Nomi startles almost as hard as Lamonte—but Lamonte is the one who looks most afraid. Simon, by contrast, looks like the Angel of Death: His boots and hands are covered in blood; the knees of his trousers are smeared dark with it. Below the torn collar of his black Henley, the wounds from the drill are red-black and weeping. His injuries make him look like he’s stepped straight off a battlefield, but his blue eyes glow against the bruises on his face, the wet ink of his hair.
He’s a body length away, still advancing. His movements have a sinister grace, and Nomi thinks she can feel something like static electricity crackling all around him.
Lamonte backs up, appalled, slashing the knife in a wide arc. “Stay thefuckaway from me, you fuckingpsycho!”
Nomi almost feels sorry for him. Here’s a man who’s senior, who’s fought his way up through the cesspool of mafia politics to make it to the position of general, now confronting someone completely outsidehis worldview. For people like Lamonte, murder is business. For people like Simon, murder is fun.
“You’re going to die here in this warehouse,” Simon says conversationally as he walks steadily, inexorably closer, heedless of the knife’s danger. He holds out his hands, which are dripping with red but completely empty. “If it makes you feel better, though—look, no weapons.”
Nomi gets a sickening feeling that Simon’s playing with his food.
“You want to make me feel better?” Lamonte is still backing up, jowls wobbling, slicing the air in front of himself. “Go set yourself on fire, you fuckingfreak—”
“I would,” Simon says, grinning, “but Hart didn’t bring the blowtorch.”
And he finally walks close enough that Lamonte’s blade finds its target: The knife shears through the fabric of Simon’s shirt. Nomi sees the white skin below his breastbone peel open, bleeding fast.
“Simon!” she screams.
Lamonte makes an ugly grin.
But that’s all he gets to do, as Simon grabs the box cutter out of the back waistband of his trousers and makes a quick, ferocious slash that draws a crimson line straight across Lamonte’s throat.
The line starts leaking. Lamonte drops to his knees.
When he keels sideways, Simon sinks over him with the blade raised, and that’s when Nomi finally looks away.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
October 1987, Saturday
He’s lost in a red fugue, and it’s like music.
On the cutting-room floor at Gennaro’s, nobody wants to lose concentration because with the tools they’re using, that could be dangerous. Piping in radio tunes to pass the time is no good—there’s always arguments over the station—but quite often, Mike Nell will play classical music through the speakers, so Simon finds himself cutting steaks or boning out a shoulder to the strains of Dvorák, or Vivaldi, or Nell’s favorite, Erskine.
This is how Simon discovered the music of Jean Sibelius. He’s listening to Sibelius now as he does a similar job: peeling and carving, slicing the best cuts. He’s unlikely to get through the brisket as this knife is simply not sufficient to the task, but he’s making good progress until he hears someone calling his name.
“Simon,” Nomi says. Her voice is hoarse; she sounds a little like she’s choking and a little like she’s crying. “Simon,stop.”
“What?” He turns on his knees.
Where before Nomi was roiling like a violet maelstrom, now her colors are fading to a dusky mauve. She’s still trembling, pulsing like a heart, but now he can see how washed out she is, pale and exhausted inher combat pants and the black sweater that’s falling off her shoulder. Somewhere above them, the white noise sound of rain.
“They’re dead, Simon. They’re all dead. And you need to stop ... doing that.” She glances at the knife in his hand, glances away.
“I’m just finishing this last—” he starts. But when he turns back to his work, he sees what it really involves.
It’s shocking enough that he drops the blade.
He staggers up off his knees, turns to face her, and the thing he just saw is mercifully gone. Was it ever there? The line between reality and hallucination is wavering. Where is he? He puts a hand to his head—god, the ache there is unbearable. “I need to finish work.”
“No,” she says. “You need to stop.”
“But there won’t be a—”
“Simon, look at me.” Nomi steps close, almost close enough to touch. She has a dark mark—a kind of long streak, like she’s been hit with the edge of a ruler—across her left cheekbone, and she’s cradling her right hand. “It’s over. You’ve done enough.”
What did I do? What did I do?He’s not sure he wants to know. He wants someone to take his elbow, tell him everything is all right, that there’s simply been an accident. He wants someone to tell him what’s real.
