Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

“Fuck!” Aspen screams as he kicks over the manager’s tray. McCabe has his gun out now as well, and the manager is backing away. “I said go get me a fucking piece of fucking—”

At first, he thinks he’s been tased, but the current comes from inside. From bright lights popping behind his eyes. His jaw muscles spasm as he collapses. He feels himself kick and another tray is tipped. The receptionist has her handset out and she is either recording or streaming. Aspen cannot stop making that awful sound and cannot stop drooling, and when he feels the warmth spread as he wets himself, he realizes that everyone is watching.

—

As soon as she sees she’s on the wrong side, Quinn spins and sprints and jumps the bumper. The car is long and low, and by the time she drops herself into the bolstered bucket seat and pulls the door closed, Ranveer’s already got it in gear. It is an old petrol-powered Jaguar, wrapped in satin black, as lean and lithe as the eponymous cat.

“I’ll never get used to everything being backwards here,” she says as they launch.

“Which is why you do the tattooing and I do the driving,” Ranveer says. “How did it go?”

“As planned.”

“Did you have time to clean up?”

Quinn dangles a sealed plastic bag. Needles, cartridges, and doubled-up gloves. Wads of ink and bloodstained gauze.

“You didn’t get any on you, did you?”

“Not a drop.”

“Good. That’s a particularly unforgiving neurotoxin.” As he shifts through the gears with quick, precise throws, the cat does not purr, but roars. “What number did you use?”

“Good old 1337. Thought it was fitting.”

While Quinn was at work, Ranveer traded the Land Rover they’d been using since they landed for the old mechanical F-Type. Just in case she came in hot, he’d explained, they needed something fast, but also something that the Department of Transport couldn’t remotely disable.

Ranveer downshifts before a curve, and the supercharged V8 wails and pops. “What do you feel like for dinner tonight?”

Quinn is just now feeling the stress of the last hour. She breathes and rolls her shoulders with a grimace and dips her chin to stretch her neck. Although she has grown more composed, she still feels the surge of emotions that she does not try to name. Which, Ranveer has assured her, is a good thing. The last thing you want to get complacent about is killing.

“I want an entire pizza,” she says. “And I want an entire bottle of wine. And I want—”

In her peripheral vision, she can see that Ranveer is shaking his head.

“What?”

“We can go anywhere,” he admonishes. “You can have anything.” He checks his blind spot and trades lanes with barely a twitch of his fist. “And the only thing that occurs to you is pizza?”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

Ranveer takes his eyes off the road long enough to politely prompt his passenger to continue.

“As I was saying,” Quinn resumes, “I want an entire pizza. An entire bottle of wine. And I want them both in Italy.”

Ranveer grins as the Jaguar passes beneath the airport sign. “I know just the place,” he says, then feathers the clutch and works the gears, leaving the dead snake behind.

41

  IMPACT EVENT

WHEELS UP AT Heathrow.

It’s getting dark, but the ability to upgrade to supersonic as part of your membership in the Emirates Executive Worldwide Private Jet Program means that Quinn and Ranveer will be in Naples enjoying obscenely meat-laden and crisp organic vegetable pizzas, respectively, by nine o’clock tops. Swapping dishes like an old married couple has already become second nature to the two of them, since servers the world over consistently reveal themselves to be stereotypically gender-biased, unconsciously placing the lighter fare delicately in front of the lady before presenting the gentleman with his meat-themed meal.

They’ll drink a full bottle of wine between them, then shots of espresso poured over butter-colored mounds of vanilla-bean gelato will see them off to bed—tipsy, sleepy, and extremely well fed.

Since they are just coming off a job rather than planning one, they have settled in the creamy, quilted-leather lounge rather than the jet’s rear business center. As has become their ritual, their crystal champagne flutes touch daintily across the narrow aisle. There is no verbal accompaniment to the gesture; the things they drink to, they do not speak of.

Quinn’s sip is followed by a dark, oyster-shaped Godiva, which she discovers is wrapped around a pearl of almond praline. She is about to summon the attendant to ask him if he has any of the chocolate-dipped strawberries that were in such abundance on the last flight when both she and Ranveer simultaneously receive incoming connection requests. Simon Baptiste. With a sidelong glance, Ranveer defers the question of whether or not they are still on the clock to Quinn, and after a moment of consideration, she casts to the cabin’s main plasma glass.

It is clear from the size of Simon’s smile that he can barely contain himself. Quinn has noticed that, since they met that day in the belly of Kilonova, Simon’s style has changed. He has gone from straight regulation to some kind of European expressionism. Today he is wearing a pastel plaid shirt with a gray bow tie and matching sport coat, both of which look like they were made from the same heavy-knit material as sweatpants. Apparently, he was hiding a fair amount of hair beneath his helmet, because it is slicked back in the front and twirled up into a knotted bun that Quinn suspects Moretti despises. Rather than his full-face visor, he is wearing tiny, round, wire-rimmed metaspecs that must be right on the edge of being completely useless. It is as though it never occurred to Simon that he could be himself at work and deflect Moretti’s abuse until he witnessed Quinn and Ranveer flippantly disregard the rules.

“I like the bow tie,” Quinn says without sarcasm. “It suits you.”

Simon primly tightens it with a