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On the far side of the double doors, Carson and the doctor exchanged victory smirks. “I often don’t like police officers,” Ahmed said.

“He was only doing his job the best he knew how,” Carson said, surprised at her own maternal tone. If Lespasse had been there, he would have been shocked to hear such forgiveness.

Lespasse. She’d seen too many friends die over the years to mourn them one at a time anymore, but she wished him well on this next leg of his Great Journey.

“Doctor, I need a telephone,” she said.

Their shared moment collapsed in his expression to more confusion. “Excuse me?”

“A telephone. It’s an urgent matter.”

“Your health is the most urgent matter at the moment,” Ahmed said.

Carson grabbed the hem of his scrub shirt with her good arm, igniting a lightning bolt of pain from her bad one. “Doctor, please stop.” The gurney glided to a halt. “It’s really not,” she said. “I love my own health as much as the next person-probably more, in fact. But in this case, it’s nowhere near as important as the phone call I need to make.”

Gun Bitch and the driver spoke with each other again and Felicia knew that the crescendo was about to begin. It was their manner of speaking, the conspiratorial tone. When Gun Bitch looked at her at the end of their exchange, Felicia knew that it would be bad for her.

The driver clicked the turn signal and started drifting toward the left-a shift in the natural order of a right- handed world to which she didn’t think that she could ever truly adjust-and as they slowed, Gun Bitch reached into her purse, looking for something. Felicia’s heart rate quadrupled. What could she possibly pull out?

It turned out to be a pair of clippers that looked like pliers and for a moment she thought she was looking at the instrument of her upcoming torture. When her captor leaned forward, however, and reached toward Felicia’s zip-tied ankles, she sensed that the bad ending to this adventure was at hand.

Felicia heard a snip and instantly her feet began to regain sensation that she hadn’t even realized they’d lost. She thought about kicking out at her captor, but then what? With her wrists bound to the man seated next to her, what would her next move be? Even if she knocked the bitch out with a kick to the head, she still wouldn’t be able to save herself.

“Don’t be stupid,” Gun Bitch said in English. She leveled her pistol an inch from Felicia’s forehead. “Move, I shoot.”

She pulled roughly on Felicia’s left shoulder to pivot her to the right. When she was facing the door, her arms stretched painfully beyond their limits, she first felt the closeness of her captor’s shoulders, and then the coldness of the clippers against her flesh as the tiny jaws slipped between the flesh of her wrists.

Snip.

She was completely free and she knew without doubt that she was seconds away from death. The instant her hands belonged to her again, Felicia knew it was time to act; just as she knew that her window to do so could be measured in seconds, not minutes.

Her first kick caught Gun Bitch in the stomach, triggering a cry that was equal parts pain and surprise. But the punch that landed squarely on her captor’s nose launched a shriek that was all pain and a fountain that was all blood.

The car slowed instantly, as if the driver himself had been the recipient of Felicia’s attack. That instant of inattention opened another window of opportunity. She lunged for the door handle and pulled, introducing a hurricane of wind and road noise.

Clearly still blinded by the blow to her nose, Gun Bitch swiveled her weapon in the direction of the noise and issued a command in a language that Felicia did not understand, yet whose meaning was universal: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Felicia punched the woman’s wrist, connecting squarely with the tendons on the soft underside and sending the pistol spiraling into the lap of her co-captive, who grunted reflexively on impact.

The vehicle slowed even more as the driver pivoted to see what was going on, but when Gun Bitch barked another order, he whipped back around to face front and acceleration forces kicked in again.

Felicia dove for the racing pavement.

Middleton knew that the urgency in Tesla’s tone had been driven by the presence of a corpse in the middle of his flat. His wrecked flat.

The body was a concern, of course, but Middleton had seen way too many of them over the years to get overly spun-up about one more. With a dead body, you got analytical. You could take your time. Someone dead today would still be dead a week from now, so the urgency was gone. The spattered blood and brains were literally and figuratively custodial matters-troubling annoyances to be cleaned up later with a little time, patience and detergent.

Far more troubling to him was the shattered violin on the floor. Resting as it was, scattered among the flotsam of overturned furniture and broken trinkets, Middleton knew in an instant why the concert had been postponed. It wasn’t a missing pianist or a technical problem. It was the missing star of the show.

“Who took Felicia?” Tesla wondered.

Middleton muttered, “Whoever left a dead man in my foyer.”

“They didn’t just leave him here. They shot him here,” Tesla said. “We need to notify the locals. Now that there’s a murder, we need to get them involved.”

“Fine.” Middleton couldn’t have cared less. Where the hell was Felicia? Why would anyone attack her like this?

“You say that so easily,” Tesla said, trying to draw him into the present. “But they’re going to ask some damn difficult questions.”

Middleton scowled at her and cocked his head, as if he’d just heard a foreign language being spoken. “What?” Then it fell into place. “Oh, OK. Fine. Whatever. Let them ask their questions. Nora, we need to find her.”

She shook her head. “No, we need to find them. They come as a package deal.”

But where to begin? With so many moving parts, how the hell were they supposed to-

His cell phone chimed in his pocket. “Jesus,” he spat, and as he looked at the caller I.D. display and didn’t recognize the number or even the exchange, he almost hit the ignore button. But then he thought better of it. When this much was going so wrong so quickly, you never knew where the next turn was going to lead. He brought the phone to his ear. “Middleton.”

“Carson.”

He recognized the difference in her voice and his gut tightened. “Are you all right?”

“Lespasse is dead,” she said. The simplicity of the delivery could have seemed harsh, but in this case, he sensed that by saying the words aloud, she’d freed herself of a burden.

“Dead! How?” At the exclamation from her colleague, Tesla’s head whipped around.

“Tampa was a trap. Place looked like it’d been empty for weeks. They had a bomb planted for us.”

His landline rang. He ignored it. “For you? How could they plant a bomb for you? They couldn’t know that you were coming.”

“If not for us, for someone. Jesus, Harry, cut me a break on the grammar, OK? I’m on my way into surgery.”

So Carson was hurt too. He hadn’t thought of that. “What happened to you?” The landline cycled through its third ring and Middleton nodded for Tesla to answer it for him.

“Some burns and broken bones. Not too bad, I don’t think.”

Despite her words, he could hear the pain and fear in her voice. “Is that what you say or does that come from the doctor?”

Carson said, “I didn’t call for sympathy, Harold. I have important news that I need to share before I go under the knife.”

Across the room, Tesla covered the mouthpiece with her hand and waved at Middleton.

Still stunned by the news of the death of his comrade and friend, Middleton stared at her blankly as he tried to focus on his own call. “Hold on, Connie.”