Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

And Rhyme understood. He glanced back, seeing the man in the gray T-shirt, the litterer from the pickup truck, race across the narrow road and tackle Poitier as he was drawing his gun. The weapon went flying. The assailant rose fast and kicked the gasping corporal in the side and head, hard.

“No!” Rhyme cried.

The Mercury squealed to a stop and two of the men they’d seen following earlier leapt out—the one with the dreads in the sleeveless yellow shirt and his partner, shorter, wearing the green T. The man in green ripped Thom’s phone from his hand and doubled him over with a blow to the belly.

“Don’t!” Rhyme shouted—a cry as involuntary as it was pointless.

The man in the gray T-shirt said to his partners, “Okay, you see anyone else?”

“No.”

Of course, that’s why he was on the phone. He hadn’t come here to pitch out trash at all. He’d followed them and used the phone to let the others know their victims had arrived at the killing site.

Poitier gasped for breath, clutching his side.

Rhyme said firmly, “We’re police officers from the United States. We work with the FBI. Don’t make this worse on yourself. Just leave now.”

It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

The man in gray walked toward Poitier’s pistol, lying in the dust ten feet away.

“Stop,” Rhyme commanded.

The man did. He blinked at the criminalist. The other attackers froze. They were looking at the Glock in Rhyme’s hand. The pistol was unsteady, for sure, but from this distance he could easily send a bullet into the torso of the assailant.

The man lifted his hands slightly, rising. Eyes on the pistol. Back to Rhyme. “Okay, okay, mister. Don’t do with that.”

“All of you, step back and lie down on the ground, facedown.”

The two who’d been in the car turned their eyes on the man in gray.

Nobody moved.

“I’m not going to tell you again.” Rhyme wondered what the recoil would do to his hand. He supposed there might be some damage to the tendons. But all he needed after the shot was to keep the weapon in his grip. The others would flee after he’d killed their leader.

Thinking of the Special Task Order. No due process, no trial. Self-defense. Taking a life before your enemy did.

“You gonna shoot me, sir?” The man was studying him, suddenly defiant.

Rhyme rarely had a chance to meet adversaries face-to-face. They were usually long gone from the crime scene by the time he saw them, which was usually in court where he was an expert witness for the prosecution. Still, he had no trouble staring down the man in gray.

His partner, the one in yellow, the one with the impressive muscles, stepped forward but stopped fast when Rhyme spun the gun toward him.

“Hokay, easy, mon, easy.” Hands raised.

Rhyme aimed again at the leader, whose eyes were fixed on the weapon, his hands up. He smiled. “Are you? Are you going to shoot me, sir? I’m not so sure you are.” He stepped forward a few feet. Paused. And then walked directly toward Rhyme.

There was nothing more to say.

Rhyme tensed, hoping the recoil wouldn’t damage the results of the delicate surgery, hoping he could keep the weapon in his hand. He sent the command to close his index finger.

But nothing happened.

Glocks—dependable, Austrian-made pistols—have a trigger pull of only a few pounds pressure.

Yet Rhyme couldn’t muster that, couldn’t deliver enough strength to save the life of his aide and the police officer who’d risked his job to help him.

The man in gray continued forward, perhaps assuming Rhyme lacked the fortitude to shoot, even as he tried desperately to pull the trigger. Even more insulting, the man didn’t approach from the side, he kept on a steady path toward the muzzle that hovered in his direction.

The man closed his muscular hand around the gun and easily yanked it from Rhyme’s.

“You know, you a freak, mon.” He braced himself, put his foot in the middle of Rhyme’s chest and pushed hard.

The Storm Arrow rolled back two feet and went off the rocky edge. With a huge splash, Rhyme and the chair tumbled into the water. He took a deep breath and went under.

The water was not as deep as he’d thought, the darkness was due to the pollution, the chemicals and waste. The chair dropped ten feet or so and came to rest on the bottom.

Head throbbing, lungs in agony as his breath depleted, Rhyme twisted his head as far as he could and with his mouth gripped the strap of the canvas bag hanging from the back of the chair. He tugged this forward and it floated to just within his reach. He managed to wrap his arm around it for stability and undid the zipper with his teeth, then lowered his head and fished for the portable ventilator’s mouthpiece. He gripped it hard and worked it between his lips.

His eyes were on fire, stinging from the pollutants in the water, and he squinted but kept them open as he searched for the switch to the ventilator.

Finally, there. That’s it.

He clicked it on.

Lights glowed. The machine hummed and he inhaled a bit of wonderful, sweet oxygen.

Another.

But there was no third. Apparently the water had worked its way through the housing and short-circuited the unit.

The ventilator went dark. The air stopped.

At that moment he heard another sound, muffled through the water, but distinct: Two sounds, actually.

Gunshots.

Spelling the deaths of his friends: one he’d known seemingly forever and one he’d grown close to in just the past few hours.

Rhyme’s next breath was of water.

He thought of Amelia Sachs and his body relaxed.

CHAPTER 42

N O.

OH, NO.

At close to 5 p.m. she parked in front of Lydia Foster’s apartment building on Third Avenue.

Sachs couldn’t get too close; police cars and ambulances blocked the street.

Logic told her that the reason for the vehicles couldn’t be the death of the interpreter. Sachs had been following the sniper for the past hour and a half. He was still in his office downtown. She hadn’t left until Myers’s Special Services surveillance team showed up. Besides, how could the sniper have learned the interpreter’s name and address? She’d been careful to call from landlines and prepaid mobiles.

That’s what logic reported.

Yet instinct told her something very different, that Lydia was dead and Sachs was to blame. Because she’d never considered what she realized was the truth: They had two perps. One was the man she’d been following through the streets of downtown New York—the sniper, she knew, because of the voiceprint match—and the other, Lydia Foster’s killer, an unsub, unidentified subject. He was somebody else altogether, maybe the shooter’s partner, a spotter, as many snipers used. Or a separate contractor, a specialist, hired by Shreve Metzger to clean up after the assassination.

She parked fast, tossed the NYPD placard on the dash and stepped out of the car, hurrying toward the nondescript apartment building, the pale façade marred by off-white water stains as if the air-conditioning units had been crying.

Ducking under the police tape, she hurried up to a detective, who was prepping a canvass team. The slim African American recognized her, though she didn’t know him, and he nodded a greeting. “Detective.”

“Was it Lydia Foster?” Wondering why she bothered to ask.

“Right. This involves a case you’re running?”

“Yeah. Lon Sellitto’s the lead, Bill Myers’s overseeing it. I’m doing the legwork.”

“It’s all yours, then.”

“What happened?”

She noticed the man was shaken up, eyes twitching away from hers as he fiddled with a pen.

He swallowed and said, “Scene was pretty bad, I gotta tell you. She was tortured. Then he stabbed her. Never seen anything like that.”