This is turning into a mess. Four on one is terrible odds. She’s tilting at windmills. But it’s time to act, and worry about the perfect course of action later, in the aftermath—if they get an aftermath.
Nomi jumps down from crate to crate until her boots hit concrete, ignores Dinkins stumbling back, strides through the door with her gun up, sighting her targets.
“What thefuck?” Ameche says.
“This isn’t the police,” Nomi says, and puts one round in his direction.
Ameche ducks. She sends another round toward Lamonte, but he’s already dived. Nomi swivels to take in Hart with his hands raised, swivels back in time to see Ameche haul Simon up as a human shield.
Which is right about the moment her whole strategy starts to fall apart.
“Nomi—” Simon starts.
“Come any closer and I’ll put a bullet through hisgoddamn throat,” Ameche yells.
Nomi ignores him, ignores the fluttering of hopeless fear in her chest, pivots right, sights on Hart, fires off a shot. But she’s telegraphed too much, and Hart has ducked behind a roof pylon.
Ameche’s stoic face is red. “Would somebodyshootthis stupid bitch?”
That’s when Nomi feels a crunch in her lower back as someone hits her with what feels like a hot skillet.
She cries out, staggers forward. Her gun goes off wild as she falls to her knees. It’s like a charley horse in her back. But she can’t stay still—she twists sideways and snaps up her weapon two handed.
Ray Dinkins whacks her gun with the shovel in his hands, and Nomi screams as one of her fingers snaps—a bright, shocking pain. Her gun goes flying.
Dinkins tries another swing, but his reflexes are off—probably from being shot—and Nomi rolls away. But by then Hart has come close enough to kick her in the stomach. She gasps, and he kicks her again; then she’s curled up in the fetal position, groaning and coughing on the cold floor.
That’s it; it’s over. Too easy.
Lamonte has recovered his cigarette from where he dropped it when he dove out of range. Now he takes a drag and blinks his hooded eyes as he looks at what Nomi has been reduced to.
“Put her in a chair,” he says, in a deep baritone that cuts through the room.
Is this real?Again, Nomi feels like she has to wonder. But pain brings her back: the throb of her broken finger, the scrapes on her knees, the ache in her spine, the splintery feeling in her ribs. She gets to appreciate the particular textures of each injury as she’s hauled up by Hart and dumped unceremoniously on the padded seat of a metal folding chair.
Ameche yanks her leather jacket roughly off her shoulders—goodbye to her knuckle-duster and her Mace. Then, as she’s processingthat loss, Dinkins grabs her by the hair and yanks back hard enough to make her shriek. It’s all the distraction that Hart needs to simply gather both her wrists and duct-tape them together. Now here she is, like a skein of tangled black wool dumped on a chair in the middle of the warehouse.
Wonderful. She hasn’t rescued anybody. In fact, she’s made it all worse.
Nomi’s been sat down directly across from Simon. His face is impassive, and the collar of his black Henley is torn above his knitted vest. This close, the bruises around his eye and nose, the blood on his neck and hands, all stand out much more. She tries to meet his eyes.
“This was probably a terrible idea,” she croaks.
“Probably.” He doesn’t seem perturbed, though.
Is he matching her gallows humor with his own? Or maybe he’s in shock. If they knocked him out to get him here, he’s probably got a concussion. As she watches, Ameche starts taping him to a chair. It’s a crummy tape job, but it doesn’t seem to matter: Simon just sits there, letting them push him around. Nomi finds this disturbing. He seems to have gone into some quiet, reserved space behind his eyes where emotions and external activity don’t even register. Maybe he hasn’t got a concussion; maybe he’s got brain damage.
But she gets a tremor of recognition and alarm: This is Simon’s Easter Island face, the same blinkered impassivity as when he attacked Ameche at Big Mouth. Is this his sociopath face? Has something flipped in him?You haven’t really seen me lose my shit.If being hit in the head has realigned the serial-killer circuits in Simon’s brain, could this be the first sign?
Then he speaks. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“Shut up, you piece of shit,” Ameche growls, before turning to her. “Little Miss PI girl, huh? You got your delivery, and you still couldn’t keep your nose out of it—”
“Fuck off and die,” she snaps back.
Gino Hart clips her over the ear. Nomi sees stars.
Ray Dinkins is somewhere behind her, whimpering. “The fucking bitch shot me!”
