She’d moved closer, unable to resist it as she taunted. She was within a couple of meters now, leaning forwards, shoving that smug smiling face into mine.
“I warned you what would happen if you hurt my mother, Vondie,” I said almost under my breath. I thrashed impotently against the restraints, an apparently useless gesture that allowed me to get the feel of them and made noise, so she had to come nearer still to catch my words.
Come on, a little closer. Just a little closer …
“Well, that’s nothing to what I’d do if I thought you were going to hurt my child,” I muttered. “Past having your own are you? You dried-up old hag—”
She took that last step, offense coloring her face as she caught the gist.
I bounced up, bunched the muscles in my arms to jerk my feet clean off the floor, scissored my legs and lashed out.
I tried to tell myself later that it was never intended to be a killing blow. That I wanted to cause enough pain to incapacitate her, no more. So I aimed for her face, for the nose I’d already broken once, intending to add insult as well as further injury. But at the last moment she jerked upright and so I gathered a little more momentum before I struck, a little lower than I’d anticipated. Or so I tried to tell myself.
My foot landed hard, side on across her throat. Above my own bellow of effort and pain and rage, I swear I heard the quiet pop as her larynx collapsed.
Vondie dropped the syringe and fell backwards, windmilling her arms. She crashed into her own chair, which tangled her legs and tripped her. Her shoe skated on the manila folder she’d so carelessly dropped, then her back hit the far wall and she slithered down it, clutching at her throat and gasping, eyes wide with shock.
“Top five percent, huh, bitch?” I said, breathing hard. “Like I said—real slack year.”
Instinct had her battling to rise, clawing for purchase on the smooth face of the blocks. I strained against the cuffs that held me, but I knew they weren’t going to give way. There was nothing I could do but dangle there, helpless, and wait for her either to die or to kill me.
Whichever came first.
Vondie made it upright by no more than sheer bloody willpower. She lurched for the trolley again, grabbed another syringe without caring which, and came for me.
I twisted wildly, kicking out. No technique involved now, just anything I could think of to stop her getting that damned needle into me.
And in the back of my mind was the deep, sick sense of panic that it wasn’t just me she was trying to hurt.
As she lunged, I jumped again, managed to get both feet up and punched them out into her stomach. The blow sent her reeling backwards. She hit the trolley containing the drugs she’d been intending to use on me, overturning it in a clatter of steel on concrete and shattered glass, and fell amid the ruins, gasping her last breath.
I waited, but she didn’t get up again. She’d been dead from the moment I’d crushed her throat. She just hadn’t known it.
It took me a minute or so to get my feet back under me, by which time my arms were shaking. Everything was shaking. I was colder than I could ever remember and weary to the marrow of my bones.
Another death on your conscience, Fox. Now what?
I hung like that for a while. I had no way to mark the passing of time, so I don’t know how long. It felt like forever, but in reality was probably no more than a quarter of an hour. Long enough. More than long enough for me to think a lot about life—the one I’d just taken and the one that might have just begun.
The sound of the door opening behind me made me start. I braced, but knew I didn’t have the energy to mount another defensive attack. I heard footsteps come in, two sets, which faltered as the new arrivals took in the scene of my destruction. It was only a momentary pause.
Terry O’Loughlin moved delicately in front of me, eyes flicking to Vondie’s body. The other person with her turned out to be the young security guard who’d put the restraints on me and my mother out in the lobby.
“Ohmigod,” he kept saying, trying both to look, and not to look, at my body and at Vondie while he did so. “Is she, like, dead?”
So elegant in life, Vondie was awkward and ungainly in death, limbs sprawling, her skirt riding up, revealing a surprisingly utilitarian pair of white cotton knickers.
“I bloody hope so,” I said. I met Terry’s eyes, saw the shock in them, but anger, too. I hoped it was pointed at somebody else, or my chances had not just improved. “Either cut me loose or shoot me, Terry,” I said tiredly, “because if you’re not going to let me down, shooting me would be preferable to what Collingwood will do when he finds this.”
She stepped forwards. “I had no part in this, Charlie,” she said, fierce to the point of tears as she fumbled with the restraints. “Please believe me.”
“I do,” I said.
My arms dropped abruptly and I discovered I’d been entirely right about one thing. Being strung up was nasty but, for the moment, being let down seemed worse. My knees went and, if Terry hadn’t arrested my descent, I would have fallen. The blood pounded back into my whitened fingers, making the nails pulse as though I’d plunged both hands into boiling water. I tried to cradle my arms to my body, but all they did was flop like a pair of drowning fish. The young security guard fumbled out of his jacket and draped it round my shoulders. His face was past scarlet and heading for a shade of purple.
I tried to smile my thanks but my eyes kept sliding past him, wouldn’t focus.
“Go and tell them we’ve found her,” Terry said to him. “Tell them to hurry!” He all but ran out of the room.
And, by the sound of it, straight into a fist.
All we heard was the contact of something hard meeting something softer by comparison, the explosive whump of air being knocked out of the guard’s lungs, and the solid thud as he hit the ground.
Terry started, but before she could do more than half-rise, the door was pushed open again and Collingwood came in. He was carrying a standard-issue Glock 9mm with the lazy facility of someone completely at home with a firearm, and the dead-eyed stare of someone who thinks nothing of using it.
He took in the scene almost instantly. My incapacity. Terry, crouched with her arms protectively around my shoulders. And Vondie’s body. He moved towards her as though his legs were taking him of their own volition, against his better judgment. Silently, he stood over his dead agent, as if to confirm she was really gone. But there was nothing in his rumpled face. No pain, no sorrow, no anger.
I skimmed my own eyes over the corpse with something close to regret. Regret that I hadn’t grabbed the opportunity to take the gun off her hip the moment I’d got loose. As soon as the thought had formed, I dismissed it. I wouldn’t be able to hold the damn thing straight yet, anyway. My arms were burning with pins and needles, so I wanted to rub them to ease the violent scuttering under my skin, but I couldn’t bear the touch.
Collingwood turned towards us, the gun still held casually at his side, the fingers of his free hand twitching.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said softly. “That was a mistake you’ll pay for.”
“For God’s sake,” Terry said, her voice cracking. “She was torturing Charlie!”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Collingwood said, certainty ringing through his voice like struck crystal.
Desperate measures. Was that all you were doing, Vondie? Trying to break me? Is that why you told me I was pregnant? Even though …