Instead, he tightened his fist and pulverized the Milano. The crumbs rained down on David’s face. Some of the crumbs landed in the streaks of blood and hung there.
Jamie opened his hand. It was smeared with chocolate from the center of the cookie.
Here he was, trapped on a floor, faced with certain death, and his hands were smeared with blood and chocolate.
Oh, was life absurd.
“That was mean,” David said, then flicked his tongue out and caught a cookie crumb that had landed near the corner of his mouth. “Mmmm.”
Jamie stood up and walked back to the conference table. The champagne bottles were still lined up, beaded with moisture. Maybe he should force-feed David a mimosa. Shut him up permanently.
Uh-uh.
Everything else had gone to hell.
But he was no killer.
Besides, Nichole had kept David alive for a good reason: information. If there was the slightest chance they could beat an escape plan out of him, it would be suicide to throw it away.
But he couldn’t stay in here with him any longer. Because he would kill him.
“You’re not going to leave this floor alive.”
“I’ll find a way,” Jamie said.
“No, you won’t,” David said. “Even if you could, trust me, you don’t want to leave. You think you can just walk away from something like this? You think there aren’t people out there who want to make sure you’re dead? Along with your family?”
“It would be the last thing you’d ever do.”
“Tough talk from a tough guy,” David said. “No man wants to ever admit he’s powerless to protect his family.”
“Oh, suck it.”
“Whip it out, faggot.”
Jamie took the gun from his waistband and aimed it at David’s face.
“Oh, oh, please. Do it. Pull the trigger. Show me how tough you are.”
Nichole had said there were only two bullets left in this gun. But at this range, it would be a sure shot.
“Pretty please.”
This is what he wants, Jamie thought. Just like the cookie. The freak wants to die here on this floor. Why are you so eager to please him? He’s not your boss anymore. You don’t have to listen to him.
“With sugar on top.”
Jamie threw the gun on the floor, and headed for the conference room doors.
“Hey.”
David was clearly not happy. But Jamie didn’t care. He was almost at the doors.
“Hey! Come back here!”
Through the doors.
“I’m going to put the word out!” David screamed. “I’m going to make sure they rape your wife nice and good! They’ll skin your son alive! Right in front of her!”
Out the doors.
“They’ll like doing it! They live for this!”
The wall collapsed far easier than Amy would have imagined. The space around them swirled with atomized plaster dust. It was hard to tell the ceiling from the floor. But Amy trusted her hands. Which were wrapped around Molly’s neck and slowly, steadily crushing the air out of her. Her hands were the only thing that mattered now. Her strong hands. They had to be strong for Ethan.
The hallway to the conference room was long. Ridiculously long on elbows and knees and smelling your own cooked flesh. Nichole might as well have been crawling to Harrisburg.
But she just needed to make it to David.
And she would.
If she endured the searing agony of the electric range to stop the bleeding, she could endure the rest of this.
She longed for David in the most physical way possible.
Jamie tried the elevator button, simply because he had to, because wouldn’t it be hilarious if all this time David had been lying about the bypass?
He hadn’t been lying.
He pressed the button again, mashing his thumb into the plastic key as if he could override the bypass by sheer strength.
Damn it!
The fire tower doors were the only other option. He walked to the one closest to their offices, and was surprised to see a hook and wire hanging from the door handle. Had someone already opened this door and dismantled the nerve gas bomb?
Did he want to take that chance?
Only now, lying on the carpet and being strangled to death, did Ania realize her miscalculation. She’d thought the sight of Ethan’s corpse would incapacitate Amy. But it had the opposite effect. It had energized her. For the first time since childhood, Ania thought she might actually die.
Her left hand, attached to her left arm and damaged shoulder, was completely sapped of strength. Her right hand alone was not powerful enough to overcome the concrete grip of Amy’s hands. The awful press of Amy’s thumbs into her trachea. The tips of Amy’s manicured nails hooked into the back of Ania’s neck, as if probing for the place where the brain stem met spinal cord.
Her light-headedness was real now. Reality was being washed away in waves of gray. Not the plaster dust. Ania saw the gray when she closed her eyes.
Ania held her breath and squeezed Amy’s wrists with her one good hand. It wasn’t much of a defense.
This was not something she had anticipated.
How was Amy doing this?
By thinking of her true love.
It was something out of fairy tales, and Ania loathed fairy tales—at least the few she’d been allowed to read. But perhaps there was true magic in thinking about your true love.
So she thought of Jamie.
Jamie put his hand on the gleaming silver door handle. If he pushed it down, maybe he’d hear the click of the bomb in time. He could jump out of the way, find another way.
But there are no other ways, are there, Jamie?
Andrea, if you can hear me, know that your dumb husband tried the best he could, and this was the only way he could think of to make it back home to you….
On the floor, David heard a noise.
He couldn’t turn his head to see, but knew the sound well enough. The swishing of the conference room doors. Ah, Jamie was back. He must have seen the futility of his escape. Now was back to kill his boss.
Thank Christ.
“You left your gun here,” David said.
“I know,” said a voice.
It wasn’t Jamie.
But David, from his supine position on the floor, couldn’t see anybody. Was he now hearing things? Wouldn’t surprise him. He had been shot in the head and was completely starving. Nothing to eat all morning but the crumb of a Milano. Cruel tease that was.
“Hello, David,” said the voice.
A female voice.
Nichole.
He turned his head, and it hurt. But he could see her now. Crawling toward him, with red paint covering her hands. David couldn’t even see her hands, there was so much red paint. Why was she nudging the gun with her face? Pushing it toward him. Nosing it so that the barrel was pointed at him? Why didn’t she pick the goddamned thing up and get it over with already?
He just wanted to finish his mission and go home.
When Ania was Molly, she thought herself immune to America. And she was. Except for Jamie. He listened. He truly listened. He didn’t see her as a disposable part of a larger machine. He didn’t see her as a life support system for a pussy and a pair of tits—not that she showed them at work. For some reason Jamie put her at ease so much that she had to be careful not to slip into Russian. Jamie felt that much like home.