FORTY-THREE
All four car doors popped open. The two men on the passenger side stepped out first. In the moonlight she could see that it was Juan and Pedro.
Angela, gun in hand, was already in a near trance, the same as when she practiced with her grandfather’s target. She had put thousands of rounds into that steel triangle. Tens of thousands of rounds. Hundreds of thousands of rounds. That triangle haunted her dreams.
An ear-to-ear grin grew on Pedro’s face. “Ah, I see the American whore is naked and eager to—”
She put a round through the center of his face, stopping him cold.
The bullet entered through the soft area of that triangle formed by the points between the two eyes and tip of the nose, the triangle her grandfather had told her about when she was younger and had her practice hitting.
The bullet ricocheted around inside Pedro’s skull, turning his brain to pulp and instantly ceasing all neurological function. He dropped where he stood before he had been able to complete the sentence. The way he went down, it looked as if his bones had dissolved.
Even as Pedro was still falling, Juan pulled a knife and screamed some sort of battle cry in Spanish that she didn’t understand.
He charged for the porch. Angela was in no hurry. Her aim had locked on to him. He was that target, wobbling, moving, swaying.
Angela shot him between the eyes. He fell dead at her feet.
Even as the sounds of the two shots were still ringing through the night air, and the two men were hitting the ground, the other two men realized they were in trouble and slammed their doors shut. The driver threw it into gear and matted the gas pedal. Wheels spinning, the car reeled around, throwing up a cloud of dust as it raced back down the driveway and into the darkness.
Angela didn’t shoot at the escaping car. She didn’t think a .22 bullet would penetrate the metal of the car reliably enough to kill the driver. A shot through glass at an angle would deflect a bullet. She doubted that the small-caliber slug would blow out a spinning tire. Shooting at the car would be little more than random shots in the dark. She didn’t like low-probability shots.
Besides, she didn’t want the shot to be luck. She wanted to look into their eyes when they died. She wanted her face to be the last thing they saw as they knew they were an instant away from death.
Angela’s immediate urge was to go after the two men, but she was naked. By the time she threw on some clothes and grabbed the keys to her truck, she knew they would be long gone and she would be unlikely to find them. It would be a series of choices—left or right—and in the end they would probably be gone.
She would find them, and when she did, she would kill them, just as she had promised that night in that filthy room on the greasy moving pad. They were not going to get away. They had come back to kill her. They were not going to give up. Neither was she.
The most important issue at the moment was the two dead guys in her front yard and the car of the now officially missing Assistant District Attorney John Babington sitting in front of her house.
She believed that she knew generally where she could find the other two men. She thought they were up to something in the old industrial area, so they weren’t likely to leave town. They weren’t going anywhere for now.
She had been out to the deserted industrial area many times, looking for them, so far with no luck. But they were still out there, somewhere. She knew they were. The fact that they had just shown up at her door to finish the job they had started that night proved it. She would find them sooner or later. And if they showed up at her house again, all the better.
Angela squatted down beside the two dead men. Her address was listed everywhere as a box at Mike’s Mail Service. The address of her house was not listed anywhere or easy to find. They had tortured Barry until he told them where she lived. She didn’t blame him for talking. In fact, she wished he had told them what they wanted to know before he had been so badly hurt.
Anyone was going to talk under torture. Holding out during prolonged torture wasn’t going to accomplish anything, because they would give it up in the end anyway. She knew that well enough.
Angela found a knife on Pedro. It was inside a sheath tucked down in his pants. It was a serious combat knife. It was big enough to decapitate someone. Other than that, he didn’t have so much as pocket change. No ID, no keys, no nothing. The only thing in his pockets was some lint.
Juan’s knife was still in his fist where he had fallen on the steps. It was the same kind of combat knife as Pedro’s.
His fist was still clenched around the handle from that instant when his brain function ceased. A person who died that fast couldn’t even unclench their fist. They couldn’t even pull the trigger if they had a gun in their hand.
He didn’t have anything in his pockets, either. The only way she knew the men’s names was because they had used them when they had been raping and beating her. They had not expected her to leave that abandoned building alive.
Neither one looked so smug, now. Since they had both died instantly when the bullets had shut down their brain function, each man’s eyes were open, staring, in death, looking up at her. She smiled back at them.
Angela knew that moving dead men was damn near impossible, and yet she couldn’t leave them both sprawled in front of her house. She had to do something. She quickly went back inside and retrieved a new plastic shower curtain. She managed to roll Juan onto it, and then she was able to pull him the rest of the way up the steps. Once she got him inside, it was relatively easy to drag him—rolled up in the plastic shower curtain—across the floor to the basement door. There, she rolled him off the shower curtain and let him tumble down the steps. She used the same plastic shower curtain to drag Pedro to the basement doorway and dump him down the steps as well.
She flicked on the light again and went down to find Pedro’s lifeless corpse sprawled atop Juan. Fortunately, neither man was big. She opened the hatch, then grabbed Pedro’s wrist to drag his body close. Once she had him to the hatch, she rolled him into the hell hole. She did the same with Juan.
There was a little blood on the shower curtain, but like anything else with evidence on it, it had to go. Rather than let it billow out on the way down and possibly get hung up on something, she folded it up to make a relatively heavy, compact bundle and then threw it in after the men.
“Two down, two to go,” she said under her breath as she tossed the second gun that day into the hole. She closed the hatch.
Using a .22 kept the bullets contained within the skulls. That meant a minimal amount of blood. Lots of guys thought big guns were best, but a .357 would blow out the back of the skull and spray blood, bone, and brain matter all over the place. It made a huge mess that left evidence everywhere, and, importantly, the victim was no deader. That was why assassins liked to use a .22.
But even with only a .22’s small entrance wound, there was still some blood. The shower curtain contained what blood there was as the men were dragged through the house until the bodies were in the basement. The outdoor hose and then rains would wash away what little there was outside.
Angela again pulled out the hose and washed down the steps and basement floor. By this time, her feet were freezing.
She still had the problem of what to do with Babington’s car.