Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

Kira was tired of men right now. Some time ago, she had discovered that after having acceptable sex, she often didn’t think about having it again for days. That had not seemed surprising. What was odd was that having really bad sex had nearly the same effect. Afterward, she imagined she should have been prowling around trying to satisfy unfulfilled desire, but she found that even desire could be used up, depleted. Either way, men seemed unappetizing until the clarity of her recollection of the experience receded.

She wanted to find Tim right now and salvage the investment she had made in him. There were not going to be that many get-togethers where she could meet young men, and most of the young men she had met at the camp had not seemed promising. She had bet the whole hunting trip on Tim-she could hardly expect to meet someone else now-and gone to the trouble of separating him from the herd, seducing him and then enduring him. She had a sudden vivid memory of how awful he had been in bed, but she did not linger on it. She could teach him to be better at it. She turned and stared into the mirror at the back of the elevator car, straightened her hair, pulled her halter top down a little and her pants up on her waist a bit. The elevator stopped. The door opened on the lower parking level.

Kira saw all three boys instantly. Jimmy and Lee were seventy or eighty feet from her, both crouching behind parked cars, one on either side of the aisle ahead of her. The spaces in this underground parking area were all diagonal; the cars on both sides of this aisle were angled away from Kira, so each was squatting behind the rear tire of a car. Tim was much farther from the elevator, nearly at the far end of the next aisle, but his reddish hair made him easy to see and impossible for her not to recognize. He was sitting behind the wheel of the car in which Jimmy had driven them all here. She stepped out of the elevator.

She heard the elevator door slide shut behind her. She tried to read the sight, to extrapolate from the positions of the three men what was going on, but she could not. Certainly Jimmy and Lee could not have been crouching there for all this time, with their backs visible to the elevator door. And what was Tim doing way down there in the car, not even in the same aisle as the others? Something had begun.

Her legs seemed to be acting on a decision she had not consciously made. She had started to walk quietly to the right, away from Jimmy and Lee, and toward the aisle where Tim sat in the car. Her eyes kept returning to Jimmy and Lee, because she did not want to startle them, but she wanted a chance to be in for the kill.

There was the faint sound of an engine. It was idling, just coasting slowly down the ramp from the level above them. She realized that she had been hearing it since the elevator door had opened, driving up and down the aisles above, searching for a space. Jimmy reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol. Lee had been watching him across the aisle, and now he did the same.

Kira’s legs moved faster, carrying her to the beginning of Tim’s aisle. Her right hand reached into her purse and closed around the new Beretta pistol. She could feel the rough pattern of the knurled handgrips, and she lifted it just a little off the bottom of the purse to feel the comforting weight of it as she walked. Kira craned her neck to look to the left, toward the aisle where Jimmy and Lee crouched. The sound of the car grew just a bit louder, and then it appeared. It was Mallon’s red Toyota. She could feel her heart speeding up.

She was still too far away to open fire. She checked to be sure the others had not moved. Tim was all the way at the end of her aisle, at least two hundred feet from her. She decided that all she could do was stay in plain sight. She kept walking toward Tim, a little faster now. She lowered her face toward her purse, as though she were a woman searching for a set of keys, but she held the red car in the corner of her eye.

She heard a car’s starter turn over, then the hum of its engine. It was Tim. She saw him back the black car out of its space. Her heart stopped, then started again, faster. She gave the fingers of her left hand a little flutter, trying to get his attention, but he didn’t seem to see her. She had expected him to move into the third aisle and drive toward her, but he steered the car around the end of the first aisle.

He had moved into the other aisle behind Mallon’s car, and she understood. He was blocking the aisle, keeping Mallon from backing up. She heard his door open and slam shut.

Lee and Jimmy suddenly stepped into the aisle in front of Mallon’s car, and opened fire. The noise of each report was a sharp bright clap that pounded her eardrums, then seemed to take a second to fade as it echoed around the concrete surfaces. She raised her pistol, but she could already hear Mallon’s car.

The car’s tires screamed, the engine growled. She stopped and pivoted, then dodged to the left, trying for a clear aim to the left of the nearest concrete column. The car’s front end seemed to rise as it shot forward. The safety glass of the rear window was spiderwebbed with cracks radiating from bullet holes, and much of it had been pulverized into a milky translucence, so she could not see anyone inside. She saw the car hit Lee and throw him forward through the air, then hit Jimmy, drag him under it for a few yards, then bump over him.

The taillights came on and the tires screeched, trying to grip the pavement before the car reached the end of the aisle, turning sideways and sliding. Kira fired twice at the car as it rocked to a stop, but then it moved ahead around the end of the aisle and fishtailed toward Kira, heading for the ramp back up to the next level. Kira sidestepped out of its path into the aisle where Lee and Jimmy had ambushed it. As she ducked down, she took note of what she saw. Lee had flown most of the way to the elevator, and he lay near it with his head turned at an angle that meant he had to be dead. She ran past Jimmy. He was the apex of a long wet triangle of bright red blood that was flowing down the gradual incline of the floor.

Kira could see Tim clearly. He was all right. He was standing by the black car, his gun in his hand. He was staring at the car Mallon was driving up the next aisle, turning his whole body as he watched it. He made no attempt to raise his gun to shoot at Mallon. He made no attempt to move the black car again to block Mallon’s way to the ramp. Kira could see that his eyes were not angry or calculating. They were open wide, staring with weak incomprehension.

Mallon sped up to the next level, and it was as though a door up there had closed. It was very quiet now. Kira moved toward Tim quickly, running on the balls of her feet, the soles of her shoes making a chuff each time they hit the textured concrete. Tim seemed to hear the sound. He turned to look up the aisle in her direction, but Kira could not tell whether he was looking at her or the crushed bodies of Lee and Jimmy. He put the pistol back into his jacket, then got into the driver’s seat of the car and slammed the door. He began to back the car and turn the wheels to swing around.

“Wait!” she called. “Wait, it’s me!” She watched him as she ran, hoping to see his head turn to look in the rearview mirror, but it never did. The car glided forward and turned up the ramp and out of sight.

Kira stopped running. She turned and looked back toward the elevator doors, past the two bodies. She was aware that the whole incident seemed to have taken much longer than it really had. It had taken less than half a minute, she was sure, but there would be people here soon.

She stepped quickly to the stairwell, making her plan by instinct as she climbed. She emerged, not at the lobby level but on the second floor, where she knew there would be fewer people to see her. There were none. From there she took the elevator to the fifteenth.