Page 4 of Devoted in Death

“What?”

“Take everything. You never know, but hurry!”

She began hauling their things from the bed of the truck to the car. “Just put everything in the back, and we’ll sort through it later.”

Her heart hammered; her hands shook. But she moved fast and sure.

“We need to get everything of ours out of the truck, baby, and I guess we need to wipe the steering wheel and so on. Anything we think we’ve touched. I’ll do that.”

She did the best she could, then finished with Darryl’s help as they didn’t have much to transfer from truck to car. In ten minutes Darryl was behind the wheel with Ella-Loo beside him.

“Don’t go over the speed limit now. We’re just going to put some distance between us and that man and the truck.”

She held on, a mile, five, ten. At twenty-five, she broke.

“Pull off, pull off! See that road there? God Almighty, pull off, Darryl, go back in the trees there.”

“Are you gonna be sick, honey?”

“I can still smell his blood. It’s on you. It’s on me, too.”

“It’s all right, now. It’s gonna be all right, now.” He pulled off, bumped his way through some trees, stopped. “Honey.”

“Did you see his face? His eyes staring at us, but not seeing us? And the blood coming out of his mouth. Of his ears.”

She turned to him, her face lit like the sun, her eyes huge, full of wonder and want. “We killed somebody. Together.”

They fell on each other. For them, sex was always hot, hard and heady, but now, with the smell of fresh blood, with the knowing, it turned feral until her screams, his shouts echoed in the car.

When they were done, when sweat fused their flesh together like glue and the white dress was tattered, stained with blood as red as her heels, she smiled at him.

“Next time, I don’t want to do it so fast. We’re going to take some time with the next one.”

“I love you, Ella-Loo.”

“I love you, Darryl. Nobody’s ever loved like we do. We’re going to have everything we want, do anything we want, from right here all the way to New York City.”

The first kill, mostly an accident, took place on a hot night in August. By the time they arrived in New York, in mid-January, their tally was up to twenty-nine.

With her first look at New York, Ella-Loo had the same reaction she’d had with her first look at Darryl.

She knew they were made for each other.

•••

An ice-pick wind stabbed down the litter-strewn alley, slicing at exposed flesh, hissing and snarling as it hacked its way from Madison Street through the tunnel formed by graffiti-laced buildings of crumbling red brick or pitted concrete.

The few lights that worked cast purple shadows along with sickly yellow glows so the pools and splashes of them bloomed bitter, like a bruise.

The lowest of low-level street whores—licensed or not—might take a john into one of the narrow niches hoping for shelter from the worst of the cold and wind while business was conducted. A junkie desperate enough for a fix might follow an illegals dealer into those bruising shadows.

Anyone else thinking to shortcut through might as well wear a flashing sign offering themselves up to muggers, rapists and worse.

None of those options applied to Dorian Kuper as he’d met his unfortunate fate elsewhere before his body had been wrapped in plastic and dumped, much like the wind- and vermin-tattered bags of garbage beside a broken recycler.

The vicious wind wouldn’t trouble Dorian any longer. Its toothy knives cut keenly enough, so Lieutenant Eve Dallas gave into necessity and yanked on the ski cap with its embarrassing snowflake. But she drew the line at the fuzzy gloves—both given to her on a cold December day by the dreamy-eyed Dennis Mira.

She thought, fleetingly, that twenty-four hours earlier she’d been basking, mostly naked, on the sun-washed sand of her husband’s private island with Roarke, also mostly naked, beside her.