Free Omega Dog by Tim Stevens

her hand again. ‘Gimme the phone.’
    ‘Boss –’ She knew he knew what was coming.
    ‘ Give it to me, dammit! ’
    Wordlessly, Infante handed the cell phone across the desk to her. Rosetti took it, hefted its weight.
    Then she hurled it at Infante’s head.
    He ducked, but too late. The phone caught his forehead with a crack and he yelled and stumbled back. The phone flew in pieces across the carpeted floor. Infante held his hands up to his forehead. They came away bloody.
    Anybody who didn’t know Rosetti might have said: don’t shoot the messenger . But anybody who did know her would understand.
    When you worked for DeeDee Rosetti, you accepted you could get shot at any time, and for any reason. Or have a full ashtray dumped over your head. Or a cigarette stubbed out on the back of your hand.
    It was an occupational hazard, a risk you took in exchange for the privilege of being part of the most prestigious crime family in New York City.
    ‘Get the fuck out!’ Rosetti raged at Infante.
    He went.
    Alone, Rosetti alternated between drags on her unfiltered Camel and bites of her nails. She was angry, all right. But she was also calculating.
    How could a civilian, a simple doctor, and a woman at that, have gotten away from a professional assassin of Marcus Royle’s caliber?
    Either she’d been tipped off, or someone had helped her somehow. But what did that mean?
    And what had Royle meant when he’d said that if Rosetti had put someone else in the field to compete with him, he’d kill them too?
    Had he come into conflict with some unknown person?
    Rosetti knuckled her forehead in frustration. Without hearing Royle’s account of what happened, she had no way of knowing. She couldn’t even call him in, cancel the deal and hire somebody more competent to do the job, because she had no way of contacting him now.
    Unless...
    Rosetti sat bolt upright in her wheelchair, a move that never failed to send stabs of pain down her arthritic neck. She had an idea.
    And ironically, Royle himself had given it to her.
    She’d never tried it before. Had always sent only one assassin into the field at a time.
    But there was no reason why she shouldn’t hire somebody else, even if she couldn’t call Royle off. After all, she’d only end up having to pay one person. Only one of them would get to the girl first.
    Humming tunelessly around the cigarette jammed between her lips, as she always did when she was pleased with herself, Rosetti picked up the phone.

Chapter 16
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    B eth ran.
    She ran as fast as the pumps she was wearing allowed, which wasn’t fast at all. But the alternative, running in her bare feet, wasn’t an option. These were city streets, and she’d cut her soles to ribbons in no time.
    The familiar streets and sounds and sights around her apartment block took on a new, terrifying air of menace. Suddenly every passerby posed a threat, every building loomed monstrously into her path. Every blaring car horn yelled aggression at her.
    Terror drove Beth on. The primal, instinctive need to put as much distance as she could between her and the source of danger.
    Between her and the man – men – who were trying to kill her.
    Beth had put up with her fair share of abuse and violent behavior, as all doctors did. She’d been punched in the face before, by an alcoholic going through the DTs. She’d been half-throttled by a criminal on the run who’d tried to escape from the ward when the cops arrived.
    But in all of these cases, it hadn’t been personal. Beth just happened to be in the way of someone who needed to lash out randomly, for one reason or another.
    Nobody had ever deliberately tried to kill her before.
    Right up until the man had come bursting through into the bathroom, she hadn’t really believed it. Even as she was dragging herself painfully through the narrow window space, hanging onto the fire escape which all of a sudden seemed terrifyingly high above the ground, some part of