Page 113 of Lone Wolf

The vehicle closer yet, nearing the turn in to the office building’s parking garage. One man in the rear seat behind the driver, just a shadowed head and torso conveniently outlined like a range target. The Town Car changed lanes, the passenger vanishing from the sight line, hidden behind the driver and headrest. Crosswind looked to be low.

If it were Evan, he would take the driver first. Given a conventional windshield and a bit of luck, there was a chance to get it done in one, sending a round straight through the driver and into the target. If not he’d anticipate that the organic shrapnel would spook Dmitri from the car.

He’d just decided where he’d place the shot—just beneath the driver’s collarbone on the left side—when the windshield shattered and a hole appeared in the man’s chest as if Evan had thought it into existence.

The Town Car veered calmly out of its lane, slowing.

Karissa would be transitioning to the second shot now, working the bolt. As clearly as if he could see through the billboard, he envisioned her behind the rifle, butt seated at her right shoulder, head on slight tilt, dominant right eye not leaving the eye box of the scope.

Evan eased his own scope to the left rear door, anticipating Dmitri would make a panicked run, and sure enough he did.

Evan swept the Leupold and Phoenix-S to follow, reticle bullseyeing the bulge of flesh at the back of Dmitri’s shaved skull—primary target acquired —and then there was a puff of pink mist, the trailing crack of a supersonic bullet in flight. As Dmitri crumpled, Evan had to double-check that his finger was still outside the trigger guard. She’d even fired to the same rhythm; it was as though Evan had shot the man himself.

The car slowed, dribbling against two cars parked at meters, then rode up onto the curb and smashed into the newsstand in front of Book Soup.

Dmitri was laid out dead in the middle of the street. A girl in a latex dress froze in the crosswalk and screamed, box clutch purse jerking on its baby straps. Traffic veered and stopped and honked and the rest of the block lurched into frenetic action, pedestrians running to safety, others sprinting to help.

Evan looked back at the billboards just in time to see Lopatina’s black-clad form swing down on the scaffolding, launch itself onto the roof, and vanish over the lip to the adjoining building.

He traced her anticipated movement. Though his scope was pegged on the sidewalk below, he almost missed her.

She emerged from an alley one block over wearing a fitted red dress, sleeveless, with a high-low hem that showed off the fronts of her thighs and swooped down in the back to kiss her calves. She held a sequined black purse just large enough to contain a Manurhin MR73 Gendarmerie revolver. Red-striped white Adidas sneakers filled out the look and were better than pumps for fleeing a crime scene should the need arise. Her calves were defined, ankles strong, trained for impact.

Crossing the street, she buried herself in a stream of pedestrians, so there’d be no neutralizing her at the moment even if he hadn’t planned to follow her to bigger fish.

He hoped to see her move to a vehicle or parking structure.

Instead she drifted across Larrabee Street and pushed through glass-fronted swinging doors into an elegant restaurant. Now he understood the red dress.

She’d left her Savage 110 behind, and he did, too. Double sniper rifles would pretzel the crime-scene investigation, but there was nothing he could do about that.

He grabbed his fob watch, took the stairs down, thumped out through a rear door he’d left unlocked. The night was filled with excitement and energy, the air wavering at a dog-whistle vibrato.

He ignored the commotion, the incoming cop cars with sirens, the onlookers clustering at the street corners in herds for safety. Moving across one street and then another, he waited for the crosswalk light to change, the murder two blocks back fading into lesser consequentiality.

Forging across Sunset, he moved through the glass front doors that Karissa Lopatina had stridden through just minutes before, giving the maître d’ a polite nod.

Her red dress grabbed the focus of the restaurant—hiding in plain sight. She sat at the bar, facing away, her sneakers just reaching the foot bar of her stool. Her bare shoulders were on display, and they were feminine and powerful, athletic.

Evan walked over and sat down at her side.

50

Every Fucking Girl Bean Beetle Ever

Evan and Karissa Lopatina sat elbow to elbow, looking at each other in the mirror behind the bar. She wore a designer Band-Aid decorated with roses over her right ear where Evan had shot her. She had a fantastic body—not the way men bandied about the expression, though she was appealing as well, but fantastic anatomically. Lithe and muscular, compact biceps, tapered lats, breasts like muscled plates of armor. She had tall towering cheeks with Eastern European cheek bones, and her other features were plain and symmetrical, beautiful by default because there was not one damn thing wrong with them.

She was self-contained and self-possessed and seemed to require nothing from the world.

He knew he would kill her if he was good enough to get the upper hand. She was fully embodied in her power and menace, as much as Candy McClure, and to not engage her with lethal force would be an insult to everything she was and everything she’d fought to become.

The bartender approached wordlessly and set down a linen coaster.

They had the VDKA 6100 Evan had wanted earlier, so he ordered it now as a lowball on a block cube. A rocks glass was more solid, a better weapon than a thin-stemmed martini glass.

Perhaps for the same reason, she’d ordered similarly, a whisky highball. He could smell the peat on her breath and something deeper than that, a pheromone underlay that was attractive and menacing, a great cat in her lair.

“I always liked my ears best,” she said to the mirror and herself and no one in particular. “The lobes.” She shook her head, eyed the Band-Aid in her reflection. “Vanity.”