The Postcard Killers - James Patterson [93]
Dessie staggered away and leaned against one of the buses. Jacob rushed at Malcolm with his pistol raised.
“Get on your knees, hands above your head!” he shouted at the top of his voice.
He was screaming to make himself heard above the ringing in his own ears, but Malcolm seemed not to hear him. The man sank down beside his sister’s body and took her in his arms. With a wild howl, he rocked Sylvia back and forth, back and forth, completely deaf to the uproar around them.
Jacob went up to him, weapon aimed at his chest.
He fished out the handcuffs from under the belt of his trousers with one hand as he tried to make contact with the dazed man.
“Malcolm Rudolph — the police are on their way. Put the body down. Get on your knees. Hands behind your head!”
The howling subsided. Malcolm’s shoulders slumped. He laid his sister’s body gently on the asphalt.
Jacob saw that he had hit her between the eyes, just above them in the forehead. The entry wound gaped red, and the woman’s eyes stared blindly at the sky. The back of her head had been blown away.
“You killed her,” Malcolm said. His arms hung by his sides. His back was bent like an old man’s. “You killed my Sylvia.”
“You and your sister killed my daughter,” Jacob said.
He opened the handcuffs and leaned down to secure Malcolm Rudolph’s arms behind his back.
From this angle, Sylvia’s dead eyes seemed to be watching him.
He didn’t see the knife coming.
In a fast move, the brother leapt up and stabbed the knife toward Jacob’s chest. Instinctively, Jacob shifted a few inches to the right.
The blade cut through the outside and lining of his suede jacket, biting into skin and sinew and muscle. Then it tore veins and arteries and lung tissue.
Jacob heard someone scream, a woman screaming.
He felt warm blood pulsing out of his body and saw the world spin and turn sideways, as if he could fall right off it. A shot rang out, the echo ringing through his head.
The killer in front of him sank to the ground with his hands over his stomach.
Then someone was holding him, laying him on the ground, tearing his shirt away.
It was Dessie, his Dessie. No, it was Kimmy, his Kimmy. Of course it was!
“Kimmy,” Jacob whispered. “I knew you’d come back.”
Epilogue
Chapter 139
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, USA
THE WIND CARRIED WITH it the smell of the sea and also exhaust fumes from Leif Ericson Drive. It made the leaves above his head rustle, the electrical wires sing.
Jacob was sitting on the porch outside his small house, watching the boys from the neighborhood play baseball on the patch of grass on the other side of the street.
The heat and extreme humidity had finally broken, leaving a hint of autumn behind it.
The sun was no longer high in the sky, and the leafy trees threw deep shadows along the street.
His lung had healed. The pain in his arm was almost gone. The wound had started to itch instead. Sometimes he thought that was worse.
He looked down toward Shore Road.
Still no taxi.
He pulled at the shoulder sling in irritation.
Next week he could take it off.
They said he must have had a guardian angel.
The little town on the Arctic Circle where his lung had been punctured and his arm almost sliced off had had no hospital, but there had been a local health center with an emergency room and a Hungarian doctor who specialized in microsurgery. The Hungarian had stitched his muscles and blood vessels together while they emptied the center’s supply of blood plasma into his body, and somehow he had survived.
Malcolm Rudolph hadn’t been so lucky.
Jacob’s wild shot had hit his liver. The killer bled to death in the helicopter ambulance. Good riddance to him, and his sister, too. Horrifying bastards.
When Jacob woke up and remembered what had happened, he started to prepare himself to face the Swedish judicial system. He assumed that he would get away with the actual shots. After all, Gabriella had heard the whole sequence of events over Dessie’s phone. It was obvious that he had fired only in self-defense.
On the other