Ice Cold Kill Read Free

seats and backrests. A window that looked out on gnarled, dyspeptic trunks, which is what passed for trees in L.A.
    She rummaged through the dying man’s trouser pockets, leaning him up against the smashed door like the legion of cadavers at Fort Zinderneuf. She found a lighter—old, burnished, and brass—and a fat calfskin wallet. She opened it and found what she wanted: a thick wad of dollars and euros.
    Perfect. Money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy time.
    *   *   *
     
    Banguera drew his own matching machine pistol, leather strap over his sloped shoulder. His eyes bulged as his partner stumbled back and fell on his ass against the far wall of the corridor. The ruptured artery in his groin was dampening his jeans with a fast-growing red stain. Guerrón began to twitch as his body went into shock. His H & K fell to the carpet by his side.
    *   *   *
     
    Daria left Patricio on his knees propped up against the door. She kicked off her stilettos and hitched up her already-short skirt to a decidedly unladylike level. She leaped up onto the cheap desk and used the lighter to ignite João Patricio’s stash of money. She held the burning end under the mandatory smoke detector that she had found in every room of every public building she had entered since defecting. I do so love American paranoia, she thought.
    An earsplitting alarm sounded and the tiny, tin windmill beneath the ceiling-mounted spigot began to rotate, splashing water everywhere.
    Daria dropped to the far side of the desk. Soaked to her skin, hair matted with water from the sprinkler, she stripped off her jacket—it was last season’s anyway.
    It was her own damn fault. She shouldn’t have come to the meeting without a gun. Oh, well. Kill and learn.
    She remembered a drill instructor from her Shin Bet days. Whatever can’t be used defensively, use offensively. The IKEA desk wouldn’t repel bullets but the cheaply made furniture was light enough to maneuver, and it rested on coasters so the office could be easily reconfigured for each new renter. She shoved the chairs out of the way and spun the desk anticlockwise so the short end faced the door.
    She started shoving. Her bare feet struggled to find purchase in the soaked carpet, but the light, cheap desk on its concave coasters picked up speed.
    João Patricio—kneeling against the door, barely conscious, right arm hanging limp and spooling out blood—half-turned to see the narrow edge of the desk only a meter from his face and moving fast. He screamed.
    *   *   *
     
    The alarm blared in the hall. Banguera felt the wheels fall off their well-crafted plan. He knelt to hoist up his friend as the busted door exploded off its hinges. He scrambled away as the door toppled like a felled tree, trapping Guerrón’s legs and drawing a howl of pain from the Ecuadorian. The Portuguese importer tumbled out into the hall, skull staved in, blood arcing in every direction. The fire alarm continued to shrill. Madre de Dios, Banguera thought, landing on his stomach, lo que el Diablo?
    He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He felt his machine pistol dig into his side, the strap still around his shoulder.
    He rolled over to free the gun but his eyes caught on a pair of bare feet standing on the felled door, which pressed down on Guerrón’s badly bleeding leg. Banguera’s eyes traveled upward from long, tapered legs, a short skirt, a soaked and translucent blouse, to a heart-shaped face.
    Only then did he realize the figure was holding Guerrón’s sound-suppressed machine pistol.
    *   *   *
     
    There were only a handful of offices in the incubator building and the fire alarm was sufficient to drive the few employees out into the parking lot on an otherwise dull Monday afternoon. No one noticed the bedraggled, barefoot woman, soaked to the skin, carrying stilettos and a limp, wet jacket, who padded out through the fire door and climbed into a nondescript car. She put the car in reverse,