35

The Heckler and Koch was a massive model 23. The mustachioed man in the light blue windbreaker squeezed off three rounds, one after the other. The big hollow-point through-and-throughs tore through Erkan and blew out his back. Blood splattered the white marble column behind him as shattered shards of stone exploded into the air.

The man in the windbreaker shoved the H&K beneath his jacket again and kept walking.

For one suspended moment, Erkan wavered, still on his feet, his white shirt blooming a charred scarlet. He opened his mouth to speak and a torrent of blood spilled down his chin. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed.

He fell backward in an ungainly sprawl, arms flung out at his sides, his exquisitely tailored gray suit falling open to reveal a small Walther PPK in a holster clipped inside the waistband of his slacks. Jax snatched it up.

Walking quickly, the killer had almost reached the gate. Jax shoved Erkan’s Walther under his shirt and followed him, also at a walk. It was never a good idea to run away from a dead body. It tended to attract attention.

Other people were running—running toward Erkan. Jax kept walking. At the gate, the man in the pale blue windbreaker threw a quick glance over his shoulder. He saw Jax and began to run.

“Shit,” said Jax, and sprinted after him.

They pelted down a crooked lane between narrow whitewashed houses that loomed up to cast the worn paving stones into shadow. This was an old part of town, one of the few areas that had escaped the Great Fire of 1922. Jax dodged café tables, scarlet geraniums spilling out of clay pots, a sleeping gray cat.

The killer hung a quick left, into a shady, stone-paved passageway so steep it soon gave up and became steps. Jax tore after him, the soles of their shoes clattering on the broad ancient stairs, the scent of damp stone and ancient decay wafting up around him.

The steps emptied into a winding street filled with market stalls hung with baskets and brass pots that glinted like gold in a shaft of early-evening sunlight. The driver of a green van laid on his horn, its brakes screeching as the man in the blue windbreaker darted across in front of him.

Jax ducked around behind the van, his gaze on the dark mouth of an alley opening up on the far side of the street. The killer bolted down it, Jax twenty steps behind. The air here was cool and dank, the houses shuttered, silent, the only sounds the pounding of their feet and the rasp of their breath and the swish of traffic from the street ahead.

As he cleared the alley, the man seemed to come to some kind of a decision. He whirled, his hand reaching beneath his jacket to close on the handle of his gun. But the sidewalk here was narrow, his momentum so great that he took a step back off the curb into the street as he brought up the big H&K.

Jax heard a squeal of brakes, saw the man’s head turn, his eyes widen the instant before a battered white delivery truck slammed into him with a heavy, fatal thud.