Another Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead, as if the windshield held vital secrets.

“All right, let’s hear this big emergency of yours,” Pryce half-sighed.

“I want Herk to get his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”

“That wasn’t the—”

“That’s the deal now,” I said. “I’ve got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together. Probably take less than an hour.”

“You can’t expect to have that sort of payment in front,” Pryce said, annoyed at my mulishness. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time. As we agreed.”

“Me, I think Lothar’s already been taken care of.”

“That’s different,” Pryce lied, switching to the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”

“So’s Herk, now.”

“But my…employers don’t need him,” Pryce said, in the patient voice you use on a slow student. “They don’t even know he exists yet.”

“How do I know you’re going to come through?”

“I’ve done everything I promised so far, haven’t I? You’re just going to have to trust me.”

I sat there quietly as a woman trundled past, pulling one of those little grocery carts behind her. Then I took out a thick tube of baffled steel, said, “Lothar?” When he turned sideways to listen, I put a slug in his temple.

It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.

“You got it wrong,” I told Pryce, as Lothar slumped over. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

Lothar’s head lolled forward, his body held in place by the seatbelt. I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him back so it looked like he was just sitting there. There was no blood, just a round little black dot on his temple—a reverse birthmark. Some of the powder had been removed from the cartridge to make it subsonic; the slug was still somewhere in Lothar’s diseased brain.

“You—”

Pryce cut himself off, out of words.

I wasn’t. “Now we’re gonna find out,” I told him, watching his hands in case he moved wrong. If it came to that, Herk would have to snap his neck from behind—the piece I’d used couldn’t be reloaded.

“Look,” I said, my voice as calm as a Zen rock garden, “Lothar was stalking his wife. That’s a fact, well-documented. There’s even an Order of Protection; you know that, too. Now, here’s what happened:

“Lothar was spotted breaking into his wife’s house. She isn’t there anymore, but he couldn’t have known that. Lothar had all his freak-tools with him: handcuffs, duct tape…. He was going to kill his wife and kidnap the baby. But first he was going to teach that race-traitor bitch a lesson.

“Nine-one-one goes off. Luckily, a sector car’s only a few blocks from the house. Soon as the cops roll up, Lothar knows he’s done. Decides to shoot it out. Gunfire’s exchanged.

“The result of that is sitting right next to you. Just add a few more rounds to the body. Use different guns—that way, more hero cops can get their medals. And be sure to blow away a chunk of his head.

“That’s the story that needs to get in the news. The others in the cell will find out what happened, probably on TV. It won’t surprise them, either. They all knew Lothar was a sex-torture freak—look how they found him in the first place. And he never stopped ranting about what he wanted to do to his wife.

“Get it? That leaves Herk. He’s your inside man now. Your only one. And he needs that immunity. Or the faucet gets turned off.”

“You’re insane,” Pryce said, not turning around.

The street was quiet.

“People could argue about that, maybe,” I told him. “But nobody’s gonna argue about Lothar being dead.”

“You expect me to drive around with a dead body and—”

“I don’t care what you do. It’s time to prove up now,” I finished. “If you’re the real