Devoted in Death (In Death #41)(3)

“I thought you said Fayetteville.”

“What? Oh, Henry,” she began.

Something must have shown in her eyes or he heard the quiet step of Darryl’s boot, as he reared back, turned just as Darryl raised the tire iron. It struck the man on the shoulder.

And he leaped at Darryl like a demon from hell.

It happened so fast – the flying fists, the animal grunts and snarls. Thinking only of Darryl, Ella-Loo snatched up the tire iron that had spun out of his hand, tried to get a solid grip.

She swung, striking the now raging Good Samaritan hard across the back, realized her mistake when it didn’t stop him. The next time, she aimed for the legs.

One of them buckled – she clearly heard a crack. Even hurt he managed to swing around, backhand her. Before she could steady herself, try for the other leg, Darryl went crazy.

“Put your hands on my woman, I’ll kill you!”

He pummelled, fists flying, eyes wild, teeth bared. She barely had time to scramble clear before the man, unbalanced on his bad leg, face bloody, fell back.

His head struck the front bumper of the truck, bounced off, then slapped against the pavement. Before she gave it a thought, she jumped in, smashed the tire iron across his face. Two hard blows.

He lay still now, eyes wide in his ruined face. Blood began to seep and pool under his head.

Ella-Loo’s breath puffed like a steam engine, whooshing out as her body quivered. “Is he… is he dead?”

“Shit, Ella-Loo, shit.” Staring down, Darryl pulled a bandanna out of his back pocket to mop at the sweat and blood on his face. “He looks dead to me.”

“We killed him.”

“Didn’t do it on purpose. Shit, Ella-Loo. He hit you right in the face. I can’t allow that. I can’t let anybody hurt my girl.”

“I didn’t want him to get up and hit you again, either. So I… You got to get him off the road. Get him back behind all that brush, Darryl, and quick before somebody else comes. And you take his wallet, his wrist unit. Take anything he’s got on him. Hurry.”

She found a rag in the truck, wiped down the tire iron, then tossed it into the backseat of their new car.

“Take his clothes, too, baby.”

“What?”

“Take everything. You never know, but hurry!”

She began hauling their things from the bed of the truck to the car. “Just put everything in the back, and we’ll sort through it later.”

Her heart hammered; her hands shook. But she moved fast and sure.

“We need to get everything of ours out of the truck, baby, and I guess we need to wipe the steering wheel and so on. Anything we think we’ve touched. I’ll do that.”

She did the best she could, then finished with Darryl’s help as they didn’t have much to transfer from truck to car. In ten minutes Darryl was behind the wheel with Ella-Loo beside him.

“Don’t go over the speed limit now. We’re just going to put some distance between us and that man and the truck.”

She held on, a mile, five, ten. At twenty-five, she broke.

“Pull off, pull off! See that road there? God Almighty, pull off, Darryl, go back in the trees there.”

“Are you gonna be sick, honey?”

“I can still smell his blood. It’s on you. It’s on me, too.”

“It’s all right, now. It’s gonna be all right, now.” He pulled off, bumped his way through some trees, stopped. “Honey.”

“Did you see his face? His eyes staring at us, but not seeing us? And the blood coming out of his mouth. Of his ears.”

She turned to him, her face lit like the sun, her eyes huge, full of wonder and want. “We killed somebody. Together.”

They fell on each other. For them, sex was always hot, hard and heady, but now, with the smell of fresh blood, with the knowing, it turned feral until her screams, his shouts echoed in the car.

When they were done, when sweat fused their flesh together like glue and the white dress was tattered, stained with blood as red as her heels, she smiled at him.

“Next time, I don’t want to do it so fast. We’re going to take some time with the next one.”

“I love you, Ella-Loo.”

“I love you, Darryl. Nobody’s ever loved like we do. We’re going to have everything we want, do anything we want, from right here all the way to New York City.”

The first kill, mostly an accident, took place on a hot night in August. By the time they arrived in New York, in mid-January, their tally was up to twenty-nine.

With her first look at New York, Ella-Loo had the same reaction she’d had with her first look at Darryl.

She knew they were made for each other.

An ice-pick wind stabbed down the litter-strewn alley, slicing at exposed flesh, hissing and snarling as it hacked its way from Madison Street through the tunnel formed by graffiti-laced buildings of crumbling red brick or pitted concrete.

The few lights that worked cast purple shadows along with sickly yellow glows so the pools and splashes of them bloomed bitter, like a bruise.

The lowest of low-level street whores – licensed or not – might take a john into one of the narrow niches hoping for shelter from the worst of the cold and wind while business was conducted. A junkie desperate enough for a fix might follow an illegals dealer into those bruising shadows.