Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

I got to my knees. My hand was throbbing. The room swayed and rocked and I thought for a moment I might vomit. I steadied myself on a crate of beer.

He said, “That’ll do fine.”

I pushed myself to my feet. “If I’m going to die,” I said, “I won’t do it on my knees.”

He snorted. It might have been a laugh.

I said, “Is Dehan alive? Have you killed her?”

He nodded. “Yes, but don’t worry. You’ll be joining her soon. I’ve never killed a man before. It’ll be a new experience. A cop, too. Two cops in one night. That’s something.”

I felt empty. It was as though the floor fell away from under my feet. We don’t realize it, but we all live with pictures of our past and our future crowding our minds. The moments, hours, days and even years that have passed and are to come are permanent occupants of our minds. They give our lives coherence and meaning. In that one, brief instant, all of my future moments disintegrated. My future, my life, lost its meaning. All I could do was stare at him and try to make sense of what he had said. It had been a throw away comment, but with it, with that casual ease, he had thrown away Dehan’s life, and mine with it.

Dehan was dead.

NINETEEN

He pointed at the wine rack. “It’s not as sophisticated as it looks.” He gave an almost apologetic laugh. “All I did was take the door off the annex and put some casters on the wine rack. Give it a push.”

I frowned at him. “Is she in there?”

He nodded and grinned. “Wayne likes his spot by the river. I prefer it here. It’s…” He shrugged. “I don’t know, more cozy. Push.”

It was unreal. I felt that reality was slipping away from me. I shook my head. “Am I going to see her…?”

He raised his eyebrows high on his forehead and smiled. “Yeah! Go on. Push.”

It was too much for my brain to grasp. She was just a few feet away from me, on the other side of the wine rack. Every instinct in my body told me to go to her. But I had seen many times what strangulation does to somebody, and to see Dehan like that was unimaginable. All I had was the past: her looking at me from behind her shades, tying up her hair behind her head, raising her sunglasses to squint at me with that beautiful trace of a smile. I needed to preserve those memories, but I also needed to be close to her, however she looked now.

I moved to the wine rack and pushed. It rolled easily to the side, revealing a gaping door with an old, peeling frame. There was a soiled mattress on the floor, a short coil of green nylon cord, a chair. Dehan was not there.

I felt a hard shove in my back and I staggered forward. I turned, knowing what was coming next: the crack of the Smith & Wesson, the crushing impact of the hot slug on my chest, the burning, searing pain. I had felt it before, but this time it would be terminal.

There was a scream. It filled the small room. It was like a banshee exploding from the gates of hell. I saw the muzzle of the pistol pointing at me. I saw it spit fire and kick. At the same time I saw Dehan, tall, lanky and wild, leaping at Teddy through the doorway, gripping the barrel of the automatic with her left hand and pummeling his belly with her right fist.

Next thing, she had levered the weapon from his fingers and smashed her right foot into his gut. He staggered back and crashed into a stack of red Coke crates, spilling them and shattering them in a spreading pool of foaming black liquid.

I said, “Dehan…” but my throat was too tight to let the word out.

She threw the gun on the floor. It fired and I stared at it for what seemed like an hour but was less than a second as a plume of dust erupted in slow-motion from the wall, where the slug had buried itself. I looked back at Dehan. She had her fists balled and was advancing on Teddy, who was crawling backward, trying to get to his feet. I saw blood trickling down his arm from where he had fallen on the shattered bottles. And, as he struggled away from her, I saw the jagged glass edge of a broken bottleneck.

I said, “Dehan, no, wait…”

But it was like a nightmare where you need to call out, but your throat is paralyzed. He scrambled to his feet and rushed her, swinging the cruel glass blade at her face. She weaved back and it missed her. Three jabs followed into his face, left, right, left, and she was roaring at him, “Come on! You want to strangle me, you piece of shit? Come on! Do it!”

He was bleeding from the nose and his eyes were wild. He stormed at her. I watched the blade miss her again by an inch as she delivered a right cross to his jaw. His leg wobbled and he staggered back three steps. She screamed at him again. “Come on! What’s wrong with you? You’re the big man! You’re the killer! You get off killing women! Come on! Kill me!”

Upstairs I heard the wail of sirens, loud. They slowed, seemed to stab the air a couple of times. I snapped out of my trance. It had been just a couple of seconds. But it was a couple of seconds too long. I bent, picked up the pistol and stepped out. I aimed the gun at Teddy and said, “Freeze. It’s over. Put down the bottle.”

Dehan glared at me. There was rage