Chill of Night by John Lutz Read Free Book Online

over at them from across the street.
    â€œSomebody oughta tell her people call us things all the time,” da Vinci said, completely unrattled.
    Â 
    Bev overslept. That was okay; her and Floyd’s West Side apartment was only a few blocks from Light and Shade. Even if she couldn’t hail a cab, she could walk it in no time. Breakfast she could make up later, maybe send one of the employees out to pick up Danish and coffee at Starbucks.
    She was alone in the king-size bed. Floyd was still in Connecticut on a golfing outing with his buddies. Bev had slept so soundly the covers were only slightly disheveled. She slid both bare legs out from beneath the sheets, then stood up and removed her nightgown, which had somehow bunched its way up around her hips.
    In the morning light she examined herself briefly in the mirror. She and Lenny had played rough and she had a few bruises, but nothing Floyd was likely to notice. Not that she cared that much if he did notice; she just didn’t want a scene. She was tired of scenes.
    The apartment was large by New York standards, furnished with a hodgepodge of furniture and decorated without much style. Except for the lamps. Lamps they had, and good ones. And ceiling fixtures. Bev was proud of the massive crystal chandelier dangling above the dining room table that they hardly used.
    She padded nude into the bathroom and took a quick shower, managing not to get her hair wet. She’d dropped by Tina’s Beauty Shop and had it done yesterday afternoon after taking off work early. After the wreck Lenny had made of it.
    The shower had fully awakened and refreshed her. Yesterday had been a hell of a day, and today she’d better concentrate on work. She knew her business and got the job done, but her attendance record was abysmal. No one from the company had said anything to her, but they might. You could push them only so far. Besides, her job was the one thing in her life she liked. Her job and Lenny.
    Bev was fully dressed in her new mauve outfit, seated before a teakwood vanity she’d bought in Mexico and had shipped home, leaning forward and applying just the right shade of lipstick to complement the dress—red, but with the slightest touch of purple—when her heart almost stopped.
    She managed to start breathing again and turned to gaze back and up at the figure she’d glimpsed in the mirror. At the hand that held the object that was indeed what she’d first feared. A gun, a small one with some kind of bulky cylinder fitted to its barrel. She’d seen enough TV and movies to know what the object was—a silencer.
    Seated on the padded vanity chair, staring up at the intruder, she was aware of her insides melting away, heard a slight trickle, felt a warmth, and knew she’d wet herself. She began to cry, tightening her grip on the chair back with one hand, on the lipstick tube with the other. She begged with her eyes. It was unmistakable, her silent pleading. He did nothing, drawing out the moment. She managed to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and the words came out as a sob.
    â€œWhat’d I do? For God’s sake, what’d I do?”
    Then she knew. Floyd! Floyd must have hired someone to pretend—
    The silencer spat and a bullet thunked! through the thinly padded wooden chair back and clipped her spine before smashing through her heart.
    The way she dropped and her chin hit the edge of the vanity on the way down, it would have hurt like hell if she’d been alive.
    The killer gently pried the lipstick tube from her dead right hand.

8
    Beam silently watched the NYPD computer genius da Vinci had sent.
    He looked about fourteen and seemed to know everything. It was obvious from the way the kid—actually in his twenties—had handled Beam’s five-year-old notebook computer that he knew his stuff. Soon there’d been talk of RAM and giga and mega and pixels while Beam looked on in gray mystification as