No longer all in white.
Sig smiled at his handiwork. Winked.
Someone shouted, “He stabbed her!”
People began screaming, shooting to their feet, tripping over themselves and their companions, upending chairs in the haste to escape.
Someone yelled, “Decapitation—ISIS!”
Milo lunged at Sig Kierstead and Reed did the same from the back.
Kierstead sat there, offered no resistance as they cuffed him.
Not a glance at his wife, spurting and leaking and dribbling blood over clothing, her food, the tablecloth, the sidewalk.
She deflated, sliding low. Hair dipping into blood, a head hanging from sinews collided on the table with a wet hollow sound. Her plate was knocked to the sidewalk.
Blood landed in her wineglass.
Swirling, as if before a tasting.
White to rosé to red.
Milo and Reed yanked Sig to his feet. He went limp.
Doing the Gandhi?
Then his eyes dilated. Rolled back, exposing the whites.
As the detectives struggled to hold on to him, froth started streaming from between now slack lips. His mouth dropped open. Filled with a bubble bath of foam. He convulsed. Spewed internal suds.
Projectile vomit followed by violent convulsions.
People continued to stumble and scream. Someone cried. The sounds of shock and torment continued until every table was empty.
Then a strange, unsettling quiet. The sidewalk clear because Alicia had been smart enough to keep it that way.
Sig Kierstead shuddered once, then again. His body sagged with a different type of flaccidity.
Gray began seeping from beneath the spray tan.
Whatever cheap imitation of a soul he’d possessed was gone.
CHAPTER
52
Milo and Reed let the body drop to the ground. Milo stood guard, Reed did the same for what remained of Candace, and Alicia kept control of the sidewalk.
No challenge for her. The street had emptied as far as was visible. Instant ghost town. The last time I’d seen it like this was after the Northridge quake.
Then the quiet gave way to din as sirens began wailing. Loud louder deafening; an avant-garde composer gone berserk.
A figure ran toward us from the south.
Sean Binchy, pumping his arms, ginger hair blowing. Dressed like the ska-punk bassist he’d once been in an untucked floral shirt, blue cargo pants, and Doc Martins.
Alicia stepped aside to let him pass. He looked around panting, eyes hyperactive. “It’s over?”
