a noise over the loud music.
It was the wail of an air horn above deck.
Next door, the volume quit as men shushed one another, listening.
“This is the United States Coast Guard!” came the order from a bullhorn. “No one move!”
Two gunshots blasted one right after the other above us. There was a surprised yell in Spanish followed quickly by a splash.
“Don’t move! We will shoot! Don’t move!” the bullhorn speaker said.
There was some more gunfire, and the long-haired man at the end of the bed looked up in shock as running footsteps passed directly overhead.
One boot on, one boot off, his cigar in his mouth and his automatic out, he clopped to the door. He opened it. Then I screamed as he pulled the trigger.
There were more shots and yelling as someone returned fire. A hunk of paneled wood blew out of the wall beside the drug dealer’s head. Then the gun suddenly fell from his hand. The expression on the man’s face was one of curiosity as he looked down at his blood-soaked banker