As Larson arrived at the far end of the upstairs hallway, he heard two shots exceptionally close. Bam… bam… the sound of an execution. He arrived at a door and kicked it in, gun extended, only to see a well-dressed man lying dead in a sea of broken glass. Not bleeding, eyes open, and dead.
He might have moved on had he not seen the blue plastic of his smashed BlackBerry on the carpet in front of an empty overstuffed chair.
He checked closets. He spun around in the center of the room, convinced she was here. And then his mind reassembled the shattered windows, the dead guy in the tailored clothes killed where he was, and Larson rushed to get a look outside.
If his mind had been free of emotion, if he’d been able to clinically abstract how it was that this man could lie dead on the floor, he never would have approached the open window. But he was desperate for her now, and he knew without knowing, understood without any evidence whatsoever, that Hope had jumped.
He saw her there down on the asphalt, writhing in the pain of broken bones. And she saw him as well, just before it happened. He made that connection with her, somehow eye to eye, or perhaps heart to heart, from that great distance, the Glock in his right hand.
A red bead lit his jacket. Like a firefly.
His head snapped up to face the edgy sharpshooter somewhere out in all that darkness, and then… the heat of a bee sting, and the world went silent.