Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Her instinctive reaction upon seeing him prone before the desk had been that of a friend and physician: Anguished, she had gone immediately to his aid. But until Pablo said, “Run,” Ginger did not understand that her own life might be in jeopardy. Suddenly she realized that she had heard no gunfire, which meant a silencer-equipped pistol. The assailant was no ordinary burglar. Someone infinitely more dangerous. All those considerations flashed through her mind in an instant.

  Her heart pounding, she rose and turned toward the door. The gunman—tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a leather topcoat belted tightly at the waist—came out from behind the door, holding the silencer-equipped pistol. He was big, but surprisingly less threatening in appearance than she had expected. He was her age, clean-cut, with innocent blue eyes and a face unsuited for menace.

  When he spoke, the disparity between his unremarkable appearance and his murderous actions was even greater, for his first words were a tremulous apology of sorts. “Shouldn’t have happened. Didn’t have to happen, for Christ’s sake. I just... I was duping those tapes on a high-speed recorder. That’s all I wanted—dupes of the tapes.”

  He was pointing to the desk, and for the first time Ginger noticed an open attaché case in which was nestled a compact piece of electronic equipment. Tape cassettes were scattered across the top of the desk, and she knew at once what tapes they were.

  “Let’s call an ambulance,” she said. She edged toward the phone, but he stopped her by gesturing pointedly and angrily with the gun.

  “High-speed duplication,” he said, torn between rage and tears. “I could’ve made copies of all six of your sessions and been out of here. He wasn’t supposed to be home for another fucking hour at least!”

  Ginger grabbed a chair cushion and used it to prop up Pablo’s head, so he would not choke on the blood and phlegm in his throat.

  Obviously stunned by what had happened, the gunman said, “He just comes in so quiet, gliding in here like a goddamned ghost.”

  Ginger remembered how gracefully and elegantly the magician carried himself, as if each movement was prelude to an act of prestidigitation.

  Pablo coughed, closed his eyes. Ginger wanted to do more for him, but the only remedy was heroic surgery. At the moment, she could only keep a hand on his shoulder in a feeble attempt to reassure him.

  She looked up entreatingly, but the gunman only said, “And what the hell’s he doing packing a gun? A fucking eighty-year-old man, a gun in his fist, as if he knows how to handle something like this.”

  Until now, Ginger had not noticed the pistol on the carpet, a few feet from Pablo’s out-flung hand. When she saw it, a cripplingly sharp pang of horror went through her, and she nearly passed out, for in that instant she knew Pablo had been aware all along that it was dangerous to help her. She had not suspected that the mere attempt to probe at the memory block would quickly draw the unwanted attentions of men like this one in the leather topcoat. Because this meant she was being watched. Maybe not hour by hour or even every day. But they were keeping tabs on her. The moment she first called Pablo, she unwittingly endangered his life. And somehow he had known, for he had been packing a gun. Now, Ginger felt the weight of guilt.

  “If he hadn’t pulled that stupid .22,” the gunman said miserably, “and if he hadn’t insisted on calling the cops, I’d have walked away without laying a hand on him. I didn’t want to hurt him. Shit.”

  “For God’s sake,” Ginger said beseechingly, “let me call an ambulance. If you didn’t mean to hurt him, then let’s get help.”

  The gunman shook his head, and his gaze moved to the crumpled magician. “Too late anyway. He’s dead.”

  Those last two words, like a pair of hard punches, knocked the breath out of her and drew the shadowy curtain of unconsciousness to the edges of her vision. One glance at the old man’s glassy eyes was enough to confirm what the gunman had said, yet she resisted the truth. She lifted his left hand and put her fingertips to his thin black wrist, feeling for a pulse. Finding none, she searched along the carotid artery in his throat, but in spite of the remaining warmth of the flesh, there was only an awful stillness where once had been the throb of life. “No,” she said. “Oh, no.” She touched Pablo’s dark brow, not with the diagnostic intent of a physician but tenderly, lovingly. Her heart was so painfully constricted with grief that it was difficult to believe she had known the magician only two weeks. Like her father, she was quick to give her heart, and because Pablo was the man he was, the gift of affection and love was even more easily bestowed than usual.

  “I’m sorry,” the killer said shakily. “I’m really sorry. If he hadn’t tried to stop me, I’d have walked right out of here. Now, I’ve killed someone, haven’t I? And... you’ve seen my face.”

  Blinking back her tears, suddenly aware that she could not afford to grieve right now, Ginger rose slowly to her feet and faced him.

  As if thinking aloud, the gunman said, “You’ve got to be dealt with now, too. I’ll have to ransack the place, empty out drawers, take a few things of value, and make it look like you two walked in on a burglar.” He chewed worriedly on his lower lip. “Yeah, it’ll work. Instead of copying the tapes, I’ll just take them, so they won’t be here to raise suspicions.” He looked at Ginger and winced. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I really am, but that’s the way it’ll have to be. I wish it didn’t. It’s partly my fault. Should’ve heard the old bastard coming in. Shouldn’t have let him surprise me.” He moved toward her. “Should I maybe rape you, too? I mean, would a burglar just shoot a good-looking girl like you? Wouldn’t he rape you first? Wouldn’t that make this look more real?” He came closer, and she began to back away. “God, I don’t know if I can do it. I mean, how can I get a hard-on and do it to you when I know I’ve got to kill you afterward?” He kept coming toward her, and she backed up against the bookshelves. “I don’t like this. Believe me, I don’t. This shouldn’t have to happen. I really hate this.”

  His apparently genuine pity, repeated apologies, and sorrowful self-recriminations gave Ginger the creeps. He would have been less frightening if he had been pitiless and bloodthirsty. The fact that he had scruples but could set them aside long enough to commit one rape and two murders... that made him more of a monster.

  He stopped six feet from her and said, “Please take off your coat.”

  It was useless to beg, but she hoped to make him overconfident. “I won’t give a good description of you. I swear. Please let me go.”

  “Wish I could.” His face defined remorse. “Take off your coat.”

  Buying time while she arrived at a course of action, Ginger slowly unbuttoned the coat. Her hands were shaking, but she exaggerated those genuine tremors and fumbled with the buttons. At last she shrugged out of the coat and let it drop to the floor.

  He stepped closer. The pistol was only inches from her chest. He was more relaxed, holding the gun less rigidly than before, thrusting it forward less aggressively, though he was by no means lax with it.

  “Please don’t hurt me.” She continued to beg because, if he thought she was nearly paralyzed with abject fear, he might slip up and give her an opportunity for escape.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, as if deeply offended by the implication that he had any choice in the matter. “Didn’t want to hurt him, either. That old fool was responsible for this. Not me. Listen, I’ll make it as painless as I can. I promise you that.”

  Still holding the gun in his right hand, he used his left hand to touch her breasts through her sweater. She endured his fondling because he might become careless as he grew aroused. In spite of his claims that his empathy would render him impotent, Ginger was certain he’d have no difficulty raping her. Beneath his regret and sympathy, beneath the sensitivity he wished to project more for his own benefit than for hers, he was taking an unconscious savage pleasure in what he had done and would do. In spite of his gentle voice, violence burned in every word he spoke; he stank of violence.

  He said
, “Very pretty. Petite yet so nicely built.” He slipped his hand under her sweater, gripped her bra, gave it a hard yank that broke it. As elastic snapped, the bra straps dug painfully into her shoulders; the metal clasp at her back bit the skin. He grimaced as if her pain was transmitted to him. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean it, I’ll be more careful.” He pushed aside the ruined brassiere and put his cool, clammy hand on her bare breasts.

  Filled equally with terror and revulsion, Ginger pressed back even harder against the bookshelves, which jabbed painfully into her back. The gunman was less than an arm’s length away from her now, but he kept the pistol between them. The muzzle was pressed coldly against her bare midriff, leaving her no room to maneuver. If she tried to twist free of him, she would be gut-shot for her temerity.

  Fondling her, he continued to speak softly and to express great sadness at the necessity of raping and killing her, as though she simply must understand, as though it would be unthinkably cruel of her not to bestow upon him full absolution for the sin of taking her life.

  With nowhere to run, with his monotonous self-justifications washing over her in numbing waves of words, subjected to his groping hand, Ginger was gripped by a claustrophobia so intense she felt the urge to claw at him and force him to pull the trigger, just to end it. His Certs-scented breath had a cloying minty aroma that, by its pervasiveness, gave her the feeling she was closed up in a bell-jar with him. She whimpered, pleaded with wordless sounds, turned her head from side to side as if trying to deny the reality of the assault. The picture of demoralization and terror that she presented could not have been more convincing if she’d had days to practice, but there was unfortunately little calculation in it.

  Further inflamed by her distress, he pawed at her more roughly than before. “I think I can do it, baby. I think I can do it to you. Feel me, baby. Just feel me.” He pressed his body to hers and ground his pelvis against her. Incredibly, he seemed to think that, under such stressful and tragic circumstances, his rampant tumescence was a tribute to her erotic appeal and that somehow she ought to be flattered.

  Her reaction could only have been a disappointment for him.

  When he pressed and rubbed himself against her, he was obliged to stop jamming the gun into her belly. Swept away by his own excitement, convinced that Ginger was weak and helpless, he did not even keep the weapon pointed at her but held it to one side with the muzzle aimed at the floor. Ginger’s terror was exceeded by her loathing and anger, and the moment the pistol swung away from her, she translated those pent-up emotions into action. Turning her head to the side, she slumped against him as if about to faint in fear or in a swoon of reluctant passion, an action that brought her mouth to his throat. In swift succession, she bit him hard in the Adam’s apple, slammed one knee into his crotch, and clawed at his gun hand to keep the pistol away from her.

  He partially blocked the knee, limiting the damage to his privates, but he was unprepared for the bite. Shocked, horrified, and reeling from the devastating pain in his throat, the gunman pushed away from her and stumbled backward two steps.

  She had bitten deep, and now she gagged on the taste of his blood, though she did not permit her revulsion to delay her counterattack. She grabbed his gun hand, brought it to her mouth, and bit his wrist.

  A sharp cry of pain and astonishment burst from him. Because she was delicate, waiflike, he had not taken her seriously.

  As she bit him again, he dropped the gun, but simultaneously he made a fist of his other hand and with tremendous force slammed it into her back. She was driven to her knees and thought for a moment that he had broken her spine. Pain as bright and scintillant as an electric current shot up her back into her neck, flashed through her skull.

  Stunned, her vision briefly blurred, Ginger almost did not see him bending to retrieve the gun. Just as his fingers touched the butt, she frantically threw herself at his legs. Seeing her coming and hoping to jump out of her reach, he whipped upright as if he were a lashed-down sapling suddenly cut loose. When she hit him a fraction of a second later, he windmilled his arms in a brief attempt to keep his balance. Falling backward, he crashed into one of the library’s chairs, knocked over a small table and a lamp, and rolled onto Pablo Jackson’s corpse.

  Equally breathless, staring warily at each other, they were both petrified for a moment. They were on their sides on the floor, curled fetally in reaction to their pains, gasping for breath.

  To Ginger, the gunman’s eyes seemed as wide and round as clock faces, proof that he was filled with fevered thoughts of his own mortality ticking close. The bite would not kill him. She had not bitten through the jugular vein or the carotid artery, had merely pierced the thyroid cartilage, mangling tissue, severing a few small vessels. However, it was easy to understand why he might be convinced it was a mortal wound; the pain must be excruciating. He put his unbitten hand to his damaged throat, then pulled it away and stared aghast at his own gore dripping off his fingers. The killer thought he was dying, and that might make him either less or more dangerous.

  Simultaneously, they saw that his pistol had been kicked halfway across the library during their tussle. It was closer to him than to Ginger. Bleeding from throat and wrist, making a strange wheezing-gurgling noise, he scrambled across the floor toward the weapon, and Ginger had no option but to get up and run.

  She fled from the library into the living room, hobbling more than running, slowed by the pain in her back, which pulsed through her in diminishing but still debilitating waves. She intended to leave the apartment by the front door, but then she realized there was no escape in that direction because the only exits from the public corridor were the elevator and the stairs. She could not wait for the elevator, and in the stairwell she could easily be trapped.

  Instead, hunched because of her aching back, she scurried crablike across the living room, down a long hall, into the kitchen, where the swinging door softly swished shut behind her. She went directly to the utensils rack on the wall by the stove and took down a butcher’s knife.

  She became aware that a shrill, eerie keening was issuing from her. She held her breath, cut off the sound, and got a grip on herself.

  The gunman did not immediately burst into the kitchen, as Ginger expected. After a few seconds she realized that she was lucky he had not yet appeared, because the butcher’s knife was of no use against a pistol at a distance of ten feet. Silently cursing herself for almost having made a fatal error, she quickly and light-footedly returned to the door and took up a position to one side of it. Her back still ached, but the sharpest pain was gone. Now she was able to stand straight and flat against the wall. Her heart was pounding so loud that it seemed as if the wall against which she leaned was a drum-head, responding to her heartbeat, amplifying it until the hollow booming of atrium and ventricle must be echoing throughout the entire apartment.

  She held the knife low, ready to swing it up and into him in a deadly arc. However, that desperate scenario depended on his slamming through the kitchen door in a fit of hysteria and rage, reckless, crazed by the conviction that he was dying from his throat wound, bent on blind revenge. If instead he came slowly, cautiously, nudging the swinging door open inch by inch with the barrel of the gun, Ginger would be in trouble. But every second that passed without his appearance made it less likely that he would play the drama out in the way she hoped.

  Unless the throat wound was far worse than she had realized. In that case, he might be still in the library, bleeding to death on the Chinese carpet. She prayed that was what had happened to him.

  But she knew better. He was alive. And he was coming.

  She could scream and perhaps alert a neighbor who would call the police, but the gunman would not be driven off in time. He would not run until he killed her. Screaming was a waste of energy.

  She pressed harder against the wall, as if trying to melt into it. The swinging door, just inches from her face, riveted her as a blacksnake might command the full attention of
a field-mouse. She was tense, poised to react to the first sign of movement, but the door remained still, maddeningly still.

  Where the hell was he?

  Five seconds passed. Ten. Twenty.

  What was he doing?

  The taste of blood in her mouth became more rather than less acrid as the seconds ticked past, and nausea worked its greasy fingers in her. As she had more time to consider what she’d done to him in the library, she grew acutely aware of the bestiality of her actions, and she was shaken by her own potential for savagery. She had time, as well, to think about what she still intended to do to him. She had a mental image of the wide blade of the butcher’s knife spearing deep into his body, and a shudder of revulsion shook her. She was not a killer. She was a healer, not merely by education but by nature as well. She tried to stop thinking about stabbing him. It was dangerous to think too much about it, dangerous and confusing and enervating.

  Where was he?

  She could not wait any longer. Afraid that her inaction was damping the animal cunning and savage ferocity that she needed if she were to survive, uneasily certain that each passing second was somehow giving him a greater advantage, she eased to the doorway and put one hand on the edge of the door. But as she was about to pull it open a crack and peer out at the hallway and into the living room, she was chilled by the sudden feeling that he was there, inches away, on the other side of the portal, waiting for her to make the first move.

  Ginger hesitated, held her breath, listened.

  Silence.

  She brought her ear to the door, still could not hear anything.

  The handle of the knife had grown slippery in her sweaty hand.

  At last, she took hold of the edge of the door and cautiously pulled it inward, until a half-inch gap opened. No shots rang out, so she put one eye to the crack. The gunman was not right in front of her, as she had feared, but at the far end of the hall where it met the foyer; he was just reentering the apartment from the public corridor, pistol in hand. Evidently, he had first looked for her at the elevator and on the stairs. Not finding her, he had returned. Now, by the way he closed the door, locked it, and engaged the chain to delay her exit, it was clear that he had decided she was still in the apartment.

  He held his bitten hand to his bitten throat. Even at a distance she could hear his wheezy breathing. However, he was clearly no longer panicked. Having survived this long, he was gaining confidence by the second. He had begun to realize that he would live.

  Moving to the edge of the foyer, he looked left toward the living room and right toward the bedroom. Then he looked straight back down the long shadowy hall, and Ginger’s heart stumbled through a flurry of irregular beats as, for a moment, he seemed to be staring directly at her. But he was too far away to see that the door was being held half an inch ajar. Instead of coming straight toward her, he went into the bedroom. He moved with a quiet purposefulness that was disheartening.

  She let the kitchen door go shut, unhappily aware that her plan would no longer work. He was a professional, accustomed to violence, and although he was initially thrown off balance by the unexpected ferocity of her attack, he was rapidly regaining his equilibrium. By the time he searched the bedrooms and the closets in there, he would be completely cool and calculating once more. He would not come charging into the kitchen and make an easy target of himself.

  She had to get out of the apartment. Fast.

  She had no hope of reaching the front door. He might already be finished in the bedroom and on his way back into the hall.

  Ginger put the knife down. She reached under her sweater, pulled off her ruined bra, and dropped it on the floor. She stepped silently around the kitchen table, pulled the curtains away from the window, and looked out at the fire-escape landing in front of her. Quietly, she twisted the latch. She slid up the lower sash, which unfortunately was not quiet. The wooden frame, swollen by the winter dampness, moved with a squeak and squeal and scrape. When it abruptly loosened and slid all the way up with a solid thump and a rattle of glass, she knew she had alerted the gunman. She heard him coming at a run along the hallway.

  She climbed hastily out of the window, onto the iron fire escape, and started down. The bitter wind lashed her, and the piercing subzero cold penetrated to her bones. The metal steps were crusted with ice from last night’s storm, and icicles hung from the handrails. In spite of the treacherous condition of those switchback stairs, she had to descend quickly or risk a bullet in the back of her head. Repeatedly, her feet almost slipped out from under her. She could not get a secure grip on the icy railing with her ungloved hands, but it was even worse when she took hold of the bare metal, for she stuck to the frigid iron, pulling loose only by sacrificing the top layer of skin.

  When she was still four steps from the next landing, she heard someone curse above her, and she glanced back. Pablo Jackson’s killer was coming out of the kitchen window in frantic pursuit of her.

  Ginger took the next step too fast, and the ice did its work. Her feet flew out from under her, and she fell over the final three steps onto the landing, crashing down on her side, reigniting the pain in her back. Her fall shattered the ice that coated the metal grid, and chunks fell through lower levels of the fire escape, making brittle music, disintegrating as they struck the steps below.

  In the wind’s maniacal howling, the whisper of the silenced pistol was lost altogether, but Ginger saw sparks leap off the iron inches from her face, and she knew a shot had narrowly missed her. She looked up in time to see the gunman taking aim—and to see him slip and stumble down several treads. He pitched forward, and she thought he was going to fall atop her. He grabbed at the railing three times before he was able to halt his uncontrolled descent.

  He was sprawled on his back across several risers, clutching a step with one hand, one leg shot out into space between two of the narrow iron balusters. His other arm was hooked around a baluster which was how he had arrested his fall; that was the hand holding the pistol, which was why he could not immediately take another shot at her.

  Ginger scrambled to her feet, intent upon making as rapid a descent as possible. But when she cast one last quick look at the gunman, she was arrested by the sight of the buttons on his topcoat, which were the only colorful objects in that wintry gloom. Bright brass buttons, each decorated with the raised image of a lion passant, the familiar cadence mark from English heraldry. She had seen nothing special about the buttons before; they were similar to those on many sports jackets, sweaters, coats. But now her eyes fixed on them, and everything else faded away, as if only the buttons were real. Even the gabbling-hooting wind, which filled the day and blustered coldly in every corner of it, could not keep a grip on her awareness. The buttons. Only the buttons held her attention, and they generated in her a terror far more powerful than her fear of the gunman.

  “No,” she said, uselessly denying what was happening to her. The buttons. “Oh, no.” The buttons. This was the worst possible time and place to lose control of herself. The buttons.

  She could not forestall the attack. For the first time in three weeks, Ginger was overwhelmed by a crushing, irrational terror. It made her feel small, doomed. It plunged her into a strange and lightless interior landscape through which she was compelled to run blindly.

  Turning from the buttons, she fled down the fire escape, and as total blackness claimed her, she knew that her reckless flight would terminate in a broken leg or fractured spine. Then, while she lay paralyzed, the killer would come to her, put the gun to her head, and blow her brains out.

  Darkness.

  Cold.

  When the world returned to Ginger—or she to the world—she was huddled in dead leaves and snow and shadows at the foot of a set of exterior cellar steps behind a townhouse, an unguessable distance along Newbury Street from Pablo’s building. A dull pain throbbed the length of her back. Her entire right side ached. The badly abraded palm of her left hand burned. But the severe cold was the worst discomfort. A c
hill lanced up through her from the snow and ice in which she sat. A frost passed into her by osmosis from the concrete retaining wall against which she leaned. The raw wind rushed down the single flight of ten steep steps, snuffling and growling like a living creature.

  She did not know how long she had been cowering there, but she ought to get moving or risk pneumonia. However, the gunman might be nearby, searching for her, and if she revealed herself, the chase would be on again, so she decided to wait a minute or two.