Cherry Bomb Read Free Page B

mercy killing. Alex derives no plea sure from mercy.
    She holds his shoulder, keeps him turned away so the spray of the carotid doesn’t splash her Dolce & Gabbana. He moans a little, but resigns himself to his fate quickly, collapsing into a clump of bloody, dirty rags. The alley, like most in the area, is narrow and deserted.
    Alex lights a cigarette and waits for him to stop breathing. She doesn’t inhale, because she doesn’t smoke. If someone happens to walk by, a nicotine break is a good excuse for standing around in an alley.
    Two minutes pass. No one walks by. For a population of six hundred thousand, there aren’t many people on the street. Maybe it’s the crummy weather.
    “D…deh…deh…”
    The bum is trying to talk, but he’s having some problems; most of his breath is bubbling out through the hole in his neck. She nudges a patch of unbloodied clothing with her toe.
    “Last words are important. Try to finish.”
    “D…deh… devil ,” he manages, somewhere between a whisper and a gurgle.
    Alex smiles, but only the right side of her face moves.
    “The dev il isn’t real, buddy. I am.”
    The bum expires, rheumy eyes going dull, and the blood finally stops pumping. Breaking his neck would have been quicker, but that would have meant getting behind him, finding a good grip. Changing her hair color is annoying enough. Alex doesn’t want to fuss with lice shampoo as well.
    Alex peels back his sweatshirt, and the smell gets so bad it activates her gag reflex. She removed the bandage from her nose a few days ago, not because the break was fully healed, but because it drew more attention than her scars, even under a veil. Now she wishes she’d waited; a nose brace and plugs would have prevented this awful odor from assaulting her.
    The money roll is in his pants pocket, almost the diameter of a soda can. During her stint in the marines, she knew of an MP who would roll drug dealers and pimps when he needed fast cash, the logic being they always had a wad. The downside was they also carried weapons, and had unsavory friends.
    When Alex needed money, her solution was less complicated. Homeless people carry their entire fortunes on them. Though some were drunks and druggies, spending their last nickels to score, the schizos and psychotics tended to hoard cash. It took her less than an hour to find one on the street, muttering to himself. When she shoved him into the alley, he was more interested in protecting his plastic bags full of precious cans than his own throat.
    She flips through the bills, which are surprisingly clean and crisp, and concludes she’s just made around six hundred bucks. Alex tucks the roll into her laptop bag, checks the sidewalk for pedestrians, then steps out of the alley and heads for her car. It’s parked on the street next to a small bookstore. A recent model Honda Accord, so popular it’s anonymous. In her younger years, she preferred to steal sports cars. But those are conspicuous.
    Or perhaps, Alex thinks, I’m simply mellowing with age.
    She approaches it from behind and inspects the trunk, satisfied that the car’s previous owner hasn’t begun to leak any bodily fluids. Since killing Jack’s fiancé three weeks ago, Alex has switched vehicles three times. Perhaps a bit overly cautious, but she doesn’t want to leave Jack such obvious bread crumbs. She prefers to keep the lieutenant guessing.
    Exactly twenty days have passed since Alex was a guest of the Heathrow Facility, a maximum security prison for the criminally insane. She’d been put there by Jack, who had torn off half of her face in the process. The skin grafts, done by unskilled surgeons on the public dime, left Alex pink and mottled from her eye to her chin. She looked like a crazy quilt made out of Spam.
    While in Heathrow, Alex had a lot of time to think. About revenge. And about the future. She planned two elaborate schemes. The first was to exact some payback. The second was larger in scope, but would