Severance Package (25 page)

“Especially with you having a newborn baby at home.”

“Goddamn it!” Jamie cried. “Tell me how to get off this floor!”

“I wish I could. But the answer is no. You’re going to die up here, just like the rest of us.”

Jamie felt his blood burn. He was overcome with the urge to smash his fists into David’s face, force him to cough up the
secret code or pass key or the friggin’
Omega Project
—anything to help him leave this building.
Now.

Instead, he tightened his fist and pulverized the Milano. The crumbs rained down on David’s face. Some of the crumbs landed in the streaks of blood and hung there.

Jamie opened his hand. It was smeared with chocolate from the center of the cookie.

Here he was, trapped on a floor, faced with certain death, and his hands were smeared with blood and chocolate.

Oh, was life absurd.

“That was
mean,”
David said, then flicked his tongue out and caught a cookie crumb that had landed near the corner of his mouth. “Mmmm.”

Jamie stood up and walked back to the conference table. The champagne bottles were still lined up, beaded with moisture. Maybe he should force-feed David a mimosa. Shut him up permanently.

Uh-uh.

Everything else had gone to hell.

But he was no killer.

Besides, Nichole had kept David alive for a good reason: information. If there was the slightest chance they could beat an escape plan out of him, it would be suicide to throw it away.

But he couldn’t stay in here with him any longer. Because he
would
kill him.

“You’re not going to leave this floor alive.”

“I’ll find a way,” Jamie said.

“No, you won’t,” David said. “Even if you could, trust me, you don’t want to leave. You think you can just walk away from something like this? You think there aren’t people out there who want to make sure you’re dead? Along with your family?”

“It would be the last thing you’d ever do.”

“Tough talk from a tough guy,” David said. “No man wants to ever admit he’s powerless to protect his family.”

“Oh, suck it.”

“Whip it out, faggot.”

Jamie took the gun from his waistband and aimed it at David’s face.

“Oh, oh, please.
Do
it. Pull the trigger. Show me how tough you are.”

Nichole had said there were only two bullets left in this gun. But at this range, it would be a sure shot.

“Pretty
please.”

This is what he wants, Jamie thought. Just like the cookie. The freak wants to die here on this floor. Why are you so eager to please him? He’s not your boss anymore. You don’t have to listen to him.

“With sugar on top.”

Jamie threw the gun on the floor, and headed for the conference room doors.

“Hey.”

David was clearly not happy. But Jamie didn’t care. He was almost at the doors.

“Hey! Come back here!”

Through the doors.

“I’m going to put the word out!” David screamed. “I’m going to make sure they rape your wife nice and good! They’ll skin your son alive! Right in front of her!”

Out the doors.

“They’ll like doing it! They live for this!”

The wall collapsed far easier than Amy would have imagined. The space around them swirled with atomized plaster dust. It
was hard to tell the ceiling from the floor. But Amy trusted her hands. Which were wrapped around Molly’s neck and slowly, steadily crushing the air out of her. Her hands were the only thing that mattered now. Her strong hands. They had to be strong for Ethan.

The hallway to the conference room was long. Ridiculously long on elbows and knees and smelling your own cooked flesh. Nichole might as well have been crawling to Harrisburg.

But she just needed to make it to David.

And she would.

If she endured the searing agony of the electric range to stop the bleeding, she could endure the rest of this.

She longed for David in the most physical way possible.

Jamie tried the elevator button, simply because he had to, because wouldn’t it be hilarious if all this time David had been lying about the bypass?

He hadn’t been lying.

He pressed the button again, mashing his thumb into the plastic key as if he could override the bypass by sheer strength.

Damn it!

The fire tower doors were the only other option. He walked to the one closest to their offices, and was surprised to see a hook and wire hanging from the door handle. Had someone already opened this door and dismantled the nerve gas bomb?

Did he want to take that chance?

Only now, lying on the carpet and being strangled to death, did Ania realize her miscalculation. She’d thought the sight of
Ethan’s corpse would incapacitate Amy. But it had the opposite effect. It had energized her. For the first time since childhood, Ania thought she might actually die.

Her left hand, attached to her left arm and damaged shoulder, was completely sapped of strength. Her right hand alone was not powerful enough to overcome the concrete grip of Amy’s hands. The awful press of Amy’s thumbs into her trachea. The tips of Amy’s manicured nails hooked into the back of Ania’s neck, as if probing for the place where the brain stem met spinal cord.

Her light-headedness was real now. Reality was being washed away in waves of gray. Not the plaster dust. Ania saw the gray when she closed her eyes.

Ania held her breath and squeezed Amy’s wrists with her one good hand. It wasn’t much of a defense.

This was not something she had anticipated.

How was Amy doing this?

By thinking of her true love.

It was something out of fairy tales, and Ania loathed fairy tales—at least the few she’d been allowed to read. But perhaps there was true magic in thinking about your true love.

So she thought of Jamie.

Jamie put his hand on the gleaming silver door handle. If he pushed it down, maybe he’d hear the click of the bomb in time. He could jump out of the way, find another way.

But there are no other ways, are there, Jamie?

Andrea, if you can hear me, know that your dumb husband tried the best he could, and this was the only way he could think of to make it back home to you….

On the floor, David heard a noise.

He couldn’t turn his head to see, but knew the sound well enough. The swishing of the conference room doors. Ah, Jamie was back. He must have seen the futility of his escape. Now was back to kill his boss.

Thank Christ.

“You left your gun here,” David said.

“I know,” said a voice.

It wasn’t Jamie.

But David, from his supine position on the floor, couldn’t see anybody. Was he now hearing things? Wouldn’t surprise him. He had been shot in the head and was completely
starving.
Nothing to eat all morning but the crumb of a Milano. Cruel tease
that
was.

“Hello, David,” said the voice.

A female voice.

Nichole.

He turned his head, and it hurt. But he could see her now. Crawling toward him, with red paint covering her hands. David couldn’t even see her hands, there was so much red paint. Why was she nudging the gun with her face? Pushing it toward him. Nosing it so that the barrel was pointed at him? Why didn’t she pick the goddamned thing up and get it over with already?

He just wanted to finish his mission and go home.

When Ania was Molly, she thought herself immune to America. And she was. Except for Jamie. He listened. He truly
listened.
He didn’t see her as a disposable part of a larger machine. He didn’t see her as a life support system for a pussy and a pair of tits—not that she showed them at work. For some reason Jamie put her at ease so much that she had to be careful not to slip into Russian. Jamie felt that much like home.

She wanted to touch him, just hold his hand, ever since the moment she met him.

The only distraction this morning was the thought of Jamie, and the opportunity to hold his hand, even if it meant giving him pain.

The pain would teach him, and serve as a reminder to her, as well.

Everything beautiful can be destroyed.

She was thinking of Jamie, but no surge of adrenaline followed. Only a strange melancholy.

She could be strangled to death here, and Jamie might not even know or care.

Jamie.

With his mangled fingers.

There she found the answer, and knew it was time to simply let go.

Jamie pushed down on the door handle.

For a moment, there was nothing.

No telltale click.

Or hiss.

Or beep.

He pushed the door open a few more inches.

Nichole was straddling him now, and David saw that it wasn’t paint on her arms at all. She had bloody stumps where her hands should have been. Okay, there was one hand, kind of just hanging there. Her skin smelled like Chinese food. The sickeningly sweet aroma distracted him from the fact that Nichole wasn’t wearing a shirt, and that her pussy was pressed up against his chest. Clothes separated their flesh—and there were those
mangled hands—but still, she aroused him. David never thought he’d experience this kind of intimacy with Nichole, who’d been out to destroy him ever since she’d started working for him. Which was a shame. He’d always found her deliciously screwable.

“You have one chance,” she said, a tiny bead of blood hanging from one corner of her mouth. “Tell me how to get off this floor.”

“I could
so
eat you out right now,” David said.

Nichole’s eyes widened, and then she leaned forward. For a moment there, David thought she was going to give him a little kiss. Right there on his forehead.

But she was reaching too far up and behind.

Nichole pressed her elbow against the grip of the gun that she had positioned next to David’s head. She stuck out her tongue.

I quit,
she thought, and thrust her tongue hard against the trigger.

David Murphy died not knowing his mission had been accomplished.

He was still thinking about what Nichole’s pussy would look like. He was thinking well-trimmed, but a little loose. Used. He’d heard she’d been messing around with the mail guys for years. Which she had been. He’d watched some of it. Got off on it.

David wore a waterproof watch he never removed, even during sex or masturbation. Lovers would tease him about it.
What, are you going to time me?

He had worn it ever since he first rented the thirty-sixth floor of 1919 Market Street, and installed detonating devices on the thirtieth floor. And installed the trigger in his wristwatch.

The watch was one of those that monitored your pulse. Constantly, quietly, efficiently.

But it wasn’t
exactly
one of those kinds of watches. He’d had it modified so that it had room for the trigger. If his pulse stopped, a signal would travel to the detonating devices six floors below. If David Murphy was to go, everything was to go.

And so it went.

The moment the door opened, there was an explosion.

Jamie screamed and hurled himself backwards, slamming against the opposite wall, then slid to the ground and tried to scuttle away like a crab.

Jesus H….

That wasn’t a chemical bomb.

The crazy bastard, he rigged a
real explosive
to the door.

But not here. There was no fire or smoke. The explosion sounded like it was somewhere else in the building.

Was the bomb set somewhere else?

Christ, was David planning on bringing the whole place down?

Twenty floors down, Vincent Marella dreamed he heard an explosion. He woke up to find that his eyes were bleeding and he could barely breathe.

He also heard a man scream.

Amy released her grip momentarily—there was an explosion, somewhere, and it seemed to puzzle her.

That was all that Ania needed.

The lid of one of her wrist compartments flipped up easily.
The blade slid down and landed in her palm. She had taken a chance, releasing her grip on Amy’s wrists to dig out her weapon. But what was true love without risks?

Ania used her injured arm to brace Amy’s body and her right hand to slide the blade into the hollow of Amy’s neck.

Then she sliced down, directly between Amy’s breasts and down her stomach to where her belt used to be.