Final Hour (Novella) Read Free

vehicles. Yet she needed to get through the traffic lights that the blonde cleared or be left behind at an intersection.
    She was never quite close enough to read the license plate on the convertible, which was the minimum information that she needed. But when the blonde pulled into the parking lot at Gelson’s market, Makani was given the opportunity to get the number on the tags and perhaps more.
    She parked at a distance from the would-be murderer and watched the woman move away across the sun-baked blacktop. Undulant currents of heat shimmered up from the pavement, slightly distorting the blonde’s taut form, as though her body might be only a superb illusion, a masquerade by which something demonic passed for human.
    The moment the woman entered the supermarket, Makani told Bob, “Wait for Mommy,” sprang from the Chevy, and hurried to the Mercedes convertible. With a felt-tip pen that she had taken from her purse, she quickly recorded the number of the license plate on the palm of her left hand.
    Even if the blonde intended to buy only one or two items from the market, she would be gone at least five minutes. More likely ten. The convertible’s top was down, an invitation.
    Makani opened the passenger door, slipped into the seat, and popped the lid on the console box. Chewing gum, a tin of breath mints, a matchbook-size folder of lens-polishing papers for those wraparound sunglasses, a ballpoint pen clipped to a small notepad, the required proof of insurance, about a dozen business cards from local shops and restaurants…She plucked out the vehicle registration, which revealed that the owner was Ursula Jean Liddon; there was a familiar street name that Makani knew to be located in a gate-guarded community in that neighborhood of Newport Beach known as Newport Coast.
    Having taken less than three minutes for her investigation, she returned the registration to the console box, closed the lid, and got out of the convertible. Returning to her ’54 Chevy, she saw that the pickup once parked beside it was gone. The driver’s door stood open, and the long-legged blonde sat sideways on the driver’s seat, reading the vehicle registration.
    Bob had either bolted to the backseat or had been moved there.
    He hung his head out a window, looking aggrieved.
    When she saw Makani, the blonde flung the registration onto the pavement.
    Makani hurried to retrieve the crumpled paper before the light breeze skittered it across the parking lot. When Makani rose from a stoop, the registration in hand, Ursula Liddon was less than a foot away, looming over her.
    That piercing blue stare, which had earlier been cold, was now hot, radiant with malice and contempt. “Makani, huh? Hisoka-O’Brien. Baby, sorry to tell you, the pretentious hyphen can’t disguise the fact that those are two mongrel races, which makes you a mongrel twice over.”
    Makani did not respond, but neither did she look away.
    Ursula Liddon said, “You think I’m stupid, I wouldn’t notice this souped-up joke car of yours? I told you, butch, I don’t want what you’re selling.”
    Accepting the cover story that the blonde’s misapprehension offered her, Makani said, “You can’t know till you try.”
    “You think there’s
anything
I haven’t tried? So you want me. So does everyone. Get over it. You come near me again, best you’ll get is a nasty scar.”
    A four-inch blade flicked from the yellow plastic handle of a knife that appeared in the blonde’s right hand no less mysteriously than a dove might manifest from a magician’s silk handkerchief. The point was half an inch from Makani’s navel. They were standing so close together that anyone chancing past would probably not have seen anything amiss.
    Although Makani’s first impulse was to take the weapon away from Liddon, she restrained herself for two reasons. First, there was a small chance she would fail, in which case the blonde, who seemed considerably less stable than a gyroscope, might in a