Then smashed a fist into her face.
Bone crunched. Several of her teeth broke loose. She sagged back against the fence, stunned motionless. Maybrick tightened a savage grip around her throat. Her eyes bulged. Her abruptly toothless mouth worked. Shock and terror twisted across her once-delicate face. High cheekbones flushed dark as he cut off her air. His wife’s face swam before his eyes, gaping and toothless and terror stricken. He dug his thumb into dear, faithless Florie’s jaw, bruising the right side of her face. The bitch struggled feebly as he tightened down. He dented and bruised the flesh of her throat, the left side of her face with his fingers, ruthless and drunk with the terror he inflicted. She was so drunk, she wasn’t able to do more than claw weakly at his coat sleeve with one hand.
James Maybrick smiled down into his whore’s dying eyes . . .
. . . and brought out his shining knife.
* * *
Skeeter Jackson pushed his heavy maintenance cart toward the men’s room in Little Agora, bottles rattling and mops threatening to crash against the protestors who screamed and carried signs and picketed fifteen feet deep around Ianira’s vacant booth, threatening to shut down commerce with their disruptive presence and threatening to shut down the station with the violence that broke out between them and the Arabian Nights construction workers at least once every couple of hours.
Nuts, he groused, maneuvering with difficulty through the packed crowd, we are neck deep in nutcases. He finally gained the bathroom, which he was already fifteen minutes overdue to scrub, slowed down on his schedule by the crowds of protestors and uneasy tourists, and turned on the hot water to fill his mop bucket. He’d just added soap when the trouble broke loose.