Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 39

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Despite his bruises and bite marks, Kirby was feeling more confident. Jordan might be on top, but he was weakening. Jasmine kept clawing at him like she was trying to work down his Levi’s.

What she would do then, only God knew.

Then he realized what Jasmine was attempting to do.

Sum’bitch!

Jasmine felt another fingernail bend back and tear as she clawed at the rough denim of Jordan’s jeans. She grabbed the edge of a side pocket, gripped and pulled, and the fingernail felt as if it had torn completely loose.

She felt the wetness of blood.

It made her fight all the harder.

Jordan was squirming around now, understanding and trying to help her. He couldn’t help much. One of Kirby’s arms was pinned beneath him, the other bent back and pinned by Jordan, but he was a powerful man and still plenty dangerous.

“You kids stop this right now!” he yelled. As if they’d attacked him and started the hostilities.

Jasmine got three fingers into Jordan’s side pocket and felt the smooth handle of the folding knife he always carried. She was elated. If she could just work the knife all the way out of the pocket, she could use one hand to open it with her teeth, then this struggle would end and that would be the end of Kirby.

How she hated him at that moment. He’d attempted to steal their future for whatever he could loot from their cold dead bodies.

Their future!

Her blood served as a lubricant. She worked, worked with her mangled fingers and felt the handle of the knife clear the edge of the pocket.

It was halfway out.

“You kids stop this now!”

“We ain’t kids,” Jordan said.

“And we ain’t gonna stop,” Jasmine added.

“I’m warnin’ you!” Kirby yelled. “You’re gonna be in a lotta trouble!”

“For doin’ to you what you were gonna do to us?” Jasmine said. And the knife was free.

Jasmine gripped the knife as best she could in her uninjured hand. Like most folding knives it had a groove along the back of the blade where you could hook your fingernails into it and pull the blade open.

“A lotta trouble!” Kirby chose for his last words.

Jasmine didn’t have the fingernails for this task. She gripped the knife carefully by its handle, holding her torn nails so they were under the least possible pressure.

Kirby knew death was on its way and bucked powerfully.

Jasmine was straddling him now, staring at a pulsing blue artery in his neck. She fixed her eyes on it, knowing the knife would go directly to its target. Drew her knife hand back and gripped it hard.

Too hard.

The blood from her torn nails had made the smooth knife handle even smoother, and too slippery to hold.

Jasmine felt it slide out from between her fingers like a watermelon seed. She made a futile grab for the knife, praying even that she could catch it by the blade.

But Kirby had worked his pinned arm free and grabbed at the knife while it was suspended in midair. He couldn’t get a grip on it but he knocked it away. It went skittering across the boxcar floor, out of everyone’s reach.

Kirby used his free arm to punch Jordan in the side of his head, then shoved him away along with Jasmine. He started to crawl toward the knife. Jordan was only half conscious, and Jasmine was winded

“I’ll show you little pissants somethin’ now!” Kirby wheezed.

Jasmine was terrified that he was right. He was closest to the knife, and could move faster and was stronger than either of them. She and Jordan were as good as dead.

Until her hand closed on a sock full of gravel.

She started crawling faster toward Kirby, not toward the knife itself. That puzzled him for a few seconds.

A few seconds were enough.

The first blow with the makeshift sap dazed Kirby.

Then Jasmine mounted him like a horse and hit him again and again and again . . .

The train was on the flat now, and in vast darkness. It speeded along, making time, toward the bright mystery of its wavering light far ahead. The train wouldn’t go anywhere but straight for miles, and the source of the light was unseen, a wavering unsteady glow up ahead and off to the sides.

Jordan and Jasmine were still breathing hard, in concert with the rhythms of the train rattling through the fields.

Jasmine said, “Let’s get rid of him.”

Jordan, leaning with his back against the swaying boxcar wall, looked over at Kirby stretched out motionless on the floor. It was too dark to see for sure, but there seemed to be a lot of blood around Kirby’s head. Kirby’s mouth was open. His eyes looked to be only half closed. His expression was that of a man slyly planning, except for the fact that he was so still. The dead didn’t plan.

Jasmine got up, her body swaying with the boxcar so she could maintain her balance. Jordan used the boxcar wall as a support helping him to get to his feet. Fighting off dizziness, he almost fell.

They made their way to where Kirby lay.

“He gone?” Jasmine asked.

“Far as we’re concerned,” Jordan said. “Time for Mister Kirby to get off the train.”

Together, they gripped Kirby by his shirt and leather belt and inched him toward the open steel door. He’d left a large bloodstain, glistening black in the darkness.

Jasmine sat down on the floor and shoved Kirby along with both feet. Jordan, with a wide stance, stood over Kirby and used Kirby’s belt to lift him slightly and shove him toward the black rectangle of the door.

They pushed together, using all their might. Kirby’s arm jammed in the door, as if he didn’t want to leave.

Then the arm came loose, and he was out in the black night, as if plucked from the train by someone or something that had been waiting for him all along. Jordan leaned out the door and looked toward the back of the train. There was Kirby, his momentum still tumbling him along near the steel wheels. Then he bounced into invisibility and the night had him.

“Dead or alive,” Jordan said, “nobody’s gonna find him for a while. And if he’s dead, or even just unconscious, it’ll take a while to figure he fell off a train.”

Jasmine knew the rails would be all the clue the police would need to tell them where the body had come from, but she didn’t mention it to Jordan. He was still shaken up and not thinking straight.

He leaned back against the swaying boxcar wall and closed his eyes.

The train rattled on through the night.

44

New York, the present

It was a surprisingly cool morning. Quinn and Pearl were walking along Broadway toward Zabar’s to have breakfast and then buy some pastry for the rest of the Q&A personnel.

It had rained slightly during the night, but now the sky was cloudless. The colorful lines of traffic-stalled cars were punctuated by the occasional yellow cab. Sunlight glancing off concrete, steel, and glass made everything look recently washed, which in a way was the case. Here and there, glitters of dew still clung to weeds or grass that had inched their way up between edges and cracks in the pavement.

Pearl’s cell phone chimed and she walked slower and fished it out of her purse. She was afraid the caller was her mother, whom she deliberately and shamelessly saw too little of. But when she squinted down at the phone she saw the caller was her daughter, Jody.

Pearl and Quinn slowed to a near stop. A passerby bounced off Quinn, glared at him, and then looked closer and sweetened up.

“What’s up?” Pearl asked her daughter. It was a question she never asked without some trepidation.

“I went out to see Gramma at Assisted Living. She says she misses you, told me to let you know you should give her a call at the nursing home.”

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