“Get in!”
Jenna dove for the passenger’s door. She barely had her feet off the pavement before the car squealed into motion. Armstrong, whatever his/her gender, was a maniac behind the wheel of a car. If anyone tried to follow, they ended up at the bottom of a very serious multi-car pileup that strung out several blocks in their wake. Jenna gulped back nausea, found herself checking the guns with trembling fingers to see how much ammunition might be left in them, terrified she’d accidentally set one of them off. She’d never used any guns like these. She asked hoarsely, “Aunt Cassie?”
“Sorry, kid.”
She squeezed shut her eyes. Oh, God . . . Cassie . . . Carl. . . . Jenna needed to be sick, needed to cry, was too numb and shocked to do either.
“It’s my fault,” Armstrong said savagely. “I should never have let her meet you. I told her not to wait at Luigi’s for you, told her they’d trace her through that goddamned call to your apartment! I knew they’d try something, dammit! But Christ, an all-out war in the middle of Luigi’s . . . with his own daughter and sister-in-law!”
Wetness stung Jenna’s eyes. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Her hands shook where she gripped the guns Armstrong had shoved at her.
“Forget Europe, kid,” the detective muttered. “They’re not gonna let you get out of New York alive. They hit your apartment, didn’t they? Killed your fiancé? Carl, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, unable to force any sound past the constriction in her throat.
Whoever Armstrong was, he or she could out-curse a rodeo rider. “Which means,” the detective ended harshly, “they were going to hit you anyway, even if Cassie hadn’t met you. Just on the chance she might have mailed it to you. And they had to kill Carl, in case you’d said something to him. God damn them!”