Page 90 of Devil's Bargain

“Hey. Counselor.”

He paused in the act of retrieving his jacket from the chair. He looked nearly back to normal. The cut on his forehead had been sutured, and his color was good. There’d be plastic surgery coming, for the skinned part of his arm, but he seemed to be dealing pretty well with that.

Better than she was, with the memory of his scream on the phone.

“You never told me how they got you.”

“I went outside,” he said. “I was going to get us coffee.”

“There’s coffee in the break room. You know that.”

He shrugged slightly. With his good arm. “I wanted to get you Starbucks. Kind of a joke.”

The smile melted her like butter. She watched him go, smiling, and shut her eyes to savor the warmth of the sunlight slanting over her face.

Naturally, the room didn’t stay quiet long. She heard the door swing open again, and cracked an eyelid. Lucia was moving slowly, but she was moving on her own, and dressed in street clothes instead of backless gowns. A distinct improvement, though it was, Jazz thought, the very first time she’d ever seen Lucia without full battle-dress makeup.

She looked young and very, very vulnerable. There was a livid purple bruise on her cheek where she’d hit the concrete in the shed after taking a bullet in her flak vest.

“Hey,” she said, and leaned against the wall as if she was either too cool or too exhausted to make it across the room to the visitor’s chair Borden had last occupied. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I took a double-barreled shotgun blast to the chest,” Jazz said. “By the way, remind me to send thankyou notes to the Kevlar people.”

“You’re taking it easy, right? Cardiac bruising’s nothing to take lightly.”

“I’m fine,” Jazz assured her. “No exertion for me for at least two weeks before they let me out of here. And then I’m on light duty for a month, they say.”

Lucia nodded and tucked her glossy straight hair back behind an ear, then walked over and seated herself. “They said you could have died.Commotio cordis.Sudden non-invasive impact to the chest, disrupting the heart rhythm.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t die,” Jazz said. She didn’t really want to talk about it, or about that moment when she’d felt her heart stop, or the light and the visions.

“You heard about the envelope they found at his house, right? The one postmarked yesterday morning?”

The killer—his name had been, prosaically, Dave Jennings—had never opened it. The police had, in their forensic analysis. It was a red envelope. It had said, on clean white paper that carried no logo or watermark of any kind, three words.Use head shots.

“Good thing he doesn’t check his mail,” Jazz said somberly.

“I think all this happened at the last minute,” Lucia said. “There was a voice mail on your cell phone telling you to check FedEx as soon as you got in, but it came while you were in the air.”

“Yeah, and I was a little busy panicking over the plane hurtling toward the ground,” Jazz said. “I’m guessing the people sending us the messages? Not Actors. At least, not Leads.”

“You think?” Lucia smiled slightly. “Presuming we buy any of this crap.”

“Presuming.”

Not that either of them would admit to it.

Jazz shook her head and let herself sink down on the pillows again. The world seemed soft-edged. Gentle. Quiet. Trees rustled outside of the hospital window and blended with the sound of turning pages as Lucia settled in with a book.

“Sleep,” she heard Lucia whisper, as her eyes drifted shut. “I’ll be here.”

Two weeks later, on the day she was scheduled to leave the hospital, Jazz had a new visitor. Lucia was gone to get the car; Borden had disappeared for a meeting with some attorney or other to go over paperwork. Even Manny was MIA, although he’d dropped by to furtively provide her with the password to get into the loft. After some persuasion, she’d also gotten him to give her the new address rather than send it to the dead drop.

She supposed that meant he was improving. That, and the love bite on his neck that without a doubt must have come from the lips of Pansy Taylor. Who didn’t hate him.

She was getting her clothes together, heartily ready to get the hell out of the hospital, when the door opened behind her.

It was Kenneth Stewart.

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