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“I think you already know my name,” she said.
Logan leaned on his desk, his bulky frame briefly knocking his tiny monitor. Behind him, she could see into the building’s compacted warehouse. Rows of industrial-sized freezers, each one padlocked and bolted to high heaven. She doubted there was any genuine produce or frozen goods inside any of them. This was Logan Nash’s personal storage space disguised as a real business. Money laundering, body laundering.
“Are you a repeat customer?” he asked.
“Nearly.”
Logan smiled then took a few steps back from the desk. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Didn’t think I could find you, did you? Thought you were untraceable.”
“Miss, we’re listed everywhere.”
“Victims showed water retention. Why? Because you froze them before dumping them, to confuse the time of death. I knew you needed a private place to store them, and you Diamonds have no shortage of businesses, do you? You’re the only freezer rental place in the city. Quite a niche industry, right? Who’s going to need something like that? Maybe farmers? No farmers around here. Grocery stores? They’d have their own. Contract killers?”
“Lots of people use our services,” Logan said. His words and expression were at odds with each other. Ella didn’t take her eyes off his.
“All I had to do was check your employee records, and what a surprise. The same person has owned this place since the eighties. You.”
Logan backed away a little further. “Miss, I think you need to leave.”
“So I’m here for those hundred-plus victims, for Robert Reed, and for my old man. The game’s up.”
Another extended silence. Ella was done with talking.
Logan finally said, “Sorry, but you’re misinformed. I think you should go, before I call security.”
“Funny,” Ella laughed. “I haven’t heard or seen anyone else while I’ve been here. Logan, it’s just me and you now. Just like it was twenty-five years ago.”
Logan pursed his lips, which then turned into a grin. In the distance, Ella heard an irritating buzzer sound. Some kind of alarm that must have been on a timer.
Because it was the same one she’d heard on the phone.
Logan caught it too. A flicker of recognition on his face that downgraded his smirk to a scowl. He gazed into the warehouse, then back at Ella, then rubbed his face in a display of exhaustion.
Ella knew it was an act.
“I told you,” Logan said. He inhaled deeply, held his breath for a moment. “It was twenty-six.”
And the man was gone. Bolted away, feet pounding against the concrete floor, pushing his way through the double doors that led into the back area of his store. Ella’s heart rate hadn’t dropped below one-twenty the whole time, but now it shot up to cardiac arrest levels.
She was across the foyer, over the counter, quick on Logan’s trail. She burst through the same doors into the warehouse and saw him darting for the bay exit. Ella had seen this scene enough times to know how it went, and she wasn’t going to repeat it with Logan Nash. This battle had already gone on long enough.
Ella pulled out her pistol without hesitation, aimed at the assassin, and pulled the trigger, once, twice, three times, four times. It didn’t matter how fast Logan ran; he couldn’t outrun a bullet. Ripley always told Ella that if she was sure of a person’s guilt, then she shouldn’t hesitate to shoot, fire, ground them into a bloody heap while she had the chance. She didn’t need grand showdowns, didn’t need to extract their reasons before locking them up for life. Sometimes, justice was enough.
And twenty-six years was enough, Ella thought.
Gunfire echoed around the high-ceilinged depot, blood spurted from Logan Nash’s legs, tripping him to the ground with a nauseating crack. The assassin yelled inaudibly, tried to crawl toward freedom. Smears of blood trailed him as he inched along the ground, but defeat had already taken hold. Ella could scarcely believe that she’d reduced this man – this supposed relentless killing machine – to a quivering heap in just a few breaths. All those nightmares she’d had where this man assumed the form of an uncatchable, unbeatable phantom dissolved in the wake of raging bullets, and now this walking nightmare was nothing more than a bloody mess, crawling along like an insect in the throes of death.
Ella was beside him, watching the man slither and writhe like a dissected worm. It was a surreal sight, one that she’d stopped believing was ever possible for the longest time.
She reached down, rolled him onto his back. Logan’s eyes were clasped shut, a coward too afraid to face his vanquisher. Ella sheathed her gun and forced open the man’s eyes.
“Motherfucker, you’re going to look at me when I kill you, understand?”
“Don’t,” Logan pleaded. One hand darted to the bullet wound on his thigh, but Ella shut it down. She pinned him to the floor, spat in his face, then smashed him in the nose with twenty-six years of fury backed up in the shape of a fist. She felt the recoil, like she’d just clobbered an iron wall. One or more of her knuckles broke in the process, but she felt nothing. Nothing but unbridled passion and the sweet sensation that justice was finally being served.
With one blow, she’d rendered Nash’s face a featureless, crimson mask. The impact of her single punch had shred the cartilage in his nose, dislodged one of his eyeballs. If anyone deserved a merciless, unrelenting assault, it was the assassin, the annihilator, the dream-haunter. In times like this, she usually felt a shred of sympathy for the person at her mercy, but here she didn’t feel a thing. No remorse, just pure disgust. Today, she was happy to embrace her moniker as the angel of death.
