She stared at the syringe. The tube was filled with brownish liquid. "What is that stuff?"
"You ever been high, sweet cheeks?" Tomlinson's eyes twinkled with something like merriment.
"No."
"Never? Not even pot?"
"I don't do drugs."
"I see. You're a good girl. All you do is suck cocks and spread your thighs." He grinned at her with evil amusement.
She asked again, "What is it?"
"Darling, what we got here"he held up the syringe, letting it catch the light"is good old horse. Hard candy. You know what I'm saying?"
"No."
He laughed. "You really are a babe in the woods. Heroin. That's what I've got. Highly illegal, class-A narcotic. Colombian smack, good stuff, very pure. It disappeared from an evidence room not long agoone gram, enough to send you on a real bad trip. A one-way trip, I'm sorry to say."
She stared up into the hollows of his eyes, where the flashlight's glow didn't reach. "Why?"
He ignored her. "See, I could shoot you, but this way there's no bullet to trace."
She tried to back away, but she couldn't retreat any farther with the handcuffs pinning her down. He grasped her right arm.
"Just stay still, Meg. This won't take long."
He squirted a few drops of liquid from the syringe and aimed it at her bare arm.
"You got nice blue veins. I'm gonna mainline this shit. That'll make it fast. Lights out in a hurry." He smiled at her in the half-light of the flashlight beam. "It's a shame I've gotta waste such high-quality stuff."
The needle descended in a leisurely arc.
"And wasting you," he added, "that's a real shame, too."
Everything had slowed down. Her breath had stopped. Her vision had narrowed to a single point. She knew that she could let fear paralyze her, and then she would die, or she could fight and give herself a chance.
With a shriek of rage she wrenched her arm to the side. He was gripping it tight, but her skin, slick with sweat, slid through his fingers, and she pulled free.
He would expect her to draw back, huddle in fear. Instead she lunged at him, angling her hand downward, closing her fist over his crotch. She felt the soft sacks of his scrotum squishing between her fingers. She squeezed tight and twisted hard.
His voice rose an octave. "Fuck!"
He grabbed at her hand, a reflex action. She released his crotch and snatched the syringe away. She stabbed at his face. He dodged, not quite fast enough. The hypodermic punched into the side of his neck, her finger depressing the plunger, releasing a stream of brown fluid into his carotid artery.
A noise like an animal's howl broke from his mouth. He tore away, leaving a bloody gash in his neck. He lifted his arm to strike at her, and then his face went red and his breathing was suddenly hoarse and shallow.
Tomlinson fell to the floor and lay on his stomach, making crawling motions with his arms.
"Can't see. Can't amp;"
He couldn't speak anymore. He rose to one knee before collapsing in a shuddering pile. His respiration was quick and noisy and sounded strangely wet, as if his lungs were clogged.
Meg stared at him, the empty syringe still in her hand. She thought she had probably killed him. The reality of it hit her like a slap, and then she was screaming for help, screaming uncontrollably, knowing that no one could hear.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The arcade was bedlam.
With Wolper at her side, Robin maneuvered through the crashing noise, the tight squeeze of people, the stroboscopic glare of game machines. She hadn't been inside a place like this in years, and vaguely she'd been expecting pinball machines or close relatives of early video games like Frogger and Pac-Man. Instead she was surrounded by large screens filled with startlingly realistic action, enhanced by stereophonic sound effects at a painfully high volume. One game console displayed the view from a race car; another put its operator in a submarine; others re-created torchlit temples and jungle swamps. She saw karate kicks, balletic leaps ending in a blast of automatic weapons fire, wrestling moves that turned lethal with the sickening crunch of an adversary's neck. The enemies to be dispatched were sometimes aliens, dinosaurs, or ghouls, but most often they were human beings, ethnically neutral, indistinguishable from the good guys as far as she could tell. Maybe good versus evil wasn't the point anymore. Maybe there was no point.
Ninety percent of the game players were teens and most of them were boys. They had the cold, expressionless stares she had seen around the slot machines in Vegas, and they stood hunched forward in concentration, their fingers moving on the joysticks with virtuoso rapidity, like skilled hands sounding stops on a flute. The kids were mostly black and Latino, affecting the baggy-pants gangsta style. She wondered what they would think if they knew that a serial killer might be hanging out here. Would they be scared, appalledor would they ask for his autograph? The girls he'd killed might be no more real to them than the animated figures being vaporized on their display screens. To them, Justin Gray might be the ultimate player.
But the kids didn't matter right now. What she focused on were the rare adults in the crowd. They were all malesshe saw no females here older than nineteenand they were a curious mixture of overweight guys with bad complexions and gaunt, hollow-eyed men who looked like junkies.
She didn't see Gray among them, but it was too soon to be sure. The arcade was huge, branching off into alcoves and nooks and specially themed rooms, and the lighting was inconstant and distracting, and the crowd was jammed into every corner, every inch of floor space.
She wondered how much time these people spent here, killing timelike the men crowded around the dogpit. Men like Brand. Maybe he'd been at the dogfights today.
Or maybe he'd been in her office, killing more than time.
Brand liked this place. It was raucous and crazy, and although no real action was going down, there was a strange excitement in watching the kids bent over video-game controls, matching their reflexes against a computer's speed. And it was noisy. That was good. Noise made good cover. If he did have to use his 9mm, the shot might go unheard.
He circled along the perimeter of the room, scoping the layout, keeping Wolper and Cameron in sight. Although he was a generation older than most of the game players, he didn't stand out too badly. The dark windbreaker helped him blend inunlike Wolper's sport jacket over an open-collared dress shirt, or Cameron's buttoned-up blouse and stylish slacks. The two of them looked like nervous middle-class parents hunting down a truant teenager. Which wasn't far wrong, when you thought about it. Gray was the shrink's pet project, her baby, and he sure had gone missing today.
A yell of frustration from a player a few feet away startled him. He glared at the kid, who was too absorbed in pummeling the machine to notice. When he looked across the room, his quarries were gone, lost in the crowd.
He scanned the blur of faces and bodies, hoping to pick them out. He hoped they hadn't already left.
There. Entering a side room, still together.
They hadn't separated, which was a problem, but at least he still had Cameron in view.
She wouldn't get away. That was a promise he'd made to himself. He might have fucked up most things in his forty-one years, failed in more ways than he could stand to remember, stalled out in his career, given up any chance at marriage or family, ended up in a sad little sweatbox of a house in a shit neighborhoodhe might have no future and no life, but tonight he had a mission to perform, and he wouldn't fail. No matter what, he was coming out of this a winner.
He touched the bulge of his gun under the windbreaker as he crossed the room, slowly closing in on Robin Cameron.
"Did Sergeant Brand call in sick today?" Robin asked Wolper.
"Yeah. But he wasn't at the dogfights."
She glanced at him, surprised that he'd touched on the subject occupying her thoughts. "How do you know?"