Get Off E-Book

Christa Faust

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 337

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The first Angel Dare novel, MONEY SHOT, earned universal acclaim: finalist for the Edgar, Anthony and Barry Awards, won the Crimespree Award and chosen by fans as their favorite Hard Case Crime title of all time. Angel's story continued in CHOKE HOLD and – after almost 15 years – it comes to a blazing conclusion in THE GET OFF. WILL THE CHANCE FOR A NEW LIFE BE ANGEL'S LAST SHOT? Tagged as a cop killer when a mission of vengeance goes wrong, Angel Dare finds herself on the run, with an unexpected burden: she's pregnant. Her desperate flight takes Angel across the American west, where cattle barons lock horns with rodeo bullfighters and life can end suddenly and brutally. A renegade couple living off the grid near the border might offer a chance of escape – but can Angel reach them in time…?

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Acclaim for the Work of Christa Faust!

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

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Acknowledgments

The Saga Begins in Money Shot and Continues in Choke Hold

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Acclaim for the Work of CHRISTA FAUST!

“Money Shot is a stunner, careening along with a wild, propulsive energy and a deliciously incendiary spirit. Laced with bravado and loaded up with knockabout charm, Christa Faust’s Hard Case debut is the literary equivalent of a gasoline cocktail.”

—Megan Abbott

“An instant pulp classic.”

—Rolling Stone

“I was sucked into the tight, juicy Money Shot, from the ripping car trunk start to the hard-pumping climax. This novel is so convincing that you want to believe Faust has been an oversexed, naked killing machine, at least once.”

—Vicki Hendricks

“Money Shot is smart, stylish, insightful, fast-paced pulp fiction with razor-sharp humor and a kick-ass heroine. Christa Faust is a super crime writer.”

—Jason Starr

“Money Shot makes most crime novels seem about as exciting as the missionary position on a Tuesday night. The results are stunning.”

—Duane Swierczynski

“Wonderfully lurid, with attitude to spare and a genuine affection for the best of hardboiled traditions. Christa Faust is THE business.”

—Maxim Jakubowski

“Christa Faust writes like she means it. Money Shot is dark, tough, stylish, full of invention and builds to one hell of a climax.”

—Allan Guthrie

“Christa Faust proves she can run with the big boys with this gritty thriller set in the darkest places of the porn industry. I loved it!”

—McKenna Jordan, Murder By the Book

“Never has an avenging Angel been sexier. Money Shot leaves you spent and wanting more.”

—Louis Boxer, founder of NoirCon

“Entertaining and all that neo-pulp should be, but its ring of authenticity also makes it quite a bit more than that.”

—Sarah Weinman

“The story had me from the first pages.”

—Bill Crider

“Christa Faust's first Angel Dare mystery, Money Shot, caused a sensation…Faust rewrote the femme fatale guidebook and upended the whole noir spectrum.”

—L.A. Review of Books

“Christa Faust’s Money Shot has to be an early contender for mystery debut of the year…Money Shot has no peer.”

—Bloomberg News

“Angel Dare,” he said. “As I live and breathe.”

For a second, we both just stood there. Wind whipped my damaged, coppery hair into my face, but his hat stayed on like it was nailed on. I was trying to make my lips move, to formulate some kind of denial, anything at all, but my thoughts were a scattered jumble, and nothing came out.

He smiled and reached into an inner pocket, and I figured he’s gonna shoot me right here in this shitty gas station and hey, at least I won’t have to worry about the Situation anymore.

He didn’t shoot me. He pulled out a badge. A fucking cop, but that made me feel worse, not better.

His smile grew, wide and cruel. I was pretty sure his perfect teeth were fake.

“I love your movies,” he said, tucking the badge back into the pocket it came from.

So, it was like that. Fine. Nothing I couldn’t handle…

HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY CHRISTA FAUST:

MONEY SHOT

CHOKE HOLD

THE GET OFF

PEEPLAND (graphic novel, with Gary Phillips)

SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

JOYLAND by Stephen King

THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

SO NUDE, SO DEAD by Ed McBain

QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

THE LAST STAND by Mickey Spillane

UNDERSTUDY FOR DEATH by Charles Willeford

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY by Joyce Carol Oates

BLOOD SUGAR by Daniel Kraus

LEMONS NEVER LIE by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark

ARE SNAKES NECESSARY? by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

KILLER, COME BACK TO ME by Ray Bradbury

FIVE DECEMBERS by James Kestrel

THE NEXT TIME I DIE by Jason Starr

LOWDOWN ROAD by Scott Von Doviak

SEED ON THE WIND by Rex Stout

FAST CHARLIE by Victor Gischler

NOBODY’S ANGEL by Jack Clark

DEATH COMES TOO LATE by Charles Ardai

INTO THE NIGHT by Cornell Woolrich and Lawrence Block

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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-166)

First Hard Case Crime edition: March 2025

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London SE1 0UP

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2025 by Christa Faust

Cover painting copyright © 2025 by Paul Mann

Author Photo by David Suh

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Print edition ISBN 978-1-83541-173-5E-book ISBN 978-1-83541-174-2

Design direction by Max Phillipswww.signalfoundry.com

Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

Printed in the United States of America

Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

For Pop Faust and The Alabama Slamma, Ross Hill.Two men who caught the Westbound Train before theyhad a chance to read the book they inspired.

THE GET OFF

1.

They called me a femme fatale in the media, back when that Jesse Black fiasco went down. Most people have no idea what it really means. Most people think it means badass with tits, but that’s not it at all. A real femme fatale is a villain, and I always thought of myself as a hero. At least I tried to be.

Turned out they were right.

* * *

May, 2011.

I found out I was pregnant on my way to kill Vukasin.

I’d been stalking him, online and in real life. I followed him everywhere, obsessively studying his daily habits. Letting him think he was hunting me, when I was really hunting him.

I started fucking his urologist about three weeks ago. Dr. Albert Balian was a sweet guy but utterly clueless when it came to women. Middle aged, unattractive, unhappily married. An easy mark. It was no sweat to convince him how hot it would be for me to dress up like one of his nurses and blow him under the desk in his cluttered office during business hours. At first, he’d been resistant to the idea of me wearing the boring unisex scrubs his real nurses wear and wanted me in some kind of skimpy stripper fantasy getup made out of red and white vinyl. I wore him down, claiming it would be so much sexier for me if I could imagine he was my real boss and that I might lose my job if I didn’t do what he wanted. I’d done it just often enough for the rest of his long-suffering staff to get used to seeing me wearing scrubs around the office, but not enough for him to get bored with the whole idea.

When I stepped onto the elevator that day, I was locked and loaded. Pulse racing as I fought to slow my breathing and steady my hands. I had a capped syringe tucked into the pocket of my borrowed scrub pants, filled with enough potassium chloride to stop an elephant’s heart. I was sweating under my expensive blonde wig. The tunnel vision of my aching hatred made me feel righteous and invincible. Nothing else mattered.

It was 2:20 PM as I stood alone in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. Vukasin’s appointment was for 2:30, so I still had time to get in through the back door and meet him in the one place his security goons didn’t follow. He didn’t want any of his men to see that hunk of badly reconstructed meat that dangled between his legs.

That’s my fault, by the way. I didn’t technically do it, but I was the catalyst that made it happen. If you just walked in on the middle of this low-budget action movie that my life has become, all you need to know for now is that he did shit to me and to people I love that I can’t forgive. Not fucking ever. Hence, the mutual vendetta.

The doors on the elevator had started to slide closed when they suddenly bounced back open to admit a pregnant woman with a baby strapped into one of those carrier harnesses that make you look like you have a stunted and partially absorbed Siamese twin growing out of your chest.

The woman was flushed and cheerful with the same fluffy, strawberry blond hair as her equally pink-faced baby. She was dressed in roomy, colorful sweats and had a fancy designer diaper bag slung over one shoulder. The baby was wailing and hiccupping in ascending scales like a soprano warming up for a difficult aria.

“Whoo,” the woman said, panting and leaning heavily against the left side of the elevator as she pressed the same glowing button that I had obviously already pressed. “Can’t move so quick anymore.”

I didn’t answer. Just stared straight ahead at the closing doors.

“Is this your first?” she asked, lightly bouncing her fussing baby.

I turned to her with a baffled frown.

“This is my fourth,” she said without waiting for my answer. The baby was starting to gasp and spit like it might blow a head gasket. “A little boy, finally, after three girls! I promise it gets so much easier after the first one. When are you due?”

The baby’s high-pitched wailing was fraying my last nerve and making my fists curl and itch, but that woman’s sweaty pink face was so mild and sweet, completely oblivious to the battle currently raging inside me. I was about to say something cruel to shut her the fuck up but didn’t. I forced a smile that I hoped didn’t seem too condescending.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the crying baby and smoothing my scrubs over my admittedly bigger-than-I-might-have-liked belly. “I’m just fat.”

She laughed and shook her head, like we were sharing some wonderful private joke. Her baby was still crying but starting to wind down as she continued with the bouncing and cooing.

“I know, right?” she said. “When my sister-in-law was pregnant with my nephew, she looked like an ad for prenatal yoga, all toned and glowing with this perfect round tummy. Me, I always look like I just escaped from Sea World.”

She rooted around for a second in the outer pocket of the diaper bag, and I figured she was looking for some kind of pacifier or toy to help shut the baby up. Instead, she took out a small packet of tissues and held them out to me.

“They make pads,” she said. “You should get some. At least while you’re still working.”

They make pads. That sentence was so far outside anything I expected from the conversation that for a moment I thought I misheard her.

“Pads?” I repeated, frown deepening.

Again, that light, happy laugh, like there was nothing wrong with the world. Like I wasn’t about to go kill the man who had killed or helped kill pretty much everyone I ever cared about.

“Bra pads,” she said, pressing the packet of tissues into my hand. “I didn’t need them when I was pregnant with Olivia, my oldest. She had the hardest time latching and I ended up having to hire a lactation consultant just to get the taps running, but this time around I’m already a total colostrum fountain, just like you! Anyway, for now you can use these to absorb any excess and hopefully one of your coworkers will have a spare top they can lend you.”

I looked down at my navy-blue scrub top. There were two small, damp blotches on the front, one over each nipple. I couldn’t have been more horrified if I’d just realized I was covered in blood.

2.

The elevator doors opened, and the pregnant woman waddled off towards the OB/GYN down the hall from Dr. Balian, waving to me and saying something cheery and meaningless that I couldn’t hear over the roaring inside my head.

I leaned against the wall of the elevator, feeling faint and sick and panicky. There had to be some other explanation for the blotches. Infection? Cancer? After all, I’m over 40 and always use condoms. I battled multiple bouts of pelvic inflammatory disease during my early years in the porn business and I had been told that I had reduced my chances of successful baby-making to somewhere between slim and none. I didn’t care. I never wanted actual kid-kids anyway, and the girls I used to manage were all the daughters I ever needed.

I started scrolling back over every single recent sexual encounter since my last period. All with Dr. Balian and all with protection. Had there been a slip, an imperceptibly tiny rupture that could have allowed some wayward and ambitious sperm to breach the perimeter?

When was that latest spotty, half-assed period anyway? Was that two weeks ago? Three? Time had been collapsing in on itself as I fell deeper and deeper into my all-consuming stalker waltz with Vukasin.

The doors started to slide shut and I was forced to launch myself through before they closed on me. Standing in the long bland hallway, I took a moment to get my shit back together. I didn’t have time for any of this. I was on a mission. So what if I was pregnant or dying from breast cancer or what fucking ever? I could always go get an abortion or a mastectomy after Vukasin was dead. For now, I needed to stay calm, stay focused and do what needed to be done.

I headed down the hallway to the staff entrance of Dr. Balian’s office.

I punched in the code to open the door. Mrs. Balian’s birthday. So sweet. Once inside, I spotted a petite Armenian nurse, Ani I think her name was, coming down the hall in my direction with her eyes on a patient’s chart. I quickly crossed my arms over my damp scrub top as she looked up and spotted me, not even bothering to try and hide her scathing disapproval.

I tried to see myself through her eyes for a moment, that trashy blonde slut with too much bronzer, electric blue contacts and fat red lips drawn way outside their natural shape. I wanted her to remember me that way, as a laundry list of exaggerated characteristics that she would later use to describe me to detectives, none of which have anything to do with the way I actually look. I smiled at her, and she turned away, ignoring me like I was a bad smell that she was too polite to acknowledge. She went into one of the exam rooms and closed the door while I ducked into the staff lounge.

The lounge was an odd little extra room with a stubby L shape. Table and chairs. Kitchenette. A cute little red couch, tucked into the short leg of the L. I blew Dr. Balian on that couch once, so I knew the door locked.

Once I locked it, I peeled off my damp scrub top. My sports bra was also stained but I knew I’d probably have to run after the deed was done and didn’t want my possibly infected boobs flopping painfully up and down while I did it.

I took a quick peek under the spandex to see what was going on, nipplewise. They definitely seemed darker and stiffer than normal, sore to the touch. Was that new? How long had they been like that? The one on the left seemed a little crusty and when I prodded it with the tip of my finger, it oozed several tiny, pearlescent droplets. That had definitely never happened before. Another wave of dizzy, drowning anxiety threatened to close over my head.

I needed to pull myself together, to make myself breathe slow and clear my crazy head. I thought of a guy I used to know, of the way revenge can twist you up inside and make you forget who you’d always assumed you were. I had no idea who I was anymore or who I would be after this was over, but there was no time to worry about that now.

I folded two of the pregnant woman’s tissues into squares, tucked them into my bra, and opened the closet door. Behind a few sad, forgotten jackets was a single spare scrub top. It was a bit tight over my tits and belly, but workable, and I tossed the stained one into the trash. My fingers reached for the capped syringe in my pants pocket like it was a rosary, but I was all out of prayers.

I checked my watch. Showtime.

3.

Vukasin wasn’t in the first exam room. It was instead occupied by a tiny old man who beamed like he just won the lottery when I opened the door. He was visibly crestfallen when I told him I had the wrong room.

The next one was the right room.

When I saw Vukasin, I felt that hot surge of intense and complex emotion not unlike the way you feel when you spot your high school crush in the lunchroom. I’d been watching him for months through windows, binoculars, cameras or online, but this was the first time that we were actually in the same room together. First time since Vegas.

He’d been steadily losing weight that he couldn’t spare. His angular face was haggard and unshaven, harshly lit from below by the glow of his phone. His thin white legs stuck out of the paper gown, knobby and restless like a child’s. He seemed so small and defenseless, his body hunched and slightly embarrassed and just wanting to get this over with. Just a middle-aged guy at the doctor, like any other guy. Only he wasn’t just any guy. He was the one, my anti-soulmate, as obsessed with killing me as I was with killing him. Our whole lives had been leading up to this intimate moment together.

“How are we today?” I asked, pitching my voice high and sweet like a preschool teacher as I slipped into a pair of nitrile gloves.

His eyes flicked up from the phone screen for a fraction of a second and I held my breath, sure that he would see right through my half-assed disguise. Like he would be able to smell me, to recognize me as his homicidal mate on some deep, primal level. But he dismissed me as irrelevant almost instantly, attention returning to his phone.

“Fine,” he said, not because he was actually fine, but because that’s just what you say when someone who doesn’t matter asks how you are.

Emboldened by his thoughtless dismissal, I came forward and took his right wrist in my hand, pretending to check his pulse while I thumbed the cap off the syringe inside my pocket. He shifted the phone to his left hand and continued reading whatever it was he was reading. I could smell his breath, that sharp and horribly familiar scent of the peppermint gum he always chewed. Whenever I met someone else who chewed that same gum, the smell gave me this hot pulse of Pavlovian nausea. Ironic, since that particular brand is marketed primarily to lovers who want to taste good when they make out.

My hand was shaking when I raised it to place two fingers just below his right ear. I swallowed hard against the nausea and felt my vision narrow down to a dark, whirling tunnel centered around his carotid artery.

“Turn your head to the left, please,” I said, hating the thin mousy squeak that had replaced my voice.

He did what I asked with a small, exasperated sigh, like I was a mildly annoying inconvenience. His eyes stayed glued to his phone.

This was it. Flipping the switch in my head and deciding to stop running and start hunting had been the only thing that kept me going. Everything I’d been through, the strange and lonely hell the last six months had been, it was all leading up to this. Nothing else mattered. I raised the syringe and held it poised a bare millimeter from that vein in his neck while I leaned in close to his ear.

“It’s me,” I said. “Angel.”

Then I slid the needle into the vein. That’s when the shooting started.

4.

I have this clear dividing line in my life, a bloody and traumatic Rubicon crossed the day of that ill-fated boy/girl shoot in Bel Air. A line between the life I used to have and what’s happening now. What keeps on happening, this crazy minute-by-minute skin-of-my-teeth survival that in no way resembles any kind of life.

But the truth is more complicated, because it’s not just one thing. It’s a sliding scale, a series of transgressions. Things I never thought I could live through but somehow do anyway. Things that chip away at the polite illusion of who I once believed I was.

One of those things, a small piece of the big ugly mess, but yet huge and life changing on its own, is having been shot at. Also, having been hit. Once your body knows what that feels like, you never think maybe that sound is just firecrackers.

As I instinctively yanked Vukasin’s body in front of mine, I realized several things at once. One was that my syringe was still sticking out of his neck, wobbling up and down with the plunger unplunged. Another was that it didn’t matter anyway, because he had just been shot in the skinny, concave chest. Not dead yet but headed down that road at a decent clip and really fucking furious about it. Last and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the gun and the person behind it. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who thought this was a good place to take Vukasin out.

“Niko, you treacherous fucking bitch,” Vukasin said, words muffled in my ringing ears and punctuated by a mist of blood around his cracked lips.

“Nothing personal,” the shooter replied.

Niko. I recognized him instantly as one of Vukasin’s accomplices from that horror show in Vegas. The guy that mattered. The one who didn’t seem to own any clothes that weren’t track suits. Vukasin’s trigger man. Clearly, he was somebody else’s trigger man now.

Even though he’d been there for a lot of the bad business that went down between me and Vukasin, he didn’t seem to recognize me now. Or if he did, he didn’t care. He looked bored, like he was just passing time while waiting for a bus.

He fired again, but this time he missed, because Vukasin had launched himself at the shooter like a rabid monkey. Grappling and hissing, the two of them crashed into a large glass-front cabinet. The glass shattered and the cabinet tipped, seeming to teeter with indecision before deciding to topple. The room was small and narrow and there was nowhere to get away, so I flattened myself desperately against the back wall. The top corner of the falling cabinet slammed into the left side of my body, causing a bright burst of pain that took my breath away and left me pinned against the wall.

My hearing was still a little iffy from the gunfire, but I was pretty sure I heard other shots coming from the waiting area, along with screaming and swearing. Fragments of the furious exchange between Vukasin and the assassin slipped between the louder sounds like muffled talk radio from a faraway station.

What the fuck was going on here? Some kind of mutiny or power grab that had divided Vukasin’s men into sudden violent factions? Was building security involved yet? Cops?

Was Dr. Balian ok? He was a bad lay, but he definitely didn’t deserve this kind of action. He wouldn’t have needed to operate on Vukasin’s dick if Vukasin had never met me. Yet another person whose life was ruined by proximity to me.

There was a confusing, awkward scramble going on, and then another three shots in quick succession. I felt one of them hit the cabinet, the shock reverberating through the metal and my battered body. At least one of the other two hit Vukasin in the face, ending the conversation for good.

There was a weird quiet moment then, a calm bubble in the chaos. Niko got his feet under him and stood in the doorway, gun in hand and evaluating me with those cold eyes. And as I looked at him, he was looking back at me, clearly sizing me up and deciding whether or not to shoot me. I still couldn’t tell if he recognized me or not.

He raised the gun, and I felt a sound well up from somewhere inside my aching chest. It wasn’t a cry of fear, or desperate pleading or anything like that. It was a strangled, wordless growl of unbearable frustration, like the sound of a trapped animal about to chew its own leg off. I should have been thinking about my own imminent death, but all I could see was Vukasin lying at his feet, dead by someone else’s hand. Not mine.

I don’t know how to make you understand the way that made me feel. Like coitus interruptus. Like I’d spent months building something from scratch with my bare hands and someone just waltzed in and stole it the second before it was finished. Like somebody ate my birthday cake. I’d worked too fucking hard to have it all end like this.

I heard another shot. My whole body clenched in anticipation of a fatal bullet, but I felt nothing. What happened instead was that Niko whipped around, turning his gun to face an unseen assailant in the hallway. More shots, shouting that might have been Croatian, and then he was gone.

I was just frozen there for what felt like ages, trying desperately to hear anything through the ringing in my ears. Nothing.

I steeled myself, bracing for pain, and then shoved the heavy cabinet away with all my strength. It took several tries, the last of which nearly caused me to pass out, but I was finally able to get myself out from under the weight of the cabinet. The pain in my ribs was so intense that I almost didn’t notice the jagged dagger of glass sticking out of my forearm. But when that piece of glass banged against the frame of the door, you better fucking believe I noticed. I yanked it out, grunting between clenched teeth, and instantly regretted that decision. The bleeding went from a sluggish trickle to a steady, alarming gush. I tore a piece from Vukasin’s hospital gown to wrap around the wound, but the flimsy material was soaked through and useless within seconds. There was no time to search around in the wreckage for gauze or other kinds of bandages. I needed to get the fuck out of there before whatever was happening out in the hallway started happening to me.

5.

Of course, it couldn’t be that simple. I probably don’t have to tell you what happened next, because if you’ve spent more than ten seconds on the internet, you already know. But just so the handful of Luddites and hermits and proud dumb-phone users don’t feel left out, I’ll give you the short version.

I killed a cop. A woman with a new baby, on her first day back on the job after maternity leave. The cold-hearted execution of the saintly victim was captured on surveillance video and quickly went viral, along with calls for swift retribution against the perpetrator. At first, I was just “Unknown Female” but once I had been definitively ID’d by DNA from the generous amount of blood I’d left at the scene, the media circus really kicked into high gear.

But you have to understand, that grainy video fragment is deceptive and doesn’t show any of the subtle details of how it really went down.

In the video you see the hero cop lady standing in the center of a long hallway, gun drawn. Low-res, black-and-white, and there’s no sound, but you can see a muzzle flash when she fires at a frenetic, blurry whirl of action happening just below the bottom center of the screen.

The next bit has been slowed down and enhanced and played and replayed about a million times. The whirl coalesces into a figure with a gun. A lot of people got distracted by the weird pale blob that flies off to the left side of the screen but that’s just the wig.

There’s another muzzle flash and the hero cop lady drops. The gun-wielding figure takes a tentative step towards the fallen cop and then does the thing you’re never supposed to do. It looks up at the camera.

I look up at the camera.

That was the moment where so many news broadcasters and internet sleuths froze the video. Me looking right at the fucking camera like I want to make sure everyone gets a real good look at my stupid face. My holy-shit-I-just-shot-a-fucking-cop face.

If you keep watching after that, you’ll see me run away down the hallway and disappear into the stairway but there’s really no point bothering. Most people who made it that far have already made up their mind about me anyway.

Thing is, they aren’t wrong. Not really. But of course, there’s more to it than that.

Here’s how it actually went down.

* * *

When I stumbled out into the hallway, clutching my side with the arm that wasn’t bleeding, I nearly tripped over the body of the cute Armenian nurse who had given me the dirty look. The older man I’d accidentally walked in on earlier was running down the hall swearing vociferously, gown flapping wide open in the back to expose his bony ass and low slung nutsack. No sign of Balian. I was feeling panicky and disoriented, and it took me a second to remember the location of the impossibly distant exit.

That’s when I found myself suddenly and intimately acquainted with one of Vukasin’s other thugs.

This guy was one of the interchangeable meatheads who composed his rotating entourage of low-rent knee-breakers. There were five total, usually only two or three on shift at any given time. They were steroid-swollen Ken dolls, tough to tell apart. Especially when I only had eyes for Vukasin. Of the five, there was only one blond. This guy was not the blond.

He was leaning against the wall, face gone pasty gray under his dark stubble and looking like he was maybe about to puke. His white shirt was tie-dyed with gore, but it was hard to tell how much of it was his. At least some of it clearly was, as evidenced by the steady trickle of fresh red blood leaking from his left pant leg and ruining his pricy kicks.

He said something to me in slushy Croatian and then lunged at me way faster than I would have expected from someone in his condition, dragging me into a weird half-hug half-chokehold, like a drowning man. I silently struggled and kicked against him, desperate to get away from him and his personal olfactory weather system of fear-sweat and blood and Drakkar Noir. It felt kinda like dealing with your friend who’s drunk and really, really loves you but also has a gun and wants to kill you.

The gun went off right by my head. I wrenched my head and upper body backward and away, crooked wig flying off in the process. I was already half deaf from the previous gunfire, but all I could hear after that was the muffled thump of my terrified heart beating like a techno baseline under the harsh tinny ringing. I thought maybe people were shouting, but it just sounded like distant rumbling. I could feel the guy’s whole body weakening against me and I was concentrating on trying to peel his thick hairy fingers off the gun.

Then someone shot at me.

I will never claim to be any kind of quick-draw marksman or anything like that. I’ve used guns for their intended purpose a lot more often than I’ve liked and occasionally succeeded in shooting one of my fellow humans, but they still feel a little weird in my hand. Like a highly specialized piece of sports equipment for a game I don’t really like or understand. But somehow, the one time in my life when I really should have missed, when I needed to miss, I didn’t.

I felt an electric jolt of terrified adrenaline as I spun towards the new and unknown threat with the thug’s gun in my hand, squeezing the trigger before my eyes could even register who it was that shot at me.

By all laws of physics, that wild, hail-Mary bullet should have plowed into the acoustic tile ceiling, or the colorful poster reminding men to have regular screenings for prostate cancer, or the cart full of catheters and syringes. But it didn’t. It hit the hero cop lady in her muscular inner thigh, severing her femoral artery and releasing all the blood in her body in a sudden, high-velocity geyser not unlike a shaken bottle of champagne.

I locked eyes with her as she realized what had happened. She looked scared, and that was so much worse than if she was glaring at me or hating me in that moment. I was overwhelmed with this desire to mouth the word sorry, but I was just frozen there, staring at her. Then her face went gray and slack, eyes rolling back as she ragdolled into a bloody heap.

I took a tentative step towards the dying cop and then remembered the security camera.

I had noted it when I first started visiting the doc at his office. It wasn’t the only one in the practice. There were none in the exam rooms, obviously, just the one over the reception desk and this one in the hall, facing the back door. It was small and subtle and might not even be noticed by anyone less paranoid than me. Which was intentional, since most guys wouldn’t like the idea of being caught on camera visiting a urologist who also specializes in surgical solutions for erectile dysfunction and reconstructive and cosmetic procedures for male genitalia.

Of course, I’d factored in the existence of that camera when I was gaming out my plan to kill Vukasin. I knew there was no way to avoid being seen going in and out even without the camera there. But with my big blond wig and heavy makeup, I felt safe in the knowledge that I’d be remembered the wrong way. That I could shed my trashy blonde stranger’s skin in a nearby parking lot and walk away as a completely different person.

In the thick of the messy, terrifying and unexpected chaos that had erupted in the wake of my failed assassination attempt, I hadn’t been thinking about anything but getting out alive. Then, when I saw the cop go down, I suddenly remembered the camera. I should have just hunched down and covered my face as I hustled out but for some reason the act of remembering the camera pulled my face up towards it like a magnet. Like I had to check to make sure it was still there or something. Anyway, I have no excuse. I did a stupid thing. And I’m currently fucked because of it.

6.

I pulled into a corner mini-mall parking lot and eased the stolen car into a slot in front of a liquor store. There was a sign that warned me not to park there for more than five minutes. Wise advice.

The adrenaline was wearing off and pain was kicking in. The worst of it was on the left side of my body, a hot pulse that reached a shrill, stabbing crescendo at the top of each breath. I had planned to strip out of the scrubs in the car, but I quickly realized that I was unable to raise my arms to pull off the top without excruciating pain. I wound up zipping a black hoodie over the bloody top and swapping the scrub pants for the forgettable gray jersey maxiskirt I had packed and ready. I did my best to stick with the steps of my plan, scrubbing away the heavy makeup with a handful of moist wipes and removing the disposable blue contacts, but inside I was panicking and sure that everyone around was watching me.

I went to get out of the car and throw the bag of incriminating items into the liquor store trash, but the massive wave of agony and dizziness that hit when I tried to stand wrenched an embarrassingly loud shriek out from between my clenched teeth. If people weren’t really watching me before, they were now.

The sleeve of my hoodie was already soaked through from the unchecked flow of blood, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t gonna stop without some stitches. Never mind the probably broken rib that felt like it was stabbing me in the lung with every breath. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it was looking like I had no choice but to get myself to some kind of doctor before I bled out like that dead cop I didn’t want to think about.

L.A. traffic is never fun, but it’s even less fun when you’re beaten, bruised and bleeding to death, trying to drive yourself to the hospital before you black out behind the wheel.

Of course, I drove right past Cedar Sinai. I didn’t want expensive, quality care. I needed stressed-out, sleepless interns desperately treading water in a sea of gang violence, drug casualties and mental health crises.

East Central Care Clinic was exactly what I needed.

It was a lot like getting stitches at the DMV. Endless lines, fraying nerves, exasperated and underpaid employees. There were feverish kids crying in the waiting room and some adults too. An elderly woman was laid out on the grimy green linoleum floor with her face pressed against the far wall underneath a wilted cardboard sombrero and a crooked sign wishing everyone a happy Cinco de Mayo. When I asked the triage nurse if the woman was ok, he said she did that every single day. The whole place smelled of ammonia and despair. It took me over an hour to get the stitches, by which time I’d lost so much blood that I could no longer stand without assistance. I had to be put in a wheelchair to go get my chest x-ray.

I had completely forgotten about the whole pregnancy thing until I saw that familiar sign on the wall, the one we’ve all seen a million times and yet never paid any attention. At least I never did until that day.

Please inform technician if you are or think you might be pregnant.

Shit.

The technician was a no-nonsense Latina with a build like an Olympic swimmer and shrewd dark eyes.

“Ok, listen I…um,” I said, trying not to stammer like a lying child and failing miserably. “Well, I think…I might be pregnant. I mean, probably not but…is there…like a test you can give me, or…”