Brody took the hit, his head lashing back and colliding with the passenger side window—the glass crunching and spiderwebbing.
Seb seethed, hissing and foaming as he crushed Brody down into the seat and struggled to get a solid hold on him. His callused hands fought past Brody’s frenzied thrashing and found their place around his throat.
In a fit of self-preservation, Brody tried pistol-whipping the man, but the swing was weak in the tight confines of the Fairlane, Seb easily slapped the gun aside. Brody next tried clawing at Seb’s hands. He could feel the pressure of backed-up blood in his face, his skin tingling with the first indicative bites of suffocation. With Seb putting his entire body weight into the choke hold, there’d be no way to peel him off.
Brody wriggled his fingers into the pocket of his coat to fetch the knuckleduster. He found it, accidentally looped his fingers into it backward, flipped it around, and got it onto his fingers properly. He connected with Seb’s jaw and his hold loosened slightly. Brody drew back and jabbed at him again and again, but the giant was unwilling to let go of his prey. Brody had made him lose face tonight, and that obviously wasn’t something the man took lightly. Seb’s sweat-greased face formed a wicked sneer of victory.
Brody punched him a third and fourth time, the metal singing out against Seb’s skull. His head was turned with each strike slightly, barely nudged, a divot of skin pocked in. Seb’s smile was as unwavering as his apparent determination to throttle the life from Brody.
There was a change in vacuum within the car—the cling wrap spanning the windshield frame sucking in like a sail facing an unexpected wind change. Seb’s clench slackened, and the winning simper on his bloodied mouth turned solemn.
Thorp ducked into the Fairlane, his pistol pressed to the back of Seb’s head. “My friend may not like to carry loaded weapons, but I assure you this one is loaded. Get out.”
Seb struggled backward out of the car.
Brody rubbed his throat and barked the dead air from his lungs. When he stepped out of the car, he did it with unsure legs. The world was filled with streaking comets and the glittering aftereffect traces of nearly having been strangulated.
When Brody came around to where Thorp held Seb at gunpoint, he noticed Spanky had been brought out as well. Both of the men stood before Thorp’s sights.
“What now?” Seb asked, shrugging, casually bleeding.
“You’re going to give me your keys, phone, and your jigsaw,” Brody managed, his voice wracked and hoarse.
“What? Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a replacement jig card? And my phone? What the fuck? Get your own.”
“Just in the event that you’re lying to me, I don’t want you to call Titian and tell him I’m asking about him. Jigsaw and your mobile. Now.”
Seb wedged his cell out of his pocket with two fingers, then his keys. He handed them over, then took out his wallet and removed the laminated card and handed it over as well. They both went into Brody’s hand still wearing the knuckleduster.
Thorp asked Brody, “What are we going to do with them?”
Brody pointed at Seb’s cubie door.
Thorp needed no other word. He waved the gun at Seb and kept it trained on him as he walked over to the door.
“You dumb shits,” Seb commented. “Doing this to us, thinking you’re some kind of heroes. Gonna clean up the big bad streets of Chi-Town huntin’ serial killers?”
Brody ignored Seb’s opinion, turned to Spanky who continued to stand idly by, hands raised. He could now see what was inked into the man’s wrinkled lids whenever he blinked: Never. Dead. “You too. Jigsaw and phone.”
Brody glanced away from Spanky for a few seconds to watch Seb struggling with his cubie door.
A shot rang brightly throughout the parking garage.
Brody whipped around and saw Spanky crumpling to the concrete between the parked cars. Bits of shattered skull and pink crumbs of brain tumbled out onto the fur collar of the man’s puffy satin coat.
Thorp, with a sweaty strip of hair pasted across his forehead, switched his gun’s safety back on, impenetrably indifferent.
Brody stared at the corpse, unable to form words.
Seb got one look at Spanky facedown on the floor, a majority of the back of his head made into a crater of ruptured pink and red, and gaped at Brody and Thorp. “You … you said you weren’t going to kill us.”
“Get back in,” Brody ordered, deciding to take care of the matter at hand before asking Thorp why he had murdered Spanky.
Clearly rattled, Seb ducked into his apartment. Brody pulled down the door before the giant’s sorrow had a chance to shift into anger. He threw the lock on the cubie door and turned back to Thorp who stood with his gun at his side, glancing up the shadowed corridor.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Brody snatched the gun from Thorp’s hand.
Thorp let the Franklin-Johann go without a fight, seemingly too mesmerized by the slow river still pumping from Spanky’s vacated head and crawling toward the storm drain to get upset.
Down the way, Brody spotted some figures at the far end of the parking garage looking toward the source of the gunfire, inquisitive but keeping their distance.
“He was going for this,” Thorp said, pointing at a pearl-handled pistol tucked into the waistband of Spanky’s boxers.
Brody grabbed the derringer and held it in his palm, unable to avoid noticing that the metal was still warm from being pressed against Spanky’s flesh. “It’s not even a .22. If he shot it at us, it’d probably hurt your ears more than anything.”
“How was I to know?” Thorp shrugged.
The sight of death before him, the smell of burned cordite on the already stinking air—completely unnecessary. He pocketed Spanky’s pistol, as well as Thorp’s. When he dropped the Franklin-Johann into his pocket the barrel was still hot, the heat easily soaking through his coat’s wool to his side.
“Get in the car,” Brody said.
With nonchalance, Thorp went around the back of the Fairlane, got in, and closed the door.
Brody looked at the body, the widening pool of blood under the dead man’s face.
A series of heavy bangs came from the door of Seb’s cubie accompanied by muffled and unintelligible shouting.
Brody popped the trunk on the Fairlane and, with some difficulty, gathered the overweight thug in his arms and dropped him in. Getting some blood on his clothes was unavoidable. There was a metallic splash as the keys fell from Spanky’s loose grip.
“You killed him. You fucking killed him.” The sound of a bolt snapping in the cubie doorframe sang out like a rock falling into a metal pail.
Reacting to the sound like it had been a starter pistol, Brody slammed the lid on Spanky, unsuccessfully avoiding his inert if still accusatory gaze, and got in. He double tapped the ignition, but before putting it in reverse he turned to Thorp.
He was still blandly indifferent. The blond hair atop his head rode the gentle breeze, undulating like a dozen golden and miniscule antennae. He blinked down the length of the hood at the cubie door and its series of metal bubbles popping up across its surface, unaffected. “Shouldn’t we go? I don’t think that thing will hold him for very—”
Brody interrupted, “Tell me. Did you get anything out of him at least before you killed him?”
“We didn’t talk,” he muttered.
Brody dropped the Fairlane into reverse. “Well done. Really. Good work.”