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Page 29.

"It's cool," Rick said as he began to dig with both hands in the trash. Fincoff's last meals lay rotting in the bottom. Flies rose.

"Gross," said Yolo. He stepped back a pace.

Rick pushed his hands down, feeling rancid, liquid garbage, crumpled papers, and other debris. "Maybe we can make a deal."

Yolo laughed. "Go figure. I knew you'd have some shaky plan."

"We split the money half and half."

"No dice, man. I split you half and half."

"Okay, it was a nice try. You win." Rick lifted a shapeless mass of paper slowly and carefully, turning toward Yolo as he did so.

The Nigerian kept the gun on Rick with his right hand. His eyes opened eagerly, and his tongue appeared pink between pearly white teeth. He reached with his big left hand to grasp the package.

In one smooth motion, Rick let the covering paper fall away.

In each hand, he held a shard of broken pottery—the plate Hannah had dropped.

With his right hand, he slashed the hand reaching toward him. He caught Yolo where he wanted—across the wrist.

Yolo made a horrified face as arterial blood—bright red, translucent as ruby—twirled in the air. It was illumined by sharp daylight slamming through the dirty window.

Squirt, squirt, squirt went the severed artery in Yolo's wrist. Thin streams of dark, rich blood pulsed across the room. Yolo's eyes widened with terror as he tracked his impending death.

Horrified, the man held his wrist up to look at it, forgetting the gun in his other hand.

Yolo's blood splattered in powerful hosing motions across his face, dripping from his nose and lips, blinding his eyes. His mouth hung open in mortal terror.

In a second smooth motion, Rick slashed with the other hand, cutting across the side of the hand holding the gun. The razor-sharp edge of broken pottery cut across the fingertip in the trigger guard and slashed deeply into the thumb coming around the side of the grip. The artery in the thumb began to squirt thin streams of blood.

The gun fell to the floor. Yolo stood clutching his hands across his chest, trying without hope to stanch the blood flying out of his hands. His eyes, blinded by spattered blood, started to glaze over with shock. He was visibly weakening and fading as he sank to his knees.

Rick snatched up a heavy cast-iron skilled and beat Yolo over the head again and again, driving him down to the linoleum floor. Yolo landed, face into the corner, by the trash can. Rick's emotions were somewhere else as he mechanically moved through what he must do to survive and save Hannah's life.

Kill or be killed—this was not my choice. You dealt me in, and picked your cards, and lost.

"Hannah!" Rick wasted no time, but dropped the frying pan, pushed the trash can over on the dying man, and quickly washed blood spatters off himself at the sink.

She came running—saw the body sprawled like a fallen Goliath across the kitchen floor—and grabbed Rick by a handful of sweater. "We might just make it. Quick!"

Rick recovered the gun. He checked the clip—it was full. Thick little copper bullet heads protruded in a row like deadly teeth. Safety off, he followed Hannah into the bedroom. She grabbed a plastic grocery bag with her meager possessions. She tossed him his backpack.

Together they hurried to the door, which was not entirely closed.

Rick pulled the door open with his heel, holding the gun ready. Hannah hovered behind him.

The hallway was quiet. Dust motes danced peacefully in a beam of sunlight, making a shaft of light that fell down the center of the flight of stairs.

"Let's go," they said in unison.

Rick remembered to pull the door shut and lock it, which would gain them a minute or two before their pursuers broke in and discovered Yolo's body.

Rick and Hannah circled a third floor landing—whose empty center that dropped dizzyingly into darkness—each clutching stray possessions. Rick held the gun ready. He was in combat mode. He'd kill anyone who got in their way. Then he'd be sick forever after.

Voices rose through the hollow center of the stairwell, where dust motes continued to dance peacefully in a broad beam of diffuse, sleepy sunlight.

Hannah grabbed Rick by the jacket and pulled him to a stop, so that she collided with him.

They listened. Rick felt his heart pounding in his throat.

The unmistakable voices of Savia and Yoichi rose up to their ears, along with the pounding of soft rubber soles as Wan's goons came running up the stairs to join Yolo—not knowing that their accomplice was already dead.

"There," Rick said, pointing with the gun. He'd spied a slightly ajar door along the many closed doors lining the gloomy hallway. The hotel was a flop for the poorest of pensioners. Luckily, none had arisen from drunken or drugged torpor to look outside their door to see what the commotion was.

Rick took Hannah's hand and pulled her along.

They crashed into a shared laundry room, with a battered washer and an equally decrepit dryer. The dominant color was somewhere between mustard green and olive drab. Blackened, rotting wood planks showed under the eroding linoleum, which in itself must be half a century old and covered with slop and stains.

"There," Rick said. A black steel fire escape beckoned outside the room's flaking, chocolate-painted window. He let Hannah go over the window sill first. He pulled the door shut while she made her way out on the sill. "Hurry!" she called out softly.

Rick pulled the door shut and locked it with a primitive sliding bolt of hardware store brass, installed for unknown reasons—maybe to offer a person doing laundry safety from prowling predators. They launched out onto steel steps and rattled down a fire escape.

They were in an alley with tall brick and wood buildings moldering all around them.

Rick hid the gun in his pocket, holding it surreptitiously as they ran down the alley.

They ran over moist soil covered with moss and bearded grass, inset with rubble and broken bricks.

Coming out onto the sidewalk, they spotted a dark Mercedes sedan parked askew before the hotel's steps. "That is Yoichi's. Let's grab it and go," Hannah said.

Together, they ran to the car, got in on opposite sides of the front, and pulled their door shut.

"Go, go!" Hannah urged.

Rick needed no invitation. He reached under the dashboard, ripped the wires his trained fingers sought, and touched them together. They sparked and bypassed the key circuit. The starter roared into life, as if he'd inserted and turned the key. So far so good.

A few random, dark-complexioned pedestrians innocently walked on either side of the street—a man in a suit, smoking a cigarette and glancing at a folded newspaper as he walked; an attractive thirtyish housewife lugging grocery sacks; a teen couple with linked forearms, lost in each other; and more.

Rick pulled the car out from the curb, where it had blocked a loading zone. He pulled into the street, amid sparse traffic.

He glanced out the window and upward. No sign that Savia and Yoichi and whoever else was with them knew they were about to get their getaway car hijacked.

Hannah draped herself over his shoulder, touching the gun in his pocket in case it needed to be taken out and fired. She stared past his head, upward, at the doors and windows of Fincoff's seedy hotel.

"We're outta here," Rick said.

"All right." Hannah relaxed, sat back, took her hand from his pocket.

"You know how to use a gun?"

She shrugged. "Necessity is the mother of invention."

"You wanted to head out of town."

"Take the Boulevard Périphérique."

"Okay." That would be the circumferential highway that skirts Paris' twenty districts or arrondissements. "Good plan."

"Look for signs. I think it's the A4 we want."

Rick glanced into the rear view mirror. "We're in luck. So far, anyway. No sign of anyone following us."

"They'll be after us soon enough, if I know Wan. He wants his package, and nothing will stop him. That's how he got to be a zillionaire." She added with a wounded, angry look in her eyes, "And a rapist."

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