They settled into the curved metal chairs, regarding each other warily.
Her pale skin was almost luminous. She rolled those red, red lips over her teeth, then pursed them anxiously. She would have been distractingly attractive were he in a mood to be distracted.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
She looked down at her hands.
“Listen,” he said. “If I am with whoever’s trying to hurt you, then I’d already know your name, wouldn’t I?”
She kept her eyes lowered. “Katrin White,” she said.
“And I would also know why they — or we — are trying to harm you.”
A cart paused at their elbows. Without looking over he pointed and a few items landed on the starched tablecloth before them.
“I owe the wrong people money. A lot of money.”
“How much?”
“Two-point-one.” She scratched at her neck, keeping her gaze on the untouched food. “It’s a Vegas situation.”
“You’re a gambler.”
“It doesn’t mean I deserve to die.”
“No one is making that argument.”
“Well,” she said, “someone is.”
A guy in a baggy shirt entered the lobby, and Evan stared across the restaurant at him. Their eyes caught for a moment, and then an older man in a tailored business suit shouldered in front of the guy to the maître d’ stand. When the view cleared again, the man in the baggy shirt was greeting a woman he’d presumably come to dine with.
Evan returned his focus to Katrin. “Which casino?”
“It’s a backroom deal. Private. It moves around. No names, no addresses, nothing. You give them your number, they call you, tell you where to be. You buy in.”
“Minimum?”
“Quarter mil. Then they stake you.”
“Can get out of hand in a hurry.”
“You’re telling me.” Her knee bounced beneath the table as it had at Bottega Louie, and he wondered how long she’d been this jittery. He could see the strain in the lines of her tensed face. “These guys are big on making examples. They unzipped a Japanese businessman from his skin. Peeled him while he was still alive. At least he was for most of it. And now…” Her voice cracked. “They have my dad.”
She ran a finger beneath the oversize sunglasses, first one side, then the other.
After a moment she said, “All I have is a phone number. They told me … they told me I have two weeks to deliver.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Ten days.”
Her delicate shoulders trembled. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault he’s involved. I don’t have the money, and they’re gonna kill him.”
“I have never lost anyone I’ve helped,” Evan told her.
“Not ever?”
“Not ever.”
Her glasses settled back on the bridge of her nose, and in them Evan caught a glint of reflected light through the window behind him. Instinct tugged at him, straightening his vertebrae. A dim sum cart was rattling past, and he slid his foot out and caught it, stopping it dead in its tracks, plates and steamer baskets clanking. The server barked her displeasure at him, but he wasn’t listening.
In the stainless-steel side of the cart, he saw a distorted reflection of the three-story apartment building behind him.
In a window on the third floor, a perfect disk of light caught the sun.
A sniper scope.
He grabbed Katrin’s thin wrist. As he yanked her sideways, a round snapped past his ear and punched a hole through the solid chrome back of her empty chair, penetrating the spot where her heart had been an instant before.
Sprawled on the hot metal of the overturned cart, it occurred to him that he was, for the first time in his professional life, playing defense.
11
What Now?
The first rule when drawing fire: Get off the X.
Evan rolled off the upended dim sum cart, jerking Katrin away from the window as two more rounds splintered the table. They came in not with the pop-pop-pop of a smaller rifle but the sharp crack of a major caliber, 30 or up. Echoes of the muzzle blast bounced around the room, a hall-of-mirrors effect as disorienting as it was unnerving. Evan half dragged Katrin toward the heart of the restaurant, trying to get clear of the sniper’s vantage.
The other customers exploded into a confused stampede toward all exits. Evan kept Katrin’s arm as he led her through the tumult, hip-checking another cart and sending forth a volley of pork bao. His hand drove straight through his shirt, popping the magnets, and ripped his pistol free from the holster.
A chunk of floor gave way at their heels, bits of tile biting at their calves, and then they were clear of the kill zone. An older woman fell to one knee, nearly getting trampled, but a surge of bodies flung her back onto her feet, and the human tide whisked her out a side door. A baby’s high-pitched mewling rose above the screams.
“They followed you!” Katrin was shouting. “Did you do this?”
Evan ignored her. Only the exit route mattered. Over the wall of receding shoulders, a single face pointed back toward the restaurant interior, a man standing eerily still in the middle of the rush.
Not the guy with the baggy shirt. The older man in the tailored business suit.
His head and upper torso were visible, the rest of his body a murky shadow behind the fish tanks that split the lobby from the restaurant proper. His fist rose, clenched around a pistol. The barrel flashed, and a woman in front of them screamed and spun in a one-eighty, a crimson spray erupting from the shoulder of her blouse.
Though Evan and Katrin had hit the brakes, the surging crowd drove them toward the man in the suit. No backing up. Too many civilians to return fire. A shooter unconcerned with collateral damage.
Evan straight-armed Katrin to the floor and dove forward over one shoulder. He finished his somersault rotation and hammered both feet into the lobster tank’s base. It was sturdier than he’d hoped, sending shock waves through his legs, but the glass above gave off a sonorous warble that sounded promising. A splash of salty water slapped Evan’s face. He blinked hard, saw the shooter looming above, aiming down.
Then the tank toppled.
The man’s arms swung up, the gun discharging once into the ceiling, and then gallons of green water wiped him from view. Lobsters twitched and flopped on the slippery tile, claws secured with blue bands. Washed halfway across the lobby, the shooter scrambled after his pistol on all fours. As the last of the customers dashed out, he reached between their fleeing legs and scooped up his gun. He’d just turned to rise when Evan hit him from above with a modified roundhouse, the points of his first two knuckles crushing the skull at the temple. The squama of the temporal bone was usefully thin there, and it caved pleasingly beneath the well-placed blow.
The man fell, his cheek and chest slapping the floor. His hands and feet curled inward, twitching, the last impulses shuddering from his brain.
Evan turned to find Katrin standing behind him, breathless, her pale skin ashen with shock.
“He’s dead?”
“Follow me. Close.”
He kept the pistol pointed at the ground as he shoved them through the double front doors into the bright light of the plaza. Red and yellow plastic pennants rode the wind, fluttering overhead on strings, and the smell of incense tinged the air. Terrified passersby swept through his field of vision, running haphazardly in all directions, but he focused on a rental minivan parked dead ahead, blocking an alley, hazard lights flashing. The back doors were swung open, a few boxes of produce stacked on the ground as props.