Rice took a deep breath, mostly to steady herself. Said: “So,” to neither of them in particular. “That’s it, then.” She looked at Horatia, gone green in the weird light. “If DD and I go out the front door together, we’ll probably distract them enough you could maybe slip out the back…”
“No. Forget it.”
“Look, one of us needs to get out of here alive, okay? And given you’re the only one knows the Highlander formula…”
“No!” Horatia backed away, until she stood silhouetted against the light from one window. “Rice, I am not leaving you, so don’t even try to make me—” She staggered and fell to her knees, glass breaking behind her with a clean tinkling punch, as a spreading blotch dark
ened her shapeless green sweater.
“‘Rache!” Rice dove across the room to catch Horatia, while DD hit the floor on the other side, peering upwards; felt something snap inside her as she did so, grating inside her ribcage as she lowered Horatia across her lap. “Oh Christ, no, please, no…”
Horatia sighed. Then said, in a ridiculously clear voice: “oh, give me a break, Rice.” She parted the hole in her sweater, probed the wound beneath, then let her head fall back. “No, that’s it. Clean shot, police marksman. No repairing that.”
Rice touched the matching hole in her own chest, from which the paste-on jewel had long since been lost. Sparkling powder drifted down, scattering across her fingers. Amazingly, she found herself smiling.
“You fucking liar,” she said, tenderly. “So what, more tests? or did you just absorb it, by osmosis?”
Horatia sat up, shaking her head. “Sample doses. Thought I was still below the critical exposure threshold.” A beat. “Guess not.”
“Hmh. I think maybe I do love you, you know that?”
Horatia just rolled her eyes. Cool: “Well, I know I love you.”
“Bitch.”
A spasmodic hacking came from DD, and they both looked over to see his chest rising and falling in what Rice realized, freakily enough, was laughter. He covered his wound with one hand, jabbed one thumb at himself with the other. “Sssooh hwhat’s that…maahke me?”
“You?” Rice grinned her old I’d-fuck-the-world-if-I-found-the-right-hole grin. “You’re the boy with the toys, Dieter. Just how many guns you got stashed around this shithole, anyway?”
After a second, his own grin almost reluctantly answering hers: “Mhor’n…enough.”
DD caterpillared across the floor into the bedroom, staying below the windows, and came back dragging a suitcase. Rice flipped it open. Boxes of clips and shells spilled across the floor, along with a half-dozen Browning automatics and a greasy-sheened shotgun.
Rice looked at Horatia, who took her hand and squeezed it hard. She picked up a pistol and slapped in a clip, just the way she’d seen in a thousand movies—and hey, she’d been right. It wasn’t that hard to figure out, with the right incentive. Then again, she always had been the smartest person she knew…
(…well—second smartest.)
“Okay, then,” she said.
HIS FACE, ALL RED
“You’re up very late, my dear,” the old man said, when Leah came over to hand him a menu and pour some complimentary water. It was 3:37 a.m. by the clock above the range, and the place was pretty much deserted—just her, him, and Amir and Gue back in the kitchen.
She shrugged, indicating the sign in the front window. “Twenty-four hours. Means somebody’s always gotta be up all night, and that’s me.”
He turned to study it a moment, quizzically, like he hadn’t even realized it was there, even though he must’ve passed right by it to get to the front door. Then replied, without much surprise, or interest, “Oh, well, yes.”
The old man had one of those crazy accents, prissy and kind of hot at the same time, every vowel struck like a bell—sounded like Gandalf, basically, or maybe Jean-Luc Picard. Leah couldn’t begin to reckon his actual age. Also, the nearer she got to him, the more she saw how his skin was kind of...flawless, creepily so. Eyes like blue glass, narrowed by smile-lines; perfect teeth, too, and wasn’t that weird, for an English dude? When he smiled, he looked like everybody’s favorite librarian. But he was wearing a decrepit, faded Lamb of God T-shirt that’d seen better decades and a pair of bright pink sweatpants, both much too big for his hawk-slim frame, with a cracked and battered set of Crocs Leah swore to God she could see his (slightly over-long) toenails through.
“What’s with the clothes, sir?” she asked, trying to make it sound funny, charming even—but she had to guess it probably didn’t sound like either of those things, because his good cheer faded on contact; he frowned slightly and looked down, studying the outfit like (again) someone had stuck it on him without his noticing.
“What is with them?” he repeated, genuinely baffled. Then: “oh, these aren’t mine; I found them in a trash-bin, I think. The one at the end of that alley beside your fine restaurant, with ‘Twister Relief ’ written on its side.”
“I don’t think that stuff is meant for...somebody like you,” Leah began, immediately feeling even sillier; now it was the old man’s turn to shrug, however, giving her an excuse to change the subject. “What was wrong with what you were already wearing?”
“Oh, it simply wouldn’t have done at all, my dear, not for a public venue. For one thing, my suit was almost completely covered in blood. And for another, I had been wearing it a good twenty years already, at least.”
Leah only realized she was staring at those amazing teeth of his—so white, so straight, so sharp—when he snaked his tongue out, unexpectedly, and licked them, like an animal. Completely out of left field, and gross, too; perverted, somehow, or at least profane. For anybody that age to be getting such an apparent charge out of being hungry, breathing in deliberately, holding it like a mouthful of weed-smoke...tasting the air itself, sensually, as though it were a steak he longed to take a bite out of...