Urge to Kill

Less than a minute later she was back in bed with Hobbs, feeling the heat emanating from his muscular body. He lay on his left side, facing away from her, unmoving and unaware, snoring away.

Lavern drifted into an uneasy sleep for a short while, and then the alarm went off.

The sun had barely risen when the landline phone on the table next to Quinn’s bed rang.

He woke slowly, not sure how many rings he’d missed, and tried to get his body to respond to the urgency he felt to answer the phone.

Finally his partially numb right hand found the receiver and clumsily removed it from its cradle.

Lying on his back, he pressed the receiver to his ear, said, “Quinn,” in a sleep-thickened voice.

The voice on the other end of the connection sounded wide awake, crisp, and authoritative.

It said, “Listen carefully. Don’t talk. These are the rules.”

73

The bedroom was bright with fragments of early morning sunlight when the man Mitzi Lewis knew as Rob Curlew observed her as she slept.

Standing nude, he leaned over her and listened closely to her breathing. She was still sleeping soundly.

Careful to make no noise, he gathered up his clothes and carried them into the bathroom. He ran no water and made little noise getting dressed.

He didn’t want to leave Mitzi, didn’t want to lose this one. But her surprise party last night had been a surprise for him, too. Now almost everyone she knew had seen him and would be able to supply police with descriptions, could identify him. Many of them had photographs of him with Mitzi.

He simply couldn’t take the chance. Sometimes the best of hunters came up empty.

When he was dressed, he found the blue carry-on that he’d promised Mitzi he’d open this morning, and walked softly back to her bed.

He stood very still and listened to her breathe, watched her sleep. She looked so innocent, so unknowing.

She would never know the pivotal moment in her life, the moment that had saved her life. Perhaps the great joke of her life. Being Mitzi, she might very well have looked at it that way.

He wanted to kiss her, but knew that might be a mistake. Instead he left the bedroom quietly, left her apartment, and disappeared into the city that was not yet all the way awake.

At 8:00 A.M., after a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and toast, Quinn phoned Renz and described his dawn phone call from the killer.

The rules were simple enough. At nine o’clock this morning the hunt would begin. It was limited to the island of Manhattan. Both men were to be armed only with their identical .25-caliber revolvers. Quinn was safe in his apartment until nine o’clock, but not afterward. From that point on, he was safe nowhere, nor was his opponent.

“He knows where you live, but you don’t know where he does,” Renz pointed out.

“That’s why I’m probably safe here,” Quinn said. “Our killer’s the sort who’d rather make it a sporting proposition. He wouldn’t consider it cricket to shoot me in my bed.”

“Cricket…” Renz repeated thoughtfully. “He use that word?”

“I don’t think so,” Quinn said.

“But you just used it,” Renz said. “Maybe because he did.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said. “Maybe he watches the BBC.”

“There you go,” Renz said. “He also knows what you look like.”

“Only from newspaper photos, and they don’t do me justice.”

“He’s really not as cricket as he’d like you to think,” Renz said. “Let’s not forget he’s just another psycho asshole who makes his own rules.”

“There’s nothing in those rules about leaving my apartment before nine o’clock,” Quinn said. “That’s what I’ll be doing after I hang up on you.”

“Okay. I’ll issue the order again that no one is to interfere with you or the kil—your opponent.”

Both men were silent for a while, knowing this might well be their final conversation, and that there simply wasn’t any more to say other than everything, and that was impossible to put into words.

“Luck,” Renz said simply, and hung up.

It was when Quinn replaced the receiver that he remembered something. Maybe. It was possible the .25-Caliber Killer had used the word cricket in their phone conversation. He might have a touch of British accent.

Bloody hell!

Not that it changed anything if the killer did happen to be a Brit. He was soon going to find himself in a sticky wicket.

Quinn finished his coffee; then he hand washed and dried his breakfast dishes before leaving the apartment.

He figured a man who’d done the dishes in preparation for his next meal was unlikely to meet death until then. Surely if you planned for the future it was more likely there would be one.

Think alive, stay alive.

But he didn’t intend to spend the day simply trying to stay alive while keeping an eye out for the killer.

He had a destination.

Quinn left his apartment via the fire stairs, then he did a turn around the block to be reasonably sure he wasn’t being followed. It was possible, maybe likely, that his opponent had his apartment building already staked out though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock.