And now Simon’s started, he will not stop.
Nomi sees him adjust his grip on the bolt cutters, then quickstep to Ameche and swing the bolt cutters into the side of Ameche’s head like a bat.
Ameche goes down. Hart is down. Simon’s closing; he’s knocking over all the pins. His face is relaxed, elated. Part of Nomi is horrified to see that there’s an engine inside Simon that runs on people’s pain, that’sgreased by their humiliation and hurt. But when it comes to Lamonte’s crew, she’s somehow all out of sympathy.
Behind her, Ray Dinkins is babbling. “Oh shiiit, I didn’t donothing, I didn’t donothing—”
Lightning flashes, interrupting whatever Ray’s saying he didn’t do, as Simon walks past Nomi’s tipped-sideways chair, advances on Dinkins with light steps. Nomi doesn’t turn her head: Her cheek is hurting from her collision with the floor, and she wants to stay low, doesn’t want to see. There’s a cut-off scream that becomes a gurgling whistle, then a sound like kitchen scissors on a chicken leg, then a thump, and Nomi knows that Dinkins is dead, or nearly dead, or about to be dead, and that bolt cutters were involved, so she chooses not to look.
The most important thing right now is her gun: She has to find it. There’s no way to predict what will happen here now, or how far Simon will take it—pretty fucking far, from what she’s already seen—and she has an ominous feeling that maybe he’ll be impossible to switch off. Like, maybe this is it: Whether he’s been a sociopath from the start, like he just told her, or whether the torture jogged those circuits in his brain back into an order they’re more familiar with, now he’s been unleashed in his original form, the black prince of murder. And she couldn’t give a shit what happens to Lamonte’s guys, but without her gun, she’s got no chance at all.
Ignoring Hart gargling on his own blood, ignoring her broken finger, she army crawls toward the left. To her right, another ruckus—she glances over. Lamonte is roaring like a bull, his heavy-lidded eyes wide open as he lunges toward Simon, who’s moved to the workbench. Nomi flinches as Simon sidesteps, slaps his hand on Lamonte’s shoulder; the bigger man howls as he stumbles forward into nothing. Simon has stabbed a screwdriver into the top of his shoulder.
Nomi hears her breath panting, redirects her eyes. She’s only three more crawling steps away from something glinting on the floor near the base of a roof pylon. She crawls harder, grabs for it, it’s her ... box cutter. Fuck. But yay? She’s found the box cutter that apparently Simonused to wound Dinkins. As in predead Dinkins. Dinkins when he was still animate. Nomi huffs laughter and wonders if she’s succumbing to hysterics. She controls it, clambers up, puts her back against the pylon. For a moment, her mind takes refuge in the box cutter’s glinting blade, then she snaps out of it and starts awkwardly sawing at the tape on her wrists.
Simon is moving, crouching down. He’s got a chisel and a mallet, and he’s finishing off Hart. Nomi gags a little at the sound of the man’s screams, at the sight of the blood—Jesus Christ, there is blood everywhere.
She’s got the tape off, but her hands are shaking. She tries to recover her firmness, the iron certainty that adrenaline gave her as Simon makes the last strike that finally puts Hart to sleep forever. Nomi braces her knees. She’s got a support pylon, she’s got a box cutter, and if she can find her gun—
There’s a garbled cry, and on her right, a rush of movement. Nomi’s surprised when Claude Ameche runs at her, is even more surprised when his tackle bowls her over—she lands on her shoulder and cracks the side of her head against concrete, and for a moment, all she can see are black sparkles, fizzy rockets, fireworks. When her vision recovers, Claude Ameche is on top of her, crushing her, hammering with his hands.
“Buckin’ bish!” He’s screaming, and the damage to his face is terrible: mashed ear, swollen lip, bloodshot eye, probably a broken cheekbone. “You buckin’ bish!”
“Fuck you!” Nomi screams, and she ducks her head before remembering she has a goddamnbox cutter—she stabs and slashes as best she can.
Ameche yells; blood streams down his facial crags and crevasses onto his shirt. But he’s strong, and when his hands find her neck and squeeze, Nomi can’t think of anything butCan’t ... breathe ...and she drops the box cutter as her arms turn to jelly, there’s a red film over her eyes, darkening rapidly from the edges ...
Then the pressure is gone and air rushes in with a whoop.She coughs, coughs again, rolls over—
Claude Ameche is lying on his back beside her; nearby, the battery charger. Ameche’s body is jolting. Simon is looking on, fascinated. He turns the dial on the charger up as high as it will go. Nomi hears an electric whine, smells smoke.
She yells, hoarse voiced, and scrambles away on her ass. Bumps into Gino Hart’s body, yells again, flips onto her hands and knees to scramble elsewhere, keeps her eyes down and focused on the concrete because everywhere she looks, some unbelievably horrifyingshitis happening. She keeps scrambling until she runs into a pair of brown leather loafers, and then there’s a hand in her hair, someone’s hauling her up, and suddenly she’s face to face with Eric Lamonte.
“Where’re you going, Miss Pace?” Lamonte rumbles, and even when Nomi screams and brings up an elbow, he seems to anticipate her, pulling back her head and smacking her in the throat.
Nomi goes down, retching, and then it’s too late. Lamonte has her by the hair again, she’s on her knees, and warm metal is kissing her cheek.
“I am not atradesman,” Lamonte hisses. “I don’t need garbage tools. I am aprofessional, and if you don’t call off your dog, I’m gonna put a bullet through your jaw, do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
Lamonte’s normally swarthy face is white, only flushed around his deep-set eyes. He’s sweating. He still has a screwdriver half-embedded in his shoulder. He looks desperate.
Nomi nods.
“Nowget up,” Lamonte commands, “before that fucking crazy motherfucker loses interest in Ameche and—”
He hauls at her again, and Nomi does the thing she was taught by Irma the first week she was on the force: She goes limp, like a bag of sand, all her weight shifting to the lowest part of her body.
Lamonte, like most attackers, isn’t expecting it. He overbalances, stumbles forward, the metal barrel of her own Smith & Wesson skiddingoff her cheek. Nomi grabs his wrist andbitesas hard as she can—she’s seen what’s possible now—until Lamonte yells, and blood floods into her mouth, and the gun fires so close to her face that for a second, she’s worried that her eyelashes are on fire. She feels gunpowder sear her cheekbone as she’s deafened.
When she falls backward, tinnitus screaming in her ears, Lamonte roars, enraged. She can hardly hear him, but she sees the blood dripping down his wrist and hand as he turns the gun toward her and pulls the trigger—
Nothing happens. His eyes go wide.
That’s why you always count your shots, asshole.So much for Lamonte being a professional.
On Lamonte’s next pull, she hears the empty click; her hearing is still muffled like she’s underwater. But he’s not out of surprises yet: He dives for his coat pocket, yanks out a blue pearl handle, pops out the switchblade, takes a step—
“Hello, friend,” Simon Noone says.
