Chapter 46

 

The pistol boomed, blossoming flame, and Cat’s left arm jerked, exploding with pain.

This did not matter.

What mattered was her right arm and the steel that filled its hand, the steel that she drove, fast and hard, into Herbert Weston’s gut.

“Aaaiiiiyeee!” he screamed, his body going momentarily rigid as she hugged him close.

Then he bucked and flailed and fired overhead.

She shouldered into him and drove forward, and he skittered along on tiptoe, begging, “No, no, no,” until she slammed him into the wall and sunk the knife once more into his belly. He shuddered, and a long squeal ripped from him, obliterating his pleas for mercy.

He was slow and weak.

She was fast and strong.

She was strong with hatred and vengeance and righteousness; strong with a night of running and fighting for her life; strong with coke and hard love for a boy who’d died in her arms. Most of all, though, she was simply strong with the strength that she now knew defined her. With this crashing strength, she buried the knife to its hilt then ripped upward, opening the pitiful fuck from belt to sternum.

He shrieked, squeezed off two more shots before dropping the pistol to the linoleum, and stared at her with terror and comprehension. She pulled him close, pushed her fist into him, twisted wrist and knife, and jerked the blade up and down inside his chest cavity, pumping the steel with a masturbatory motion that jellied his lungs and split his trachea and sliced through his heart, carving it to pieces. He gurgled, growled, and died, and she let him drop away, the smell of urine strong in the air.

In what seemed a fitting eulogy, Herbert Weston had pissed himself.