Brandy Lawton brought her suitcases to the door. Foolishly and out of habit, she went back through the house, checking to make sure the lights were all out and that the stove was off. It was amazing how some routines persisted in the face of everything. Satisfied, she went back to retrieve her bags and take them out to her car.
Across the street, leaning on the side of the van, Georgi waited for Stojan to give him the signal. If he had had his way, Stojan would simply have broken into the apartment or rung the bell and killed the woman when she came to the door. His first preference would have been to use a Kalashnikov, to drive past, spraying the woman with bullets. Witnesses shocked and frightened, escape made easy because he would already be on the move. But their bosses had been explicit in their instructions. Kill her quietly by her car. Put her in the car. Make her disappear. Stojan once again saw the teacher’s silhouette at the door. The door opening slightly. Stojan banged his hand against the van. Georgi made his way to the opposite sidewalk.
Jesse, phone back in his pocket, weapon drawn, took off in a sprint. Sarkassian was darting in and out between cars in the hospital parking lot. Jesse had a few clear shots but did not fire for fear of hitting a passerby. Arakel Sarkassian had no such worries. As he ran, he would half turn, fire blindly behind him in Jesse’s direction — windshields spiderwebbing, side windows shattering, alarms shrieking. Above the din of the car alarms, Jesse heard sirens. He thought to pen Sarkassian in at a corner of the fence surrounding the lot until backup arrived. Until then, he would bait Sarkassian into exhausting his ammunition.
Brandy Lawton put her suitcases on the front porch, the gym bag slung over her shoulder. She locked the door, pulled up the handles on both suitcases, and walked toward her car, wheeling the rollerbags behind her. She stopped, hearing sirens in the distance. She snickered at herself, realizing the sirens probably had nothing to do with her. She pressed the key fob and popped open the trunk of her car.
Stojan and Georgi heard the sirens, too. They were louder, coming closer, very close.
Stojan yelled to Georgi. “Hurry up. Bürzam! Bürzam!”
Instead, Georgi froze and stared across at Stojan. Then saw the cruiser coming down the street.
Brandy heard that voice, recognized it. It was the voice of the man who had threatened her the night she had taken the stash bag back from the girl. She dropped her bags and ran back to the front door.
Georgi sprinted, his .22 Ruger with sound suppressor held in front of him as he ran.
One Paradise police car and Suit’s pickup skidded to a halt in front of Brandy Lawton’s driveway. Neither Suit nor Peter Perkins looked at the white van, focusing instead on the man with the pistol in his hand turning into the driveway. A bullet smashed the passenger-side back window of Perkins’s cruiser. He hit the floor. Suit dived out the passenger side of his pickup, grabbed his nine-millimeter.
Brandy Lawton, panicked, nauseated with fear, dropped her keys at the door, bent down to pick them up.
Georgi turned the corner of the driveway and rushed toward the teacher. He raised the .22, squeezed the trigger once, heard a moan, glass breaking, but also heard more than one shot. He fell forward, facedown in the gravel, unable to move, confused because he felt no pain. His confusion came to an end as his hand relaxed around the butt of the gun and his blood spilled out of his wrecked veins and arteries into the cavities in his body. He laughed a short bark of a laugh, a laugh wet and red. The last sound he would ever make.
Stojan hit the gas, firing out the window as he went, bullets flattening tires on the cruiser and pickup. Peter Perkins rolled out of the cruiser, took aim at the van, and fired. Two bullets hit the van’s rear doors, the hole visible to him. But the van was quickly out of range for an effective shot and, like Jesse, Perkins feared ricochets or stray bullets hitting civilians. The taillights disappeared.
After calling it in, Perkins stopped by Georgi’s body. He checked for a pulse, found none. Suit had already kicked the .22 far away from the dead man. Perkins found Suit hunched over Brandy Lawton. He was pressing his hand to her neck, blood spurting out between his fingers. She was clutching at him with one hand, clawing at her gym bag with the other. Her eyes were big with fear, her mouth open. Perkins ran to the car to put a rush on the ambulance and to get the first-aid kit. By the time he returned, the blood had stopped spurting between Suit’s fingers. Brandy Lawton had stopped clutching and clawing forever.
Suit’s hands and uniform were covered in blood. He fell back against the wall next to Lawton’s body and hung his head. “What do you think she was clawing at in the gym bag, Pete?”
Perkins, hands now gloved to begin doing the forensics, knelt down beside the dead woman and unzipped her gym bag. He pulled out a white pharmaceutical bottle and shook it at Suit. “This, probably.”
“But she was dying.”
“These damn things are why she’s dead, Heather Mackey is dead, and why he’s dead,” Perkins said, pointing at Georgi’s body. “It’s a plague, Suit, a goddamn plague.”
Eighty-one
Jesse saw the light bars flashing a block away, and the sirens were deafeningly loud. It wouldn’t be long now until Sarkassian would have no place to go. Jesse wasn’t certain about the man’s weapon, but it didn’t seem to have an extended magazine, and he’d used a lot of ammo already. If he could only get Sarkassian to waste a few more bullets... But just as he was feeling confident, a yellow Camaro convertible backed out of a spot near the corner of the lot Jesse had worked so hard to herd Sarkassian into. Jesse understood Arakel Sarkassian was many things, but he didn’t think stupid was one of them. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Jesse almost had him penned in.
He ran toward the Camaro and jumped in just as the driver, a woman in blue nurse’s scrubs, stopped to put the car into drive. Sarkassian pressed the muzzle of the gun to her neck. But instead of freezing, the woman screamed and flailed at him. He slapped her across the face with the side of the gun and pressed it once again to her throat.
“Shut up and do as I say or I shall surely blow a hole through your throat.”
The nurse quieted just as the patrol cars stopped at the parking-lot gate, their sirens finally silenced.
“Sarkassian,” Jesse said, “you can’t get out of here.”
“Oh, but I will, one way or the other, Chief Stone. The question is who I will take with me. That is in your hands. Now drop your weapon and order your people away from the exit.”
“Take me,” Jesse said, dropping his nine-millimeter. “Let the nurse go and take me. I’ll toss my cell. My people won’t shoot while I’m in the car.”
“Do not take me for a fool, Chief. Go to the gate and order your people away. Now!” For emphasis, Sarkassian yanked on the nurse’s hair and put the barrel of his weapon in her mouth.
Jesse didn’t bother trying to retrieve his gun and walked to the parking-lot gate. Gabe Weathers and John Spellman met Jesse there.
Before Jesse could speak, Gabe said, “Two hit men killed Brandy Lawton. Suit got one of them.”
“Dead?”
“Dead. The other got away. He was driving a white van. Word is out.”
“Hurry, Chief,” Sarkassian said. “I am not certain the nurse will live much longer.”
“Deploy your spike strips on either side of the exit. We can’t afford him seeing them as the car pulls out. When the spikes are out, move your cars away.”
Jesse went back into the lot and walked toward the Camaro, hands raised above his head. As Jesse got within ten feet of the Camaro and the cruisers pulled away from the parking-lot gate, Sarkassian removed the gun from the nurse’s mouth.