Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  She needed to scream, to let Frank or Ian or anyone in the vicinity know that she needed help. As if they could possibly reach her in time. As if they could even hear her over the weather.

  She needed to formulate a plan for what to do if they, by some miracle, reached the next floor, since she had nowhere to go and could not possibly make it to the stairwell or the zip lift before Jack pounded down the steps to meet her.

  He hadn’t fired. Why hadn’t he fired?

  Most likely because he was already on his way down the steps.

  The metal beam felt cold enough to numb her skin, and yet it didn’t because they hurt plenty—

  You’re going to fa—

  Look, a voice in her head suddenly roared, you have worked out every day since you were twenty years old. What was that all for?

  You can do this.

  Just then her foot touched the outside girder of the thirty-first floor.

  One toe slipped off the solid foundation of the next floor’s outer girder but the other one left Theresa secure enough to pull herself around to the inside of the beam. Suddenly she and Ghost were not hanging off the side of the building in a driving thunderstorm any more but safe in the dark but much more secure interior of wire mesh and narrow girder and merely soaked through every stitch of clothing she wore. She could have fallen to her knees and wept with gratitude.

  Except that Jack would be upon them any second.

  After she pried her hands from the beam she had to pry Ghost’s arms from her neck. This proved difficult for the child but Theresa’s gasps convinced where words could not. Then she grabbed the girl’s hand and ran for the zip lift, as fast as they could across the malleable, spongy mesh floor. Theresa breathed like a freight train but made no attempt to quiet her lungs. It wasn’t like Jack didn’t know where they were.

  They tripped over the first girder they encountered, then the second. The interior of the building held only the dimmest haze of ambient light in between the flashes of lightning. Theresa tried to watch the stairwell entrance as she ran but lost track of it in the shadows.

  Ghost cried out as she fell over a small stack of tools near the center of the floor just as Theresa saw a figure appear from the murk of the stairwell. It could have been the figure in a dream, nothing but a darker patch of dark against the wall, but Theresa knew he would prove all too real. He had less distance to cross to reach them as they had to go in order to reach the lift. They’d never make it. He would catch them again and push them over the edge. Ghost first. He’d promised to throw her first.

  ‘Ghost. Run and jump into the zip lift – the elevator. Press the lower button on that box and it will take you down. You can do it.’

  The little girl fell again. Theresa yanked her up. ‘Run!’

  A gentle push toward the lift, but then Ghost stopped dead. In a flash of light she saw Jack come straight for them from forty feet away.

  Theresa dropped to the uneven ground, hands rooting through the items there. A five gallon bucket, a safety harness—

  ‘No,’ Ghost said. ‘I’m not leaving you.’

  Theresa thought she hadn’t heard correctly over the howl of the wind. She stared at the vague outline of the girl. ‘Ghost, please – it will be just like climbing down the tree outside your window. You can do it.’

  ‘No. He made me leave Nana and I’m not leaving you!’

  They didn’t have time to argue, and besides, Theresa knew determination when she heard it. Twenty feet.

  ‘OK, then I need your help. Find something I can use as a weapon, OK? I’ll look here. You look over there. But hide if he comes near you.’ She aimed the child toward the darker areas to the south, away from Jack, and gave her a push. Please run. Please. Let the lightning hold off, let her hide.

  Ghost moved away.

  Fifteen feet.

  Theresa tried the handle of the five-gallon bucket but to her surprise it lifted easily, so light that it would simply bounce off the man if she hit him with it. The harness – maybe she could use the long strap as a bullwhip—

  Right. She was no more Indiana Jones than she was Crouching Tiger.

  Ten feet.

  Then something small and warm took her right hand and pressed something cold and hard into its palm.

  Ghost had found her a weapon.

  A spud wrench is essentially a wrench with the other end honed to an ice-pick-like point. The middle is smooth and gave her wet hand no traction. Theresa held it against the back of her damp thigh, gripping the wrench end with two fingers sticking through the opening, figuring that even supposing she could hold on to it she’d probably break a couple of digits.

  ‘Who the hell do you think—’ Jack said as he rushed her, hands reaching for her neck even though one still held the gun.

  She swung the harness toward his face, stepped up closer instead of retreating and brought the spud wrench up and into his abdomen with all the force her stiff, exhausted hand could muster. Holding it at the end didn’t give her a lot of control, but otherwise it would have simply slipped through her palm.

  His body went rigid and for a moment she could feel the heat from it searing her, the smell of beer on his breath and even the brush of his shaggy hair against her cheek.

  Then the gun went off.

  For the second time that night her eardrums were split by the sonic boom of a bullet.

  No sharp pains in her body, no sudden sucking feeling of perforated organs. But Ghost! Had he hit Ghost?

  Lightning flashed, and in its ghostly illumination they were face to face. The side lighting turned his gaunt face to a series of craters and peaks, hair plastered in wet snakes, the face of a monster. Or a shadow man.

  Then he fell on to her, and she felt a new wetness on the hand that still held the spud wrench. She couldn’t hold him and without warning her body pivoted so that he toppled across a girder between the mesh and the wrench slid out of him. She dropped it, but remembered to reach down and follow his arm to where the gun should be.

  And wasn’t.

  A quick scrambling pat-down of the area located the firearm as Jack moaned and tried to curl into a fetal position. Theresa tossed the gun – not smart, but she had pretty much used up all disciplined thought for one night – and went looking for Ghost.

  True to her word, the girl hadn’t moved, just fallen back across the mesh and girders and five-gallon bucket.

  She’s been shot she’s been shot she’s been – Theresa’s frantic hands scanned the girl’s body, searching for a gaping hole of ruined flesh, burnt by gunpowder.

  But she found nothing, and Ghost’s arms closed around her neck.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Ian Bauer held Theresa MacLean, and he thought that nothing had ever felt better in his entire life. She had even let him drape her in a blanket he pilfered from the ER, though they were both soaked to the skin with rain that, thanks to the robust air conditioning, felt as if it were turning to ice on their clothes.

  Yes, she had been through a grueling and traumatic experience. Yes, she might have her head on his shoulder, her hair brushing the bottom of his jaw, only to keep herself from falling over in sheer physical exhaustion. She had refused to let go of Ghost even after help arrived, staggered into the hospital with the child still wrapped in her arms, releasing her only so that nurses could put the kid in dry clothes and stop her teeth from chattering. But even so, he told himself, women didn’t stay long in the arms of men they despised. Certainly not for the entire fifteen minutes they’d been standing at the glass window to one of the emergency rooms watching the hospital staff work on Ghost’s grandmother.

  Nana Zebrowski had turned out to be tougher than anyone, including Jack, would have guessed and had escaped with a medium-strength concussion. By the time Theresa reached the hospital she’d already begun agitating to leave, alert enough to semi-confirm Novosek’s story of his affair with a very young Samantha, back when she had been working a summer job in his former boss’s office. ‘I never re
ally knew, but that makes sense,’ Betty Zebrowski conceded. ‘I could have handled her getting pregnant by a schoolmate. I couldn’t have stood an affair with a married man. She probably thought I’d kick her out. My poor baby,’ she’d told Frank, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘I don’t know how Jack found out about Ghost’s obsession with finding her father,’ Theresa murmured. ‘Somehow he did, and he used it to get close to her. But she recognized his belt buckle – a large star behind a steer’s head.’

  Frank approached them. He gave Ian the usual skeevy look to let him know he didn’t approve of his cousin’s choice of moral support, but Ian couldn’t blame him. He was, after all, a pretty odd-looking duck. No doubt about it.

  It had never bothered him less.

  Without preamble, Frank told them: ‘Kobelski will be picked up by Finney, since we were kind enough to give him the written evidence in the form of a fake ASTM specs book. And do we get a word of thanks from the Super Special State Investigator?’ He didn’t bother to answer himself.

  Ian sighed. ‘I’d better call him.’ He slowly removed himself from Theresa’s side. The frigid emergency room air sucked into his wet clothes, right where her body had been, but somehow his skin stayed warmed by a heat that welled up from the center of his being.

  It felt good.

  Frank waited until Ian had been forced around the corner by a team of doctors and nurses wielding a crash cart, and then turned to his cousin. ‘I know you, Tess. That puppy-dog adoration is going to be fun for about a week and then it’s going to get on your nerves.’

  Theresa rubbed one eye, elongating a tiny smear of mascara the rain had left behind. ‘Maybe. But you know what? I spent sixteen years married to a man who never, ever, not once even considered putting me first. So a little adoration might be just what I’m looking for.’

  He studied her for a moment, then shook his head and used one thumb to rub off the mascara. ‘I get it. We’re all searching for something. Problem is it doesn’t always work out to be what we expected.’

  A nurse brought Ghost in, hair still damp but wrapped in two child-sized hospital gowns with pink kitties on them. As soon as she saw her grandmother she hurtled herself across the room and up on to the bed before any of the nurses could begin to react. Mrs Zebrowski winced, winced again as the little girl snuggled into the area under her arm and wedged one temple into the older woman’s shoulder, but then the lines in her face relaxed into a beatific smile. She laid one cheek on the child’s hair and closed her eyes.

  Ghost also screwed her eyes shut, so tight it seemed that she might be afraid to open them – not surprising, after what she’d been through. One fist clenched her grandmother’s blanket, and if she heard the nurses speaking to her, she ignored them.

  ‘For example,’ Frank said, putting an arm around Theresa’s shoulders, ‘Ghost found her father, but just in time for him to go to jail.’

  She said, ‘Maybe it won’t be for long, if he can convince a jury that Kyle’s death was manslaughter and not murder.’

  ‘I guess Nana and a team of social workers can decide when and how to break it to Ghost. Maybe – maybe we should just let her keep believing her father really was Sam’s prom date.’

  ‘No.’ Theresa gazed through the glass. ‘She deserves the truth. She searched too long and too hard to get it.’

  As if she’d heard her, Ghost’s eyes flew open, staring directly at Theresa. The hand unclenched slightly. The corners of her mouth turned up, and her lips formed two words.

  Thank you.

  Theresa pressed her hand to the window, feeling the cool glass against her skin.

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are, so far as I know, absolutely no plans to raze the Administration building.

  I also invented the temporary aluminum forms for concrete pouring that Sam Zebrowski may or may not have been scrapping.

  And to my great agent, Vicky Bijur – thank you for not giving up on me.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ballon, Hilary and Kenneth T. Jackson, Editors. Robert Moses and the Modern City; the Transformation of New York. W.W. Norton & Co: New York, 2007.

  Ingle, Bob and Sandy McClure. The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption. St Martin’s Press: New York, 2008.

  Saliga, Pauline A., Ed. The Sky’s the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers. Rizzoli: New York, 1990.

  Bowe, John, Marissa Bowe and Sabia Streeter, Eds. Gig. Crown: New York, 2000.