Dead Heat by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

More to the point, I don’t want him to put a bullet in me.
    ‘I can help you,’ I say earnestly. Something about the way he’s holding himself changes. Whatever he had been planning to do, he’s un-planning it in front of my eyes. ‘Tell me what I can do to help?’
    He looks at me, eye-to-eye. Man-to-man.
    ‘And put the gun down, for Christ’s sake,’ I tell him. ‘You’re going to hurt somebody if you’re not careful.’
    I silently pray that he’ll hear the warmth in my tone. Slowly Witt pulls the long pistol away from his temple. His trembling hand arcs gradually away from his head, and for a moment I am looking straight down the barrel into the gun’s black heart. Witt leans slightly to one side and places the gun gently on the floor. I take a lungful of air and realise that I’ve been holding my breath for a long time. The oxygen hits my bloodstream and I feel my muscles unclench.
    ‘What is it?’ I ask him softly. ‘What’s going on?’
    He shakes his head slowly, as if he can make no more sense of it than I can. Then he rolls his shoulders and takes a breath, and slowly brings his gaze up from the floor until he is staring straight at me. I can see a confession in his watery, red-rimmed eyes. Witt knows something, and I’m about to know it, too. But as he draws breath to speak, I watch in horror as at least six of his front teeth disappear, smashed out by a bullet from somewhere over my shoulder. The whip-crack of a firing pistol registers milliseconds afterwards,sharp and violent. It is a perfect shot, entering through his open mouth and severing his spine, forcing bone and sinew and skin and blood to fuse and flail, then push out of the back of his neck.
    For a moment Witt’s body holds, balanced in the praying position, and I can see his final confused and horrified emotions playing across his undamaged face. Then gravity finds a weak spot and pulls him face-down onto the cold green floor. A second shot cracks violently through the air behind me and I hear a second body hit the floor. The dead-weight slap of skin on unforgiving concrete chills my blood. I pull myself from my seat and spin, my heart cold with fear and my head full of Vitoria Paz.

CHAPTER 12
    DETECTIVE VITORIA PAZ has been my partner for three years. Most mornings she’s outside my house before eight. There isn’t a month goes by that Juliana doesn’t invite her over for Sunday lunch. Felipe, her boy, calls me Uncle Rafa. So when I hear the second shot crack through the air in the arena, I turn fast, dreading what I’m going to see.
    What I see is the back of Paz’s head. Intact. She’s still on her feet. Just behind her, in the doorway that leads back to the deserted corridor, is the slumped shell of a woman. She is Asian. Chinese, maybe. Paz is already climbing towards her and I debate for a moment whether to follow her or whether to head down towards Oliver Witt. I’m not sure who’s the hero and who’s the villain. Besides, I don’t imagine there will be much I can do for either of them.
    A combination of duty and curiosity forces me up the steep steps behind Paz. I watched Witt die. I saw the back of his skull. I watched the life extinguish from his eyes as he fell. The woman who shot him had been behind me and I have no idea whether she’s alive or dead.
    Paz slows up before she’s reached the shooter, which is a sure sign that she’s beyond help. I understand why when I reach Paz’sshoulder. The Asian woman is crumpled into the doorway. Her legs are splayed out at an unnatural angle, her knees twisted. Only the door jamb has kept her from falling completely. There is a high-powered competition rifle at her feet and a long-barrelled pistol still hanging from her right hand, her finger caught in the trigger.
    ‘Competitor,’ Paz says, straightening an identity lanyard around the woman’s neck.
    ‘That figures,’ I say, looking back over my shoulder at Witt lying dead on the floor from one perfect shot. A