Kiss Her Goodbye (A Thriller) Read Online Free PDF Page B

just happened?”
     Then there was Tina. Jesus. Poor Tina had half a steering wheel embedded in her face, her once blond hair now wet and stained crimson, Queen of the Gladiators no more.
     And Sara.
     She was strapped in front next to Tina, eyes closed, arms dangling, a pregnant Raggedy Ann.
     Gunderson felt gut-punched. He climbed over to her, touched her face, her neck, searched for a pulse.
     Nothing there.
     “No,” he groaned, and unbuckled her seat belt. She fell into his arms, all bony angles and beach-ball belly, as lifeless as a sack of potatoes.
     This can’t be happening. Not this.
     Blood dripped from the car seat. A dark stain spread at the crotch of her dress.
     Gunderson groaned again. He slapped her face, trying to rouse her. “Wake up, baby, wake up!”
     He slapped her again and then again, her head flopping listlessly beneath his blows. “Goddamn you, you little bitch, don’t you fucking do this to me!”
     The sirens were even closer now. He heard movement behind him, Nemo sitting up, probably still blinking.
     “We’re dead, man. We gotta get out of here.”
     Gunderson cradled Sara in his arms. He’d never been much for tears, but he felt them coming on now and struggled to choke them back.
     She was alive. He knew she was alive. Her pulse was too weak to register, that’s all. There’s no way she was gone. Not Sara.
     He turned to Nemo. “Help me get her onto the sidewalk.”
     “Are you kidding me? We don’t have time for this shit.”
     Gunderson wrapped his fingers around Nemo’s neck and jerked him forward. “Help me get her onto the sidewalk, needle dick, or I swear to Christ you’ll wish you were Tina.”
     Nemo shot a nervous glance at Tina’s bloody corpse.
     “You’re the boss,” he said.
     
    W HEN DONOVAN CAME awake, he saw the big guy in the ski mask getting to his feet. Donovan’s brain kicked into autopilot, sizing him up: six-three, 240 pounds, most of it muscle. He ran the catalog of possibilities through his mind, thinking he knew the names and faces of everyone on Gunderson’s crew, but this guy was a mystery to him.
     Of course, the ski mask didn’t help much.
     The guy staggered a bit, cradling a nasty gash that ran the length of his left inner forearm. The gash didn’t seem to slow him down. Still wobbling slightly, he glanced back at Donovan, then stumbled toward the overturned van, which lay on its side several yards up the street.
     Police sirens screamed in the distance, as if connected to an alternate universe, and Donovan wondered what the hell was taking them so long. He felt as if he were caught in some weird kind of limbo, where time and distance weren’t measured the way they were in the real world.
     He tried to move, but couldn’t. The front end of the patrol car looked as if it had been crushed in the jaws of a trash compactor, the crumpled dash pinching his wounded leg. Blood pumped steadily from his thigh, seeping down to the seat beneath him. The entire limb was prickly numb, as if he’d slept on it for two days straight.
     Donovan had been wounded twice before in the line of duty. Once as a patrolman in Lakeview. He was chasing a suspect in a liquor-store robbery, a kid no more than sixteen years old, when the kid wheeled around, opened fire, and struck gold with his first shot.
     The bullet entered Donovan’s right pectoral and exited just below the armpit. It ripped the hell out of muscle and tissue—he still had the puckered pink scars to prove it—but it had somehow managed to miss any vital organs. The attending physician told Donovan he was lucky his right lung was still sucking air, but Donovan hadn’t felt all that lucky at the time.
     The second incident was more serious. Donovan had a detective’s shield by then, working Special Crimes, chasing down a serial rapist who had slit the throats of three of his latest victims, all thirteen-year-old girls.
     On a tip from victim number four, who had