Private Paris (Private 10)

Her bullet smashed into the exposed grip panel of the Glock, just below my thumb. It was as if an electrified sledgehammer had hit my hand, causing it to close and inadvertently pull the trigger, discharging a round before the pistol slipped from my useless fingers and fell to the floor.

Even in that crowded space, the sound was deafening, disorienting. Blood was blinding my left eye. My right hand had gone completely numb. And from wrist to shoulder, my muscles twitched and my bones burned.

I realized that Haja was shouting at me, and that in shock, I’d gone to one knee, holding my useless arm. She came at me. The blonde returned. She shouted, but Haja couldn’t hear, or wasn’t listening.

Haja was getting a better angle. Maybe she’d aimed for my hand at first because she wanted to find out how much I knew before killing me. But my gun going off had ended that idea.

The shot would bring the police, and she had to be gone when they came. She would kill me now to cover her tracks. I could see it in her nickel-gray eyes when she stepped out from behind the stacks of magazines, raised her pistol, and aimed, two feet away, no more.

“Haja! Don’t!”

Those were the first words I heard clearly after my gun went off, and they hadn’t come from the blonde.

Michele Herbert was standing in the mouth of the hallway, afraid, but insistent when Haja turned to her.

“Don’t shoot, Haja! It’s me, Michele!”

Seeing Michele surprised and broke something in Haja. Her arms, hands, and pistol began to sink.

It registered in my daze, and once again my marine training kicked in. I let go my damaged hand, and lunged at her.

My left shoulder hammered the side of her left knee. Haja crashed sideways. Her gun went off as she fell. I went frantic then, and scrambled up on top of her, straddling her legs. I saw her pain and hatred of me, and the fact that she no longer had the pistol.

But she’d found a nasty chunk of metal, and swung it hard at my head. I blocked it with my good arm, stunned at the raw power of her blow. Then she bucked against me. With her ironworker strength she damn near threw me off.

Then she hit me in the face with the butt of her palm, caught me right under the jaw, and rocked me. She cocked back that hunk of metal again, meaning to finish me off.

Flinging out my left hand again, I caught the inside of her elbow, and then used the only other weapon I had.

My head became my hammer. I swung it with every bit of my remaining strength and felt my forehead crack and crush the bridge of her nose.

When I lifted my head, she was addled, and there was blood gushing from her nostrils. But I hit her a second time, just to make sure.

Panting, drenched in sweat, my face slick with sweat and blood, I heard something, and looked to my right in time to see the blonde. She gripped a three-foot piece of angle iron, which was already in full swing at my head.

Halfway through the arc, I heard a thud.

The blonde hunched up and let go of the iron piece. It flung through the air, clipped my ear, and hit something behind me. Dumbly, she looked at me, and then down at her chest before going down in a breathless heap.

“Jack?” Michele said weakly. “Help. Me.”

I pivoted. She was sitting up against a piece of busted furniture. Haja’s pistol was in her lap, and her hands were clasped across her belly and blouse, where a dark rose of blood had bloomed.

Chapter 97

14th Arrondissement

6:12 p.m.

SHAREN HOSKINS PULLED her car over in front of La Santé prison. She climbed out, came around the back door, and opened it for me.

I was in handcuffs. My face was swollen and held together by thirty-two stitches. A black patch covered antibiotic cream smeared over my sewn eyelid. My arm was in a sling, and my spiral-fractured wrist in a cast.

A dull throb had returned to my fingers and lower forearms as Hoskins led me, Juge Fromme, and Loui

s Langlois toward the security entrance.

Louis’s doctor friend had figured out that he’d slightly dislocated the head of his tibia, and had snapped the bone back into place. But it was still so sore he could only walk as fast as the magistrate’s top speed.