The Blonde

figure it out, just like we did in Philadelphia. She told me I was sweet, but no. There was no way out. Not out of this.

“She thanked me for saving her.

“She thanked me for trying.

“She thanked me for the Beretta.

“And then I heard a gun crack. I dropped the phone. A while later, I called you guys to turn myself in.”

The interrogator stood up and started clapping. “Bravo,” he said. “Bra- fucking-vo.” He turned to a camera on the ceiling. “Did you get that on tape? I mean, cut it right now and submit it to the Academy. That is fucking Oscar-caliber material.”

The interrogator walked around to Kowalski’s side of the table, then leaned in close to his ear. “Two things, buddy boy. You said she dropped the gun in the banquet room. Hard to blow your brains out with a gun you don’t have.”

Then he grabbed Kowalski’s chin and used his thumb to pull down his bottom lip, exposing his lower teeth.

“And you’ve got all your teeth. When did you have time to see a dentist?”

Kowalski twisted his head away.

The interrogator looked practically orgasmic. “It’s pain time, Mikey boy.”

The next minute was what Kowalski expected. The guards came back into the room, handcuffed him, then dragged him back to the gleaming meat hook. They lifted him up, looped the links of the handcuffs over the hook, then let him drop. The cuffs cut into his wrists. Meanwhile, the interrogator had retrieved his knife. The blade caught some of the fluorescent lights in the room. It glistened.

The interrogator approached. Kowalski was hanging high enough so that his nipples were at eye level with the interrogator.

“Let me ask once more for the record,” he said.

“Sure,” Kowalski said.

“Where’s Lucia Black?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes!”

The interrogator moved in with the knife. Predictably, he immediately started trying to spread Kowalski’s legs. Going for the anal cavity. The interrogator gestured to the guards. “Grab a leg, each of you.”

This was going to hurt.

Not the anal cavity.

His mouth.

Specifically, pushing the tooth out of his gumline again.

It was going to really hurt.

The interrogator had been right. Kowalski had been spinning him a line of bullshit, ever since the stuff about the banquet room, after Lucia Black had announced she’d reprogrammed Proximity.

Sadly, that last part was true.

Vanessa had been turned into a walking, talking killing machine.

But what Kowalski hadn’t mentioned was that he’d grabbed Lucia before she could run away.

Vanessa had bolted, yes. She had driven away and inadvertently killed seventeen people. Many of them American tourists. It was not pretty. Kowalski wasn’t going to lie to himself.

He couldn’t imagine the horrors taking place in her mind.

She was still shell-shocked over the adulterers she’d slaughtered.

But instead of searching for Vanessa, Kowalski had attacked the problem at the root. He took Lucia Black and applied his signature move: arm around her neck until she was unconscious.

She woke up an hour later, strapped to a dentist’s chair.

A chair belonging to Kowalski’s Mexican dentist friend, who was just gearing up for a long tequila-fueled night.

Kowalski told him not to worry. He’d take it from here.

First he kissed Lucia. Deeply.

He wanted to get those Proximity-eating nanites into his own system.

Then he settled in for some real work.

Lucia resisted for a while. But by the time Kowalski was finished with the drill, she was not only ready to deactivate the nanites in Vanessa’s bloodstream and tell Kowalski how to repro-gram Proximity from her handheld, but perfectly willing to reveal the formula for Coke as well as the eleven herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She spilled everything.

Even how her brother used to finger her in secret when they were kids.

Kowalski thanked her, then smothered her with a wet towel. Figured that was doing her a favor. Later, he’d cut off her head, tell them it was her. Vanessa. Their mysterious blonde, now a redhead.

The real Vanessa did call the hotel near dawn, crying and ready to end it all, even though she didn’t have a gun. Kowalski was glad she didn’t remember the grenade launcher in the trunk of the Taurus.

After Kowalski assured her she was safe, and unable to kill anyone else, they met up again. They talked. They made plans. They used Lucia’s handheld device to do a little reprogramming of their own. They figured out a way to end this, for good.

For good, at least for now.

Make them suffer a little in return.

They visited Kowalski’s dentist again, who by this point had mostly sobered up.

“You want me to do what?” he asked.

He was intoxicated enough to do it anyway.

Kowalski finally worked the tooth free, then spat it out.

The interrogator smirked. “Come on now. I haven’t even touched your face.”

Kowalski smiled. Revealing the small trigger mechanism he’d had implanted in his gum. A tiny LED in the middle of the trigger pulsed red.

Blink blink

Blink blink

The trigger would tell Proximity to reprogram the nanites in his bloodstream.

But not to kill at ten feet. Kowalski and Vanessa had discussed that, and decided it wasn’t enough. So they used Lucia’s handheld device to reprogram the distance to, oh, say, quarter of a mile. In all directions.

I’m going to let myself be captured, Kowalski had told her. And then, when Ym sure all of the rats are in one place, and I know what they know … they’re dead. Every last one of them.

The interrogator stared at Kowalski’s mouth, dumbstruck, but at the last moment he seemed to get it. Not everything, of course. Just the idea that yes, Kowalski had indeed outthought them every step of the way. And yes, they were all about to die. Every last one of them.

Kowalski depressed the trigger with his tongue.

“Good-bye,” he said.

The guards dropped first, followed by the interrogator. They were all screaming. Kowalski counted to nine in his mind, and then …