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“Fight with the wifey?” she drawled. “But you want to make it all better.”
The woman Lindsey had nicknamed Strawberry Death was two feet away, that semi-automatic pistol of a make I had never seen before pointed at my chest. This time, no DPS uniform—she wore a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black running shoes. I wondered how long she had been watching.
I opened my mouth and closed it. I was not thinking of clever comebacks.
She drawled, “She’s pretty. A little of the Goth girl left in her. If I had time, I’d suicide you both. Suicided is better, cleaner. But I don’t have time. Where are my stones?”
“What?”
“Are you hard of hearing? Where are my diamonds?”
So that’s what this was about.
“I don’t have them.”
“Then I’m going to have to keep the promise I made.”
“To who?”
“Whom,” she corrected. “You should know better, Doctor Mapstone, being an educated man. Whom.”
My feet felt very heavy as I spoke. “To whom?”
“Peralta.”
Gun in your face. Buy time.
“You told him this?”
“I didn’t have time,” she said. “But a girl’s got to keep her promises. Now, where are my stones?”
She smiled, showing a perfect set of white teeth, and made the mistake of taking two steps toward me as she answered.
I quickly stepped in close, as if we were about to dance. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late. I planted my right foot and calf behind her left leg and used this as a lever to push her backwards.
At the same moment, I grabbed her gun hand with my left hand while notching my right hand under her elbow. It incapacitated the arm, pushed the gun aside, and helped propel her off balance and down hard.
Thanks to this straight-arm-bar, the gun came loose before she could pull the trigger and I fell on top of her.
This should have knocked the air out of her, but it didn’t. She wrestled, punched, and made grunting and growling sounds.
She also wore Chanel Number Five.
My face was instantly on fire. It took a couple of seconds to realize this was a result of her raking fingernails across me. She tried a kick in the groin, but I blocked that by turning to the side. Then she bit me on the wrist.
That let her struggle toward the pistol on the grass while I grasped the waist of her black jeans to hold her back. Her hair had come loose and I pulled on it hard. She screamed and cursed me. My reach was longer and with my other hand I tossed the gun into a hedge. Something black and sudden came into my vision, followed by pain and starbursts. She kicked me in the face with her running shoe.
Her move toward the bushes and her weapon caused me to pull my .38. Before I could even raise the revolver, she sprinted away, leaving her pistol on the ground.
It took me a few seconds to get my balance. She had nailed me good with that kick.
By the time the dizziness faded, she held a good head start and she was fast.
She ran east on Cypress.
I pumped my arms and hammered the asphalt across Third Avenue, over the curb, and across the uneven, eighty-year-old sidewalk. But she was younger and I couldn’t catch her.
Her lead extended. She wove in and out of palm trees on the parking lawns, making me momentarily lose sight of her.
