Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

“Where’s the medic?!” he screamed. Then he burst out of the bathroom and scurried down the emergency stairwell. Twelve flights of stairs to the ground floor. Followed by his second guard.

Gone.

Exited.

Both of them.

Alone with me now, the other guard had a serious dilemma. He could a) chase his boss, b) shoot me, then chase his boss, c) preserve me as the only source of valuable information on how to save his boss and then chase his boss, or d) yell.

“Glupi majmune!” he yelled, then punched a wall. He was malfunctioning. “Idi u pičku materinu lit! Što si učinio?!”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what all his words meant, but it couldn’t have been a recipe for baklava.

“Što si učinio?” he screamed at me. “Što si učinio?”

He threw a lamp, then kicked over a desk, took a breath to gain some practical control of himself, then marched over to me.

“You poison him?!” he asked.

“Us,” I corrected him.

He looked at me like I’d fallen from a passing asteroid.

I pointed to my mouth. Us. I opened my mouth. I showed him. Then he leaned over me to inspect this nonsense. What you are talking about?” he asked.

“I’m talking about… this. ” And that’s when I grabbed his gun. He had leaned in just close enough, just carelessly enough, to allow me access to his muzzle.

My left hand took the stock, my right took the barrel.

“Odjebi!” he roared.

He outweighed me by fifty pounds, yet from my seated position, gravity favored my effort. His weapon wound up pointing back toward him. His instinctual effort to reclaim it led him to slip his finger off the trigger, so that bratatatat .

Should have chased his boss.

Chapter 40

Clock ticking, the next step was to fetch my target. I had to assume the neighbors were now a logistical factor. Few things earn as much attention as an assault rifle going off behind cheaply built walls.

I stood up and saw the supermodel standing within striking distance of me. She looked like she was experiencing every emotion imaginable.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said to her. “I just need th—”

Wham! She kicked the dead guard in his bullet wound. Wham! She kicked him again. Kick after kick. When she had finished, she looked up at me, panting.

“Hospeetal is there,” she said, pointing across the city block in front of us.

She was looking out the window. There was a giant street and then a hospital visible in the distance.

“I tell you fastest way,” she said. “First you go courtyard. Then—”

“I know,” I said. “He’ll try to cut through the library.”

I’d mapped the route several hours earlier. Poison was the only way to get him out of his eagle’s nest. I knew I had a very low probability of killing him inside this palace, but I figured if I could lure him to the streets, the playing field would level itself out. My Smith & Wesson was on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it and handed the VHS-2 rifle to our newly liberated female army of one.

I swear this woman was ready to adopt me.

I started to show her how to use it. “You just need to pull the knob t—”

Chkkkchk . She yanked back the charging handle.

“I know,” she said. She pointed me toward the elevator.

Seconds later, I was heading down. My bet was there’d be someone waiting for me when the doors opened, but nope, the lobby was empty. I was sure our fireworks had been heard, but somehow this entire operation had aroused exactly no one.

I stepped out of the elevator just in time to see Vatroslav down the block, disappearing into the hedges toward the library.

“On schedule,” I said to myself somewhat smugly.

Bratatatatat!

A hurricane of bullets shattered all the glass in the lobby. I was being shot at from the other elevator, two bodies visible.

I ducked behind the front desk while firing two quick shots toward my rear. I don’t think I hit anything useful but I certainly made my point. They crouched low. I crouched low. Mutual suppression. They didn’t do me the favor of collaborating with each other in English.

What if I crawled toward them?

There was a row of tall indoor planters and a door to the parking garage.

One warning shot from my revolver— blam —which elicited a barrage of wrongly aimed retaliatory fire, and off I went. Once I was close enough to the door, I lunged for the knob, twisted it open, and burst through. I then pulled it closed behind me, just as incoming bullets lit up the frame. The finishing touch was to jam the hydraulic arm up top—the skinny metal thing that slows down big doors. By grabbing it and doing a mock pull-up, I managed to bend its elbow downward, which bought me an extra ten seconds of exodus. A lifetime in this business.

I sprinted out and took a shortcut across the lawn to see the tail end of Vatroslav’s flight. He’d sprinted across the sloping lawn and opted for a path that led to a locked gate, leaving him no recourse but to come back the same way, back up toward the main steps, and up to the front entrance of the public library. Enough time for me to catch up.

“You got a back door?!” he roared at the librarian he encountered.

I managed to catch sight of his frantic path toward a utility door.

Mmmmmmm. I knew where that led. The subterranean level, full of old, archived, out-of-date, ugly, gorgeous editions of every book imaginable.

Thank you, city of Boston, for conserving these valuable books. Vatroslav had cornered himself in a labyrinth of good ideas.

Chapter 41

His panic was increasing. I could hear it.

“Titles are listed by author,” I bellowed out. “Not subject.”

I was starting to relish the news I had for him. He couldn’t see me but he could feel my voice come from every direction at once. The muted reverb was unworldly. Perfect for stifling the sound of a .38 Special.

“Get me out of here!” he yelled.

He rounded his final corner and arrived squarely in front of me, face-to-face, out of breath.

“The poison!” he said. “The poison is taking effect.”

“No, it isn’t,” I replied.

“Christ, you don’t feel the numbing?”

“I don’t. And would you like to know why?”

“Move!”

He tried to get by me but he was so out of breath he didn’t have the agility needed.

“Because there’s nothing to feel,” I said.

He stopped struggling.

“The bottle of brandy contained pure brandy.” I had his full attention now. “I never added a drop of poison.”

“What?”

“The mind is a powerful drug, my friend. Today you’re learning it. I spent eleven years and one terrible marriage learning it. Pretending she wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“Wait. What?!”

“And now I’m here to kill you.”

He looked at the gun in my hand, aimed his way. He wondered if I really wanted to fire it in a library. That was the beauty of the stacks—a fact I decided to elucidate for him.

“Worth mentioning,” I began. “I have a noisy weapon in my hand but we’re surrounded by thousands of sound-absorbent pages.”

“My father will gut you.” He spoke with as much venom as humanly possible.

I took out my phone. If he wanted to go there, sure. “I’ll let you personally help him find out.”

“Father!” he cried.

“Hang on, I haven’t dialed yet.”

I dialed.

“You’ll never get away with this,” he said.

“I’m gonna wheel your corpse out on a book cart. In broad daylight.”

It was true. I’d probably shroud his dead body under a large floor mat and roll the whole mess out the back gate, right to the trunk of my car. I’d then drive the corpse to my house, where I’d lay it inside the Kolpak 1010 freezer system. I’d go to Ivan and give Ivan the house keys. Maybe Ivan would be kind enough to dispatch a team of people who’d make disturbing situations disappear.