CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

As they reached Kate’s car, the piercing wails of police sirens racing toward the scene at the Janek home were only a block or two over. It sounded like half the Chicago police force was coming to the rescue.

As was so often the case, they were not coming to the rescue. They were coming to the aftermath, after the murdering was over and done with. That chilling realization only added to the things that Jack had said, as well as what the sifu had once told her. She shouldn’t depend on anyone coming to help her.

Flashing lights strobed off tree branches and houses in every direction as the police cars and ambulances raced in. Kate saw a number of people in the distance come out on their front porches to see what the commotion was all about. Fortunately, the distraction of all the flashing lights left Jack and Kate in the obscurity of darkness, and in the opposite direction from the sirens that everyone’s attention was focused on.

With such a large police response it was only a matter of time before the body of the killer would be found. Forensic evidence, especially blood evidence and DNA, would show him to be the killer. Although they would have no idea how the killer had met his fate, the crimes at the Janek home would be solved.

But those murders were over and done. The killer hadn’t been stopped beforehand. While it served justice that the killer would be identified, AJ and her family were gone forever; their lives, their world, had ended.

That thought brought home the significance of what AJ had been doing with John and then with Kate—stopping killings before they could happen. AJ had done that work secretly because such methods would not be officially tolerated. Jack had gone to Israel because those methods would not be officially tolerated. What had happened, had happened to the one person who had been trying to stop these killers.

Kate knew that she would remember the horrifying murder scene in AJ’s house for as long as she lived. Kate thought that most of those officers who were about to discover it would never forget it, either. A police officer shot in the line of duty was tragic enough, and dead was dead no matter how it happened, but for an officer and her family to be slaughtered in such a gruesome fashion would be viewed on an entirely different level. In a way, it shook the very foundations of law and order, exposing the barbarism that was leaking through the crumbling veneer of civilization.

Expanding rules and regulations aimed to deny reality. Officials hid comfortably behind those regulations. AJ had instead found consolation in finding a way to stop killers.

AJ had been interested in protecting her, but the police would not have been so understanding. They didn’t know her the way AJ had. They didn’t know anything about her.

Jack was the only one who truly understood what was going on and the danger she was in. Kate didn’t even grasp the whole picture, but Jack did. Jack had been the one who was there to help keep her alive. He was the only one who could keep her alive. She was beginning to see his wisdom in getting them away from the scene and staying off the police radar.

“Why don’t you let me drive,” Jack said. “I don’t think you’re up to it at the moment.”

“I think you’re right,” Kate admitted as he opened the passenger door for her and let her get in. She noticed for the first time that her hands were bloody. Some of it was from cuts on her hands, but she knew that a lot of it was from the man who had been trying to kill her.

Once Jack got in and closed the driver’s door, he watched the cross street as ambulances raced by.

Just then, a man suddenly appeared at the driver’s side of the car. With the light behind him, Kate couldn’t see who he was. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. She didn’t know if he was a cop or maybe a neighbor. Her immediate thought was that he was someone who had seen Jack kill the man and then the two of them go through his pockets, and thought it was a robbery.

And then the man tapped on the driver’s window with something metallic.

Kate saw that it was a gun barrel.

“I saw what you did,” the man’s muffled voice said as he stood outside the car, pointing the gun in at Jack.

Kate’s heart felt like it had jumped up in her throat.

The man gestured with a tilt of his head. “I saw what you did to that man back there. I saw you rob him. Now get out of the car and put your hands up.” He leaned down a little and pointed the gun at Kate. “Both of you.”

Jack already had his hands up. Kate followed his example, holding her hands up where the man could see them.

“All right,” Jack called out, sounding compliant. “We don’t want any trouble. Take it easy. I’m getting out.”

With a quick look over at her, Jack whispered, “Stay where you are.”

Jack kept his left hand in the air as he unlocked the doors and then leaned over and popped open the driver’s door with his right hand. He looked and acted like any terrified victim of a mugging at gunpoint. Looking confident, the man waved the gun, directing him to get out.

Kate heard a soft, metallic click.

As Jack carefully pushed the car door open so as not to startle the man with the gun, it forced the man to step back a little to make room. As Jack rose up out of the seat to step out, and as if reaching for the edge of the side window like he meant to close the door, in one smooth motion he instead took hold of the gun hand of the man and twisted it sharply inward.

The man cried out from the sudden pain of having his hand turned inward in a way it wasn’t meant to bend. He leaned toward the right as his hand was being twisted inward.

At the same time, before the man had a chance to struggle, Jack calmly swiped something along the exposed left side of the man’s neck.

Jack stood quietly, holding the man by his bent wrist to keep him from being able to move, to point the gun at them, or put up a fight. The man’s free hand went to his neck as he started to sag. Kate knew that with the way his hand was bent, if he resisted Jack could easily break the man’s wrist.

Kate saw great gouts of blood pumping out between the man’s fingers as he held the hand against the side of his throat. His knees buckled.

A few seconds more, and he had slumped quietly to the ground.

Kate sprang out of the car and ran around the front. “What in the world did you do? The guy was probably an innocent bystander who saw us picking the dead man’s pockets.”

By the time Kate knelt down beside the man, she could see that he was no longer breathing.

Still holding the man’s gun hand back, Jack clicked on his little flashlight, shining it at the man’s face.

“Look at his eyes, Kate. Look at his eyes and tell me if you think he’s just some innocent witness.”

With a finger on his chin, Kate turned the man’s head toward her a little so she could see his eyes. The blood that had been gushing out in spurts only moments before had slowed until it merely oozed. She knew that his heart had stopped.

The man’s eyes were open. The sight of those eyes gave Kate an icy jolt of fear.

They were the eyes of a killer.

She looked up at Jack as he clicked off his flashlight. “What in the world …”

“Like I said, it’s not over.”

“You mean he was with that other man? How did you know he wasn’t just some innocent witness who saw you kill that other guy and go through his pockets?”

“Experience, the way he moved, the look on his face, the way he held the gun. I can’t see in his eyes what you can see, but looking up at him made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Doesn’t that ever happen to you?”

“Yes,” she said, “as a matter of fact it does.”

Jack had just killed two men, swiftly, and with a minimum of fuss. With the second man, he hadn’t even looked like he was trying. It seemed as if he had done nothing more than step out of the car and hold the man’s hand, helping to ease him to the ground.

Kate now understood what she had seen the first moment she had looked into Jack’s eyes. If she had killed the first man, when she looked into a mirror would she see the same thing in her own eyes that she saw in Jack’s?

Jack was already going through the man’s pockets. He pocketed a few items and then stood in a rush.

“We’ve already spent too much time here. Let’s get going.”

Kate gestured down at the dead man lying at the curb. “Where did he come from? What’s going on? Was he working with the other one?”

“Now is not the time. We need to leave. Get in the car, Kate.”