Posted by critmk on May 21, 2003 at 06:51:10:
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Sisters
a novel by critmk
Chapter 18: Duel by Proxy
I spun and ducked out of the room and onto the landing, but the surprise assassin still winged me before the door swung shut behind me. The bullet cut a furrow across my right shoulder blade. It was a grazing wound and could have been worse. But it hurt like hell and the pain loosened my grip on my pistol, which clattered across the floor of the landing. The Uzi was strapped to my chest, but there was no way I could get into firing position before my pursuer came through the door.
I lurched toward the stairway and stumbled face-first into a luscious pair of 36Cs. The owner was a brunette of about 25, in a snug white sports top. It left her midriff bare above a tiny silk skirt with an overlarge paisley pattern in amber, gold and turquoise. Her legs were naked. Flip-flops were on her feet.
I could smell beer on her breath; she’d just come up the back stairway from the estate’s poolside bar. She grinned stupidly at me. “Well, nice to see you, too, cowboy. What’s with the guns? Paintball game? Say – you’ve been hit!”[shield25.jpg goes here.]
It hurts to get shot; better her than me to take the next bullet. I knocked the silly grin off her face with a right cross to the jaw. She was just conscious enough to stay on her feet.
I grabbed her by both arms, swung her around in front of me and back-pedaled quickly toward the stairs, half-dragging the girl. I could only hope that her body would be substantial enough to stop the bullets that were surely coming my way – exit wounds would be bad news for me.
My enemy -- an ordinary-looking woman of about 30, dressed simply in jeans and a black top – burst through the door. She kicked off her mules and came after me barefoot, spitting fire at every other step.[assassin29.jpg goes here.]
By some piece of luck, she’d loaded soft, low-velocity, hollow points. They had major punch – it felt as if Rocky Marciano were beating up my human shield – but they expanded and stayed within her body.
The girl was rocked five times – shot through her skirt twice, in her crotch and in the join of her long right leg and her hip; in the center of her belly; and twice in the right tit. The impacts drove her back toward me and made her difficult to hold upright, especially after she’d turned to dead weight. I dropped her when I got to the steps and turned and bounded down, her corpse tumbling noisily at my heels.
I owed that dead girl. Not only did she shield me from fire, the hitwoman slipped on her blood. The delay gave me life-saving seconds to dash through the living room, around the archway, into the dining room and momentarily out of the line of fire.
My streak through the living room interrupted a lively discussion among seven women of various ages, all dressed to the nines for a night on the town. They stood dumfounded, gaping first at me, then at the dead girl sprawled behind on the steps, then at the menacing hitwoman.
Screams broke the silence, but they came from the kitchen, not the living room. Someone, it seemed, had stumbled onto the body of the Japanese maid I’d left in there.
My would-be nemesis had killed two women already, without hesitation. I thought her likely to blow away the women in the living room rather than chase me, so I didn’t worry about them getting to cell phones or running out the front door. I gambled on that scenario and, Uzi at the ready, dashed to the kitchen.[Latina25.jpg goes here.]
There, a horrified Latina in her mid-20s, a member of the household staff, was backing away from her stabbed Japanese co-worker. Two more steps and she would have been out the back door. I stitched a line of holes into her belly through her tight white T. Blood started dripping over her pink miniskirt and her lush lower lip almost immediately. She doubled over, staggered onto the patio and bumped her butt on a column.
The obvious targets were her full tits, which hung heavily from her chest as she bent forward. They exploded in red as I loosed a quick burst, which lifted and threw her halfway off the pavement. Her back hit the fresh garden dirt with a thud, and her white heels clattered to the sidewalk a split second later.
Things happened fast after that. I turned back into the dining room and confronted an auburn-haired beauty in her mid-30s. In fleeing the hitwoman, she’d run right into me.
[Auburn30.jpg goes here.] She was running as fast as she could in her dressy black heels, which laced elaborately around her well-turned ankles. Those heels dug into the carpet when she stopped abruptly to avoid me. She tilted back toward the dining room table; the hip-high slit of her elegant violet rayon evening dress opened as she tried to regain balance.
I killed her with a line of Uzi fire that began on the outside of her exposed left thigh, just above the knee, ran to her left hip, up her belly to her left breast, to her throat and, finally, into her brain through the tuft of hair in front her left ear. The entire murder took perhaps two seconds, including her flailing, crazed-marionette fall and sprawl backward across the table, which left her pussy obscenely exposed through her sheer pantyhose.
Meanwhile, the hitwoman had been busy in the living room.[lanky20.jpg goes here.]
A long, lanky brunet of perhaps 20, dressed in a spaghetti-strap crushed velvet slip dress in wine-red, lay dead on a sofa near the window. A shot to the center of her graceful throat had killed her, but I noted with interest a bullet wound in the left instep her long, slender right foot, elegantly shod in a red slingback heel.
Another brunet, this one seated and in her mid-30s, died as I watched. [whitewine30.jpg goes here.] The wineglass in her left hand and then the neck of the bottle in her right exploded as bullets passed through glass on their way to her tits. A spray of fine shards and pinot grigio embedded in and moistened the flesh of her face, neck and exposed belly. The bullets tore nickel-sized holes in her white, button-front crop top and slammed her into the back of the sofa. Her left hand dropped to the seat cushion, the broken-off wine stem still in her fingertips. The lower half of the wine bottle fell into her lap; its remaining contents glugged audibly as the wine soaked her pink miniskirt, panties and thighs.
Four women were trapped, now. I blocked their exit to the dining room and the back of the house and the hitwoman was between them and the front door. They were starting to snivel and beg and scream. A blond in her late 30s was so noisy that I blew her away just to shut her up.[blondchair38.jpg goes here.]
She screamed all the louder when I shot her high and inside on the right thigh and through the right calf. She kicked and writhed in her chair, waving the gold-tipped spikes of her black heels about and lifting the hem of her little black cocktail dress above her crotch. A fusillade into her belly and breasts shut her up for good and left her head flung back over the arm of the chair and her mouth agape. I made a mental note to grab the heavy gold necklace from her throat before I left.
“Hey, Jack – you’re still alive! I figured you’d have bled to death by now,” the assassin taunted, from the foyer. “How’s that arm feeling? Shooting with the left, now?”
It hurt like hell and I was shooting with my left, which isn’t easy with an Uzi, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.
“Actually, for a man who’s just been shot, I’m feeling pretty good,” I said, calmly. “Mind telling me who you are and what you’re doing here?”
“Haven’t you figured it out? Your girlfriend hired me – you know, the one you keep crawling back to? the one you keep killing for? For mopping up these bitches and offing you, she’s gonna put me on the Aerometrics board of directors! Ain’t that a hoot? Barbara and I go way back – the whole board’s gonna be girlfriends from the old days, people she can trust. It’s gonna be a blast!”
Somewhere, deep inside, I more or less knew what was happening. But to hear her say it, so bluntly and gleefully, hit me hard. For a fleeting second, I thought about saving her the trouble and blowing my own brains out.
But only for a second. After that, I felt a deep, cold well of anger filling in my heart. I was too pissed off to die. With renewed determination, I reached for the last clip for the Uzi – only to realize that it was missing. It must have fallen out of the leg strap when I’d dived through the doorway upstairs. Shit. I checked my magazine; two shots left.
The three women still alive in the next room had quieted down some, to take in our conversation.
Their unison moan of dismay greeted the assassin’s next conversational turn.
“But enough chit-chat – we can settle our score after we off these last three greedy little sluts.”
She opened up on a woman in her early 40s.[titshot42.jpg goes here.] The woman had been cowering on a sofa, her legs and their black, patterned stockings folded beneath her. The first shot ripped through the black stretch nylon over her left breast. She rose, and the sudden movement pulled the top of her tight, strapless cocktail dress down, to display a pleasing expanse of tit and cleavage. A geyser of blood erupted and sprayed over the white sofa. She clutched the wound with an opera-gloved left hand just as a second shot opened a bloody hole in her gut. She pitched forward, but a third bullet flung her back as it opened a hole centered in her right breast, just above the taut top of her dress.
Her thin, wavy brown hair, teased up for a night at the clubs, brushed over the last wound as she fell back and banged her head hard into the wall. She rebounded with enough momentum to crash face-first through the glass coffee table in front of her. She lay dead, with her black spike heels still on the sofa.
“Hey! I wanted to do that one!” I said, in mock indignation. “I got dibs on the brunette in the blue lacey dress!”
I wanted to keep this killer engaged, to slow things down while I tried to manage the pain and think through a plan that was beginning to form in my brain. She laughed at the childish absurdity of my claim, then played along.
“Oh, why not? I give her to you. Fire away. I’ll kill the blond. I like killing blonds.”
While she was talking, I motioned to the terrified brunette, a slip of a thing who couldn’t have been more than 19, to come to me. [minisofa18.jpg goes here.]Her dark blue eyes were the size of saucers. “I won’t hurt you,” I mouthed to her, silently. She shook her head. I pointed the Uzi at her, and she came to me.
She dashed over just as the female assassin pumped her first bullet into the blond. The girl was about 24, a tarty, golden-haired cheerleader type. She wore a shimmery blue velvet minidress, dark hose and black platform mules.[bluedressblond24.jpg goes here]
The assassin shot her in the belly, and she uncrossed her legs and toppled over to her left. She clutched her gut and in her writhing opened her legs wide. The killer laughed as she fired once, twice three times into the crotch of the blond’s pantyhose. Blood poured from the girl’s mouth, turning her cries and moans into choked gurgling. The sound cut off abruptly when a red hole opened in the center of the blond’s forehead. The dead girl’s right knee flopped further open and came to rest against the back of the sofa. Her left hand slid from her thigh to the floor.[bludressblond24a.jpg goes here.]
While the blond was being killed, I had been whispering in the ear of the terrified brunet, instructing her: “If you want to get out of this alive, you will make sounds as if you are being strangled. You will count to 20 while I run up the back stairs; my purpose will be to come down the stairs in the main landing and surprise that woman from behind. When you’ve counted to 20, you will take this Uzi and charge her and try to kill her. This is our only chance – if we try to run out the back door, she’ll shoot us down before we clear the patio. If we succeed, I will let you live. Can you do this?”
The girl swallowed hard and nodded.
“Now start your strangling act.”
Her choking and gurgling began just as the shot blond’s choking and gurgling ended.
“What are you two doing over there – you’re not fucking her, are you Jack?” the assassin said, teasingly.
“Actually, I’m strangling her. I’ve had enough shooting and stabbing today.”
The girl was doing a great job – her carrying on was as orgasmic as it was asphyxiatic.
“Oooh, I’d love to watch.”
“Please do – I’d love to see you poke your head around that wall so I can blow it off.”
She laughed. “I guess I’ll have to settle for radio drama.”
I bounded down the hall and made my way up the back-bedroom staircase. I ran by the bedrooms, scooped my 9mm from the floor and hairpinned onto the staircase -- just in time to see an exit wound blow open in the assassin’s back. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, her gun hanging by her side from a limp right arm.
My tormentress grabbed her left breast, then stared at the blood on her hand for a long moment. She couldn’t believe it.
Neither could my hastily recruited partner, who had somehow gotten the drop on a professional. The element of surprise can work wonders. She stood, slack-jawed, with the smoking Uzi still aimed at the woman standing 10 feet in front of her.
“Well – finish her, kid.”
The girl obeyed. A second shot split the killer’s heart. She fell back onto the steps, her dead eyes staring at the crystal chandelier in the foyer.
My protégé, her eyes suddenly defiant, turned the Uzi toward me and pulled the trigger. Of course nothing happened.
“What a naughty girl, trying to kill me like that. And after I’ve been so nice to you.” I stepped over the dead assassin pulled the spent Uzi from the limp grasp of my temporary ally.
Tears ran suddenly and copiously from her eyes as they met mine.
“Are you going to let me live? You promised. You promised…” Her words dissolved in sobs.
I assured her that I would not kill her, then put my arm around her shoulder and walked her around the bodies in the living room. I flung the dead blond onto the floor to give my new friend a place to sit, then went into the kitchen to get her a glass of water.
I circled behind her as she drank it. When she was finished, I whacked her across the back of the head with a blackjack. Out cold, she fell forward and landed across the blond’s corpse on the floor.. She’d have a headache for a few days, but she’d live. And she wouldn’t be calling the cops any time soon
A few hours ago, I’d have killed and raped her, but now I’d lost my taste for it. Now, there was only one woman I wanted to murder: Barbara Laufer.