Read Online The Goldfish Bowl by Laurence Gough - Free Book Online

no footsteps behind her, and it had finally occurred to her that anyone who could afford a Mercedes would be unlikely to have much interest in her small bankroll. In fact she was beginning to wonder if she really had seen a movement inside the car, heard the soft click of a door opening behind her.
    She glanced over her shoulder. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw a woman in a shiny plastic raincoat standing on the sidewalk next to the open door of the exotic little car. The woman’s feet were wide apart and she seemed to be leaning slightly forward. Her right arm, elbow bent, was held out from her body parallel to the ground. Phasia Palinkas squinted into the gloom, and realized with a shock of horror that the woman was pointing a gun at her. Her heart thumped in her chest, spewing an adrenalin-rich mix of blood through her veins. She lurched into the centre of the puddle of light, and stood stock still.
    The protection offered by the streetlight had been nothing but an illusion, no more substantial than a painted scrim.
    A bright disc of light winked at her, reflected from the lens of the telescopic sight.
    The sniper peered through the scope into a field of blackness irregularly sprinkled with a dozen tiny pinpoints of iridescence. Frowning, he moved the barrel laterally. The lens filled with light. In the lower left-hand quadrant there was a fuzzy black slope; the material, twice magnified, of Phasia Palinkas’ black cloth coat. The iridescence, he saw now, had come from the many loose filaments of wool standing out from the mass. He tracked across the width of her shoulders, gauged the span, and tracked halfway back. The viewfinder was filled once again with blackness. He was, in a sense, shooting blind.
    His finger tightened on the trigger.
    Once again, the lens suddenly filled with light. He blinked. The crosshairs were focused on the shiny green metal of the lamp-post. It was as if he was looking at a slide show which made no sense and over which he had no control. He looked up, perplexed, and saw that Phasia Palinkas had moved and that she was in full flight.
    He tried a snap shot, firing from the hip.
    The bullet slammed into the small of her back. It threw her forward and knocked her down. Her head hit the sidewalk hard enough to fracture her cheekbone. She lay on her side on the cold wet concrete with one arm trapped beneath her and the other fully extended. The sound of the shot echoed down the length of the street, marching inexorably away from her.
    Dimly, as if from a great distance, she heard the door of the Mercedes slam shut.
    She opened her eyes. Her purse had burst open, spilling the contents across the sidewalk. Blurred scraps of paper drifted across her line of vision, past her key ring, a yellow nylon comb that belonged to her younger daughter, a scattered handful of coins that gleamed under the light.
    The Mercedes coughed into life. She listened carefully, straining, as the muted clatter of the diesel engine faded to a perfect silence.
    Everything kept shifting out of focus, sliding away from her. Suddenly the keys and comb and small change and the meaningless scraps of paper became enormously important. She was determined to retrieve them, to tidy up this last small segment of her life. Her fingers scrabbled spasmodically on the roughly textured surface of the sidewalk. A nail splintered. Minute laminations of polish crumbled and fell away along the irregular edge of the fracture. Never had her perspective been so small, details so significant. She stared at her hand as it staggered sideways of its own volition. The tendons in her wrist bulged. The fingers were arched and rigid. She watched the maverick hand march out of her line of sight and back again, pause six inches from her nose with the index finger flexed in mid-stride.
    The air filled with mist. It began to rain. The streetlight above Phasia Palinkas retreated into a thick grey haze, slowly faded to black.
    Nichos was in the lobby