Paris is a Bitch

you’ll do the same.”
    “Think, John. We can’t leave four bodies, or more, outside a restaurant where we just had dinner, where we’ve eaten, what, eight, ten times before? The police will get a description. An attractive blonde and a Japanese guy, you want to be worried about the police looking for something like that every time we share a kiss on the Pont de Sully?”
    Goddamn it, she was right. I was letting those images of what they would do to her in the truck affect my judgment.
    I blew out a long breath. “You’re right.”
    “I mean it,” she said, knowing me, realizing how I was feeling.
    “I get it. I’m not going to kill anyone.”
    But I’ll make them wish I had.
    “If the plan is to get you into the truck,” I said, “that’s the center of gravity of this thing. So when you’re done taking care of business, you keep going in the same direction you started. Away from the truck. I’ll handle my end, you just get out of Dodge. You understand?”
    “Yes,” she said. There was no need to affect protest. She was good, but she knew I was better. Sending the target back into the center of the op would have just been stupid.
    “Good. And don’t go back to your apartment when it’s done. We don’t know how they tracked you. If it’s your mobile, they could have logged your movements to your apartment, we don’t know. So when we’re done—”
    “Yes, I’ll turn it off and remove the battery. Where do you want to meet?”
    “There’s a park, by Sully Morland Metro.”
    “The Square Henri-Galli.”
    “Yes. The playground inside it, the monkey bars—I’ll meet you there and we’ll figure out what to do next. But like you say, first this.”
    “Okay.”
    I rotated my neck, cracking the joints, and popped my knuckles. I felt a surge of hot adrenaline spread out from my gut and it felt like coming home.
    “All right,” I said. “You ready?”
    She nodded and we stood. She pulled on the cream suede jacket that earlier she’d hung on the back of her chair, slipped one arm and her head through the strap of her shoulder bag, and eased the Hideaway onto the first two fingers of her right hand, concealing it alongside the shoulder bag. I drained the last two inches of wine remaining in my glass, but didn’t swallow it, instead holding it in my mouth. Delilah bid the waitress
au revoir, merci,
and we walked to the door, each of us eyeing the area outside. Just beyond the threshold, we paused, facing each other, and kissed in the French style, one cheek, then the other, giving each of us two opportunities to see what was waiting a little way down the street.
    I squeezed her arm and she moved off, her footfalls echoing quietly on the stone sidewalk in the dark, and there was something about the sound as it faded away that almost could have panicked me. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard to let her walk alone into whatever she was facing. I suddenly wondered if I’d made a mistake, if the odds weren’t better with us sticking together. But too late to go back now.
    I took out my mobile as though to make a call, using it as an excuse to linger in front of the restaurant a moment longer. I kept my head down but my eyes up and saw the two on my end of the street start moving in our direction. They weren’t even looking at me. They were completely focused on Delilah. Bad enough that they’d underestimated her. But thinking I was a civilian, too… this just wasn’t going to be their night.
    I glanced right. Someone had stepped out of the gloom in front of Delilah. I heard him say,
“Désolé.”
Someone else had peeled himself off the dark wall of the École and was moving to flank her. Delilah’s arm moved in a blur and the first guy stumbled back, clutching his face, crying out,
“Ah! Putain de merde!”
She’d slashed him with the Hideaway. I hoped across an eye.
    The second guy, obviously not understanding what had just happened or not having time to process it, reached her and grabbed her wrist, pulling on it as though trying to haul her in the direction of the truck. Delilah pulled the other way and the guy braced with his forward leg, straightening his knee. I saw it coming a second beforehand: she chambered her forward leg and blasted a stomp kick into his outer knee, blowing it outside in. As the guy shrieked and crumbled to the ground, something an old instructor had once said popped up crazily in my mind—
Actually, the knee bends both ways, it’s just that one of