Jesus fuck, she had dyed it red.
“What?” she asked, defensively. “I was tired of looking like me.”
Katie had been a redhead.
Katie was his dead pregnant fiancee, who was waiting to give birth sometime in the afterlife, whenever Kowalski could arrange to be there.
“Huh,” he said, then took another slug of beer.
And that’s when people started showing up to kill them.
You have to admit, the second team was pretty good,” the interrogator said. “Yeah,” Kowalski said.
“They were pretty good.”
They were:
Ms. Montgomery, a.k.a. “Ana Esthesia.”
Mr. Brown, a.k.a. “The Surgeon.”
Mrs. McCue, a.k.a. “Bonesaw.”
Their skills complemented each other, which was part of the reason for their silly nicknames.
But they were also a surgical strike team, specializing in accidental and bizarre sanctions. If you want someone to die and have nobody think twice about it, you call in these kinds of people.
So, yeah. Surgical strike team, surgical nicknames. CI-6 had a fondness for the literal.
Bonesaw dug her name. Then again, she was a pain freak.
The Surgeon hardly ever spoke, so it was difficult to ascertain what he thought of his nickname, or if it even occurred to him that he should have an opinion. He did Sudoku. He answered most queries with “Yep.”
Ana Esthesia had a mental defect; she claimed to be able to rid herself of any kind of pain by inflicting the equal and opposite pain on others. Shoot her in the leg, and she’d immediately recover after shooting
She went in first.
There were only two ways into Lee Michaels’s apartment: up a caged elevator within a high tower that gave the complex its name, or up a winding set of concrete stairs. The elevator clacked and hummed so loudly it might as well have been an announcement:
She jumped a white partition meant to give the apartment’s patio a little privacy. She crouched down then inched her away around to the glass-paneled door, which opened out.
She didn’t carry weapons. She liked to use what she could find.
She found something on the patio: a little metal table, with a glass ashtray and a couple of Corona Extra bottle caps littering the top.
She cleared off the crap, hurled the table through the glass.
She stepped in directly behind it.
Kowalski was too distracted by Vanessa’s new hair color to fully comprehend why the glass patio door had suddenly exploded and a surly-looking teenager had come charging through it.
The teenager pushed Vanessa to the floor. Vanessa’s towel unraveled. The sight distracted Kowalski for another fraction of a second. In the time they’d been living together, he’d never seen her naked before.
The teenager charged and smashed her forehead into Kowal-ski’s. His eyes teared up, and he staggered back into the kitchen. It was difficult to keep his balance; his leg was still in a light brace. The Sierra Nevada slipped out of his hand, shattered on the floor.
The teenager was grinning.
Through blurred vision he could see her face a little better, and okay, maybe she wasn’t quite a teenager. She had young features, though—small mouth, upturned nose. And her dark hair had an ice-blue streak running down the front, which is some kind of silly shit teenagers do to worry their parents.
She reached out and slapped Kowalski’s face, as if to get his attention.
Then she followed up with a short, shockingly hard punch to his mouth, which loosened two of his teeth.
Kowalski slapped out at her, like he was trying to kill a fly. It was suddenly very hard to see. There were three teenagers standing in front of him. He was swallowing his own blood. Blood and pale ale: not a recommended combination.
Goddamnit, what had just happened?
The three teenagers wound up for another punch. Kowalski snapped off something cheap and dirty at the middle teenager. Her lip split.
Her eyes fluttered, and her lips quivered, as if she were going to cry. Jesus, he’d just punched a little girl in the fucking face.
Then she lashed out and nailed him in the mouth again. That one did the trick. Kowalski felt two teeth roll back onto his tongue. He had big teeth.
The teenager’s face changed. Tears went bye-bye; now she was beaming like it was Christmas morning.
“Hah!” she shouted.
What the fuck was wrong with her? Kowalski thought, trying to catch his own teeth before he swallowed them.
And how did they know about this place?
How did you know about the place?” “You led us there,” the interrogator said.
“So I didn’t lose the first team in Inglewood?”
“No, you did. They were even shot at by a couple of gang-bangers. Which made for an amusing getaway interlude. People are still giving them shit about it.”
“So how did you find us?”
The interrogator paused, then smiled. “You really don’t know, do you? Ana must have hit you harder than I thought.”
Kowalski looked down at the table. His vision still wasn’t right. His perfect 20/20 vision went away the moment that blue-streaked teenager headbutted him. The bitch.
Cunt,” Vanessa said, then smashed the teenager in the head with a steel tea kettle.
The girl fell to her hands and knees, scream-cried. She sounded like a tea kettle. Kowalski followed through with a boot stomp on her back, smashing her into the jagged remnants of the Sierra Nevada.
Kowalski looked up to Vanessa, who had three sets of breasts and six nipples.
God his vision was fucked.
Think about that later. Kowalski turned and spat blood into the sink. A tooth landed on porcelain. Another tumbled down the drain.
“Shit,” he said. He’d lost some upper teeth before, never one on the bottom row. It had been a point of pride with him. A small point, but still.
The teenager on the floor was sobbing violently now, her lungs pumping hard, her fingers shaking, her eyes
