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 drumhead,
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 fieldmouse. 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 g
reater 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 worldshe 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 chill 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.
She was astonished that she had clambered all the way down the
ice-sheathed fire escape and had fled, by whatever roundabout route, to
this hiding place without breaking her neck. Evidently, in her fugue,
reduced to the miserable condition of a frightened and mindless animal,
there was at least the compensation of an animal-like fleetness and
sure-footedness.
Like a pair of industrious morticians, the wind and cold continued to
drain the warmth from her. The narrow, gray concrete stairwell
increasingly resembled an unlidded sarcophagus. Ginger decided it was
time to go. She rose slowly. The small backyard was deserted, as were
the yards of houses on both sides. Ice-crusted snow. A few bare trees.
Nothing threatening. Shivering, sniffing, blinking away tears, Ginger
climbed the stairs and followed a brick walkway that linked the rear of
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 40
