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“Right, your crappy life, it’s somebody else’s problem.”
“You’re damn right it is.” She waggled her head again. “All that gold. What didhe say, half a billion?”
“Something like that. But it’s just money, Donna.”
She laughed bitterly. “Easy to say unless you don’t have any.” She groaned and clutched her side. “Shit, it hurts so bad.”
“Put down the gun, Donna. I can get you some help for the pain, but you have to put the gun down first.”
She sat up straighter and her features calmed a bit.“I’m gonna get the death penalty, Decker,” she said quietly. “All the stuff I’ve done.”
“Even if you do, it never happens fast.”
Decker could tell that her blood loss was nearing the critical stage. She started to stammer.“I’m n-not going to prison. Ex-cop. Not going to p-prison. No way. N-no way.”
“You don’t want to do that,” said Decker, seeing where this was going.
“I was a g-good cop. I really was. And…and then it all w-went t-to h-hell.”
Decker could see that her face was growing pale as her blood pressure dropped with each pump of her heart. There was clearly only one outcome now.
“How’d you get hooked up with Ross?” he asked, trying to distract her.
She seemed to perk up with his query and said clearly, “Known himforever. He needed some help on the inside. He knew about my dad, and my mom. He knew I was kind of desperate. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“Alice Martin didn’t know about you, did she?”
She shook her head. “T-to her, I was the nice, good c-cop.”
“What about Green?”
She shook her head again. “Nobody knew about me other than Ross. He had Martyand a bunch of other cops on the payroll. But I was the f-fail-safe. Otherwise, Marty c-could’ve fingered me when you nailed him on Bond’s m-murder.”
“Put the gun down, Donna.”
“Not gonna do that.” She looked up at him with pleading eyes. “Shoot me, Decker.” She pointed to her forehead with her gun muzzle. “Right here. Please. Fellow cop asking a favor. Just do it.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”
“Okay, I just thought I’d ask,” she said grimly.
She stuck the pistol in her mouth, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Decker didn’t react to this. In fact, he knew it was the logical outcome. And maybe it was better that way. He stepped over to the body, which had slumped sideways. The wall behind Lassiter was smeared with herblood and brains.
As Decker looked down at the body he closed his eyes as the electric blue color that he normally associated with death flashed across his mind. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt slightly nauseous and claustrophobic.
He almost had to smile, and would have if he hadn’t been standing over Lassiter’s corpse. She was a bad cop, for sure. Butshe was still a cop. And he wasn’t going to celebrate her death.
Yet maybe tomorrow he would be the same old Decker after all, at least the one the blindside hit had created. And in a world that seemed to be nothing except unpredictable, maybe that was as good as it got.
