Free Don't Blink by James Patterson

then did Viktor Belova’s reflexes kick in. He tried to muscle his gun back toward Torenzi, but it was no use. Torenzi was too strong, too quick, too good at what he did.
    He pumped three rounds into Viktor’s stomach, causing the Russian to fall backwards onto the carpet. As he lay faceup and spilling blood, Torenzi stood and lodged his gun into Viktor’s open mouth. The blast sent his brains shooting out from his skull in a perfect circle.
    It was a bad day for the Belova brothers.
    Now the only sound in the room was Anastasia crying like a little girl.
    She had fallen to her knees, the red cocktail dress still unzipped in the back, hanging off her shoulders. She wanted to run for the door but couldn’t. She was in shock, paralyzed, scared to death that she would be next.
    “Get on the bed!” Torenzi ordered. “Take off that goddamn red dress.”
    “Please,” she begged, her blond hair covering her face and tears. “Please, don’t…” But then she shrugged off the dress. She climbed onto the bed.
    “Now, where were we?” said Torenzi. “By the way, Anastasia, my name is Bruno. That is my
real
name.”
    Hearing that, the girl began to cry even harder. She knew what he meant.
    “That’s right. You know my name. You know what I look like,” he whispered. “You might as well enjoy your last time in the sack.”

Chapter 27
    DWAYNE ROBINSON’S unspeakably sad funeral unfolded under a rain so heavy that had it been a baseball game, it would’ve surely been postponed. There was no church service. Instead, we all gathered graveside with a nondenominational minister at the sprawling Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, final resting place for Joseph Pulitzer, Miles Davis, and Fiorello La Guardia among so many others.
    The turnout was sparse, although bigger than I thought it might be. Many of Dwayne’s ex-teammates were actually there—former Yankees and heroes of mine, whom on any other day I would’ve been thrilled to see in person.
    Just not on this day.
    Also on hand was Dwayne’s ex-wife, who had left him the same week that he’d been banned from baseball. She was a former Miss Delaware. Alongside her were their two children, now approaching their teens. I remembered readingthat she had petitioned for full custody of them during the divorce and won without much of a fight from Dwayne. For a man unaccustomed to losing on the mound, once off it he had clearly known when he’d been beat.
    “Let us pray,” said the minister at the front of Dwayne’s mahogany casket.
    Hanging toward the back, hunched under an umbrella like everyone else, I felt strange being there. Technically, I’d only met Dwayne once. Then again, I was one of the last people to speak to him.
    Maybe even the very last. Who knew?
    Certainly not anyone standing around me. As the service broke, the chatter was all about the “man they once knew.” It was as if the poor soul who had reportedly jumped to his death from the terrace of his high-rise apartment had been a complete stranger to just about everyone at his funeral.
    “Once he was banned from the game, it’s as if Dwayne stopped living,” I overhead someone say.
    Now he’d just made it official.
    What wasn’t official yet was the autopsy, but in the intense media frenzy following Dwayne’s death, a leaked toxicology report showed he was high on heroin. Space-shuttle high. That probably explained why he hadn’t left behind a suicide note.
    One mystery down, perhaps.
    Another still unresolved.
    What the hell had Dwayne wanted to tell me?
    Weirdly, I felt as though I was also hiding some kind of secret. Courtney was the only other person who knew aboutthe late phone call Dwayne had made to me the night he killed himself.
    But as secrets go, mine was minor league. Dwayne’s was a whole lot bigger, and he’d just taken it to the grave.
    I walked back to my car, an old Saab 9000 Turbo—my one “extravagance,” if you can call it that, in a city dominated by subways, taxis, and