Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 by John Birmingham

me to break your other knee and hit you in the back of the neck, you need to cough up the information now. Were you being paid to get me?’
    ‘Yes.’ His voice was so weak and broken she almost missed the answer.
    ‘What’s that? Yes? Did you say “Yes”? So who sent you?’
    She let him have another two seconds of voltage.
    ‘My boss, my boss,’ he replied, sounding as though he was pleading. ‘My boss take contract. I do job.’
    A surge of anger boiled up inside Julianne and she smashed the bar down on the middle of his thigh. He screamed until she cut him off with the 26.
    ‘And who do you work for, hey? Who sent you out to ruin a perfectly good evening? I could’ve had fun tonight. I could’ve got laid . Instead I’m stuck here having a shitty time with you and . . . and . . . Oh fuck, you’ve got blood all over my new shirt!’
    Jules could no longer control herself. She was so sick of running and hiding and running again. It was all she had done since escaping New York with the Rhino. A red mist of rage clouded her vision as she let loose with both the taser and the rebar. She could feel the jolt of the power surge every time she hit him, but she couldn’t stop. Her fury, her fear, her sick satisfaction at finally being able to lash out when previously she had felt only impotence and frustration – they all combined to doom this Romanian who had been sent after her.
    When she was done, when she finally regained some control over herself, he was long dead. A ship’s horn wailed nearby as she collapsed against the edge of the skip, dropping the iron bar to the road. It was filthy with matted hair, bone fragments and clumps of grey matter. Julianne vomited.
    She heard voices close-by and almost fled, but her father’s memory, speaking calmly to her across the years, stayed her reaction. ‘Better to be found at the scene than fleeing it,’ the late Lord Balwyn always said. ‘One always looks so bloody guilty when fleeing.’
    She gulped in a couple of long, halting breaths. Gathered her disordered wits. And checked her surroundings again. Nobody. Not even voices or footfalls this time.
    The body was heavy, a dead weight, but Julianne was strong from years of shipboard life and months on the run with Rhino across the American frontier. She detached the taser darts from the corpse and dragged it over to a builder’s skip that was only half full.
    ‘Bugger me,’ she grunted, heaving him over the side of the industrial bin. ‘Weighed down by your sins, I’ll bet.’
    Her would-be killer thumped down on top of a mound of plastic wrapping and cardboard. She took a few moments to cover him with rubbish she gathered from another skip, and thought about washing away the blood. But what was the point? In her experience the streets around here were caked with blood and vomit every morning. She did take the iron bar and the taser with her, however. She would have to dispose of them properly.
    It would have been foolish to walk back up the hill towards the pub. Had she run into Donna and Jeff, there would be no way of explaining what had happened. And even if she hadn’t, she looked a frightful mess, covered in hot blood and brain flecks. Best if she headed down to the docklands, where the bottom-feeding whores plied their trade. There at least she could toss the rebar into the harbour.
    She was going to have to get out of Sydney, though. The cops were hardly likely to break a sweat over a dead Romanian hitman, but they weren’t the problem. Cesky was. He had found her again.
    Julianne started walking. She didn’t spend much time wondering where she might go next, because there was only one choice, really. The only place in this country where she had any real friends.

6
     
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
     
    They took a break late in the morning. The discussion about what to do with the prisoners in the east continued for at least an hour after Kip had made it clear he wanted to take Sarah