Night Victims

by John Lutz

Staring up at the shadowed ceiling, Nina smiled. Maybe she could invite Lyons into her room and engage him in conversation. Maybe—

  A slight sound close by, from a direction she couldn’t determine, made her heart leap. This wasn’t like the car horn, obviously far away.

  At first she lay breathless, unmoving. Then she snaked out a long pale arm, opened the nightstand drawer, and withdrew the small, nickel-plated handgun Newsy had given her.

  It was surprisingly cool and heavy in her hand. Horn hadn’t wanted her to have a gun. He was afraid the wrong party might accidentally be shot.

  Well, fuck Horn! Especially now! She thumbed off the gun’s safety.

  Then her addled mind regained some function: Lyons!

  Lyons right in the next room, just on the other side of the door! In a situation like this, she was supposed to summon Lyons!

  She tried to call out to him but made no sound. Terror was a steel claw at her throat. She could barely move. Nina never dreamed it would be this bad, that she’d be paralyzed like this.

  Her hand trembling, she held the gun beneath the white top sheet, her finger curled around the trigger.

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  Her eyes strained to peer through the dimness at the rectangle of paler night that was her bedroom window.

  She heard the soft rush of the bedroom door scraping on the carpet, opening behind her.

  Lyons on the job! Thank God!

  Nina tried to tell him she’d heard a sound, but she could only emit a strangled squeak. She chanced turning her head a fraction, looking away from the window.

  Not Lyons in the doorway! Not Lyons!

  A dark figure as tall as Lyons but thinner and more angular.

  More nimble.

  Quicker.

  Before she could move an inch, before she could inhale to scream, it had crossed the room and was on her.

  On the living room floor, Lyons felt warmth and wetness beneath him and knew this was serious, he was bleeding badly. He was on his back, his hands at his sides.

  If he could only reach the gun in his shoulder holster . . .

  fire a shot . . . let them know . . .

  Slowly and laboriously, with all the effort he could muster, he raised his lower arm, then his elbow, and felt for the gun in its leather holster.

  Not there . . . Maybe to the left . . . there . . .

  His fingertips moved exploringly on the coarse nap of the carpet and he knew his arm hadn’t risen at all.

  A burning sensation at his throat, and he was having difficulty breathing.

  He was inhaling but he wasn’t breathing.

  The knowledge struck him with cold, numbing immensity. The recollection of his surprise, his throat being slit.

  He wasn’t breathing!

  The dimness grew darker until it became blackness and silence.

  He died gazing at Nina Count’s open bedroom door.

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  Nina writhed and bucked beneath the taut sheet but could barely move. The Night Spider was straddling her, his knee on one side of her, his foot on the other. One of his hands was at her throat, cutting off breath and sound. She tried to adjust her right hand, with the gun in it, so the barrel was aimed at her attacker. She was sure he wasn’t aware that she had the gun. At the cold core of her panic, she knew the gun was her one slim chance for life.

  Quickly, roughly, a broad rectangle of duct tape was slapped over her mouth, then made tighter so her front teeth bit painfully into her lips. The powerful hand came away from her throat. Salt taste. Blood in her mouth. She managed to swallow it.

  She could breathe now. Instinctively she tried to scream.

  The muffled moan she emitted devasted her. It was as if the silence of death already had her. Soon would come the agony.

  Her assailant’s eyes were dark and wide, and fixed on hers. Something about them. They seemed to draw from her, to drain all her energy and will to resist. Their whites gleamed in the dimness of her bedroom, making the irises 256

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  seem all the blacker. She could make out nothing of his features other than his eyes, and she couldn’t look away from the eternity of darkness behind them.

  Inside the tight sheet that he was now tucking beneath her left side, preparing to begin the winding, her right forefinger was still curled around the gun’s trigger. She straightened the rest of her fingers so her hand was cupped over the small pistol, smoothing its contours so it might not be noticeable.

  But she knew the barrel was pointing straight down along her right leg. If she squeezed the trigger, the bullet would probably carve a furrow in her thigh and strike nothing else.

  She desperately needed to shift the weight that bore down on her, pinning her to the mattress. Her legs were encased in material he was skillfully drawing tighter.

  She had to find the leverage she needed. If only she could lift her knees slightly!

  Nina gathered all that was left of her stubborn desire to survive, all her physical strength, and dug her heels into the mattress. She strained to raise her hips so she could drop them suddenly and draw up her legs, which were bound together so firmly.

  She moaned with effort and the thing that had come for her life stopped his tucking and winding and looked down at her, cocking its head to one side. She was up to something and he was curious.

  Nina moaned again, almost getting her buttocks off the bed. And suddenly it struck her: He must wonder if I’m actually trying to help him tuck the sheet tight beneath me!

  She caught the gleam of white teeth in the darkness.

  He’s smiling! He’s enjoying this!

  His weight shifted and he rose a few inches. He leaned his strong, spindly body back so she could do whatever she was attempting in her desperate, futile struggle.

  He’s helping me!

  And holding out hope! He doesn’t want me to give up just yet! Wants me to struggle harder! To almost make it! Starting his game!

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  Back and forth, life and death . . .

  Toying with me!

  Nina managed to bend her legs at the knees the thirty degrees or so she thought she needed, then lowered them abruptly and created slack in the sheet.

  Enough to adjust her hand and elevate the gun barrel half an inch.

  Maybe enough of an angle! . . .

  She squeezed the trigger.

  The gun roared, and she felt a burning sensation along her right thigh.

  He was off her and poised by the bed even before the sound of the shot stopped reverberating. She could hear his breathing, rapid, ragged, oddly inhuman. He was hissing in the silence left by the gunshot. There was more rage and malevolence in that hissing than she had ever heard.

  He tensed his body to spring at her.

  Movement! Shouting!

  From the living room!

  Just outside my door!

  The Night Spider leaped not toward Nina but toward the window. He unlocked and raised it in one smooth, unbelievably quick motion. It was as if time sped up and swept him along. Quick as a thought, he was through the window and outside, dragging a hand and affixing something to the sill on his way out.

  Horn’s cigar had gone out and he didn’t bother to relight it. His mouth was dry and with the stale taste of too much tobacco and coffee, and he’d almost dozed off behind the steering wheel of his parked car. Not that there wasn’t enough activity to merit his attention. On a busy Manhattan street like this one, even at this late hour, there was occasional pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

  Then he’d seen an undercover cop named Givers leap to his feet from where he’d been pretending to sleep as a home-258

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  less man in a doorway and race into Nina’s apartment building.

  As Horn was climbing out of the unmarked, he heard “Shot fired!” on his two-way and started to run across the street. He almost slipped and fell in front of a cab letting out a woman in front of the buil
ding. She was bent over wrestling packages from the backseat, and looked sideways at him with surprise and concern as he regained his balance and raced past her.

  Givers was stepping into the elevator when Horn burst into the lobby. He saw Horn and held the door open for him.

  “You hear the shots?” Horn asked, as they ascended toward Nina’s floor.

  “Yes, sir. Just one shot.”

  “Sound like it coulda come from inside the apartment?” Givers gave it some thought before answering. “It coulda, yeah.”

  When the elevator door glided open, Horn was first out into the hall. A uniformed cop and Bickerstaff were already at Nina’s door. Bickerstaff was kicking at the door with the sole of his shoe. Several other doors were open, tenants craning their necks to peer out. A couple of men in pajamas and an older guy in Jockey shorts and a sleeveless undershirt were standing outside their doors. The one in Jockey shorts had mussed gray hair that stood up like a rooster comb. His grizzled chin was thrust out, his fists propped on his hips.

  Whatever was going down, he was game for it.

  “Back inside!” Horn shouted, waving his shield over his head. “Everybody back inside now!” There were a few defiant and resentful looks, but everyone obeyed. The guy with the rooster comb was last in.

  Bickerstaff had given up on kicking and was lunging at the door over and over, slamming into it with his shoulder.

  Horn saw that the door was open about three inches. Its latch was sprung and its lock ripped from the wooden frame, but something was stopping it from opening farther. Movement on the left. Paula came chugging down the hall, breathing hard after taking the fire stairs.

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  Givers and the uniform were helping Bickerstaff now, all three men hunkering down and pressing against the door and each other, trying to direct their strength and weight in one direction. A cop, a raggedy grifter, and a guy who looked like an overweight salesman, all struggling to get into the apartment. Paula, the winded college girl with the shotgun, did what she could to help.

  “Something’s up against the damned thing!” Bickerstaff said, looking over at Horn.

  “Where the fuck’s Lyons?” the uniform asked, doubling his efforts to budge the door. Each time he strained forward, his eyes bulged and his beefy face got so red he appeared ready to have a stroke.

  Horn ignored his bad right arm and joined Paula in awkwardly trying to help with the door, but there wasn’t enough room for either of them to make much difference. He knew that, viewed from a distance, there must be something tragi-cally comedic about their struggle.

  Then the door moved an inch inward.

  Six inches.

  At last it grudgingly opened far enough to allow entry.

  Bickerstaff was first in, gun drawn. Givers and Horn followed. Horn heard Paula behind him instructing the uniform to stay in the hall.

  Horn had his service revolver out and was crouching low to make a small target as he moved to the side and tried to see in the dim living room. A heavy chair had been pushed up against the door, tilted so its back was wedged beneath the knob. Bickerstaff cursed, almost tripping over the chair.

  Horn was wondering about the answer to the uniform’s question in the hall. Where the fuck’s Lyons?

  “Shit!” Paula said. She’d stepped in something squishy and almost stumbled over Lyons’s body near the sofa. She looked down and saw that her right foot was on blood-soaked carpet. “Lyons is shot! Looks dead!” Horn was appalled and relieved simultaneously. One shot fired. Not into Nina.

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  Then he stepped closer and looked down at Lyons, at the black formless shape that framed his body like a shadow and had leached and spread. “His throat’s been slashed.”

  “Shit!” Paula said again.

  “Bedroom!” Horn said, pointing to the hall off the living room. He led the way.

  The bedroom door was open. Horn held his breath but didn’t hesitate.

  There was a little more light in the bedroom. Nina was on the bed wrestling with the sheets, frantically trying to free herself, sit up, and rip a rectangle of tape off her face at the same time.

  “Nina!” Bickerstaff shouted, letting her know she had help, friends, she was going to be okay.

  Beyond her a shadow moved at the window, not in the room but beyond it. Outside. Horn thought it might have been an illusion, a trick of light and adrenaline.

  “The window!” Givers shouted. “He went out the goddamn window!”

  Nina was aware that the bedroom was full of dark figures darting in different directions like flitting shadows and still shouting. She heard her name. Then:

  “The window! He went out the goddamn window!” One of the figures was at the window, leaning outside to peer down.

  “He’s dropping like a fucking stone. If I take a shot I might hit somebody below.”

  Nina tried to get untangled from her sheets. She had to break free so she could rip the tape from her mouth and tell them his line was attached to the sill. They should cut it.

  Detach it. Let the bastard fall like a stone! See if he shatters like a stone.

  Horn was standing near the foot of her bed, yelling something into his two-way.

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  “Blood on the sheet!” a voice not Horn’s said. “She’s hurt.”

  I’m hurt . . . I’m hurt!

  “Blood on the window frame, too,” said the figure who’d been peering down the vertical face of the building. He stared at his wet fingertips, then wiped them on his pants leg.

  “He’s hurt!”

  The Night Spider had been ready for anything but what happened. After the initial shock of the gunshot, he’d quickly wedged his small but sturdy grappling hook beneath the window’s marble sill and unfurled his slender polymer line down the side of the building. As soon as he was through the window and into the night, he dropped, rappeling; he almost ran down the building, controlling his rate of fall by playing line through his belayer.

  But a few yards beneath Nina Count’s window, he realized he didn’t have the strength in his left hand to break his speed as much as he wanted. He was dropping too fast.

  He squeezed harder and gained a grip on the line, finally slowing his descent but bringing pain where there had been numbness in his left shoulder.

  I’ve been hit! She shot me!

  The bitch shot me!

  Fury lent him strength. He knew he could do this now, knew he could elude his pursuers. They have no idea what they’re dealing with!

  His hyperalert senses picked up movement above. When he glanced up he saw something he didn’t understand. It was dark, jutted out from the building about two feet, and was almost the width of the building. And it was moving down the building’s face toward him like a wave descending on a vertical stone beach.

  Falling toward him faster than he could safely drop!

  Then it was on him, around him, over him, past him.

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  No, not past him.

  A net! They dropped a net down the side of the building!

  His bare right foot snagged in the heavy rope net and he lost his grip on the line. Sudden drop! His knee twisted, and there was a painful wrench to his injured left shoulder.

  He found himself caught in the net, dangling upside down and pressed tightly against the stone face of the building by its weight.

  He was staring straight down. Ten stories above freedom.

  At least ten more stories.

  Not freedom, though. There were dozens of figures directly below now, staring up at him.

  Struggling to free himself, he was overcome by more pain. Not only his shoulder, but his knee. He refused to let them have him! Not alive! If he could manage to reach his knife . . .

  They can’t have me! They can’t!

  He raised his upper body, bent at the waist as if doing a midair sit-up, and tried to grip a cr
oss rope of the net but fell back. Now his right arm was entangled in the net. Pain blos-somed like fire in his shot shoulder and damaged knee. So much of his weight was hanging by that ruined leg! The pain made him dizzy, nauseating him. It overcame his will and defeated his strength. His hope.

  All he could do was wave his left leg freely, his left arm limp and dangling from his injured shoulder.

  He felt a warm trickle down the arm and watched blood drip from his fingertips. It twisted and plunged in a thin scarlet thread parallel to the slender line that no longer led to escape.

  At the window of the building directly across the street, Newsy Winthrop was almost jumping up and down, using all the self-control he had to keep from pounding his cameraman on the back. Mustn’t do that! Mustn’t jiggle the frame!

  “Getting it?” Newsy kept asking, staring at the Night NIGHT VICTIMS

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  Spider snagged like an insect in a net, pinned to the building by converging brilliant spotlights, dangling like the unwilling specimen of a bug collector. “Jesus! Are you friggin’ getting this?”

  “I’m getting it,” the cameraman kept answering, trying to ignore Newsy while concentrating as intently on his work as if he were alone.

  “We’re the only ones getting it, my man! The only ones who’ll have it!”

  “Take it easy, I’m getting it all. Don’t distract me, man, okay?”

  But Newsy wasn’t listening.

  He was thinking Pulitzer.

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  When finally he’d fallen into bed at 7:00 A.M. Horn went over it in his mind, how everything had almost gone terribly wrong.

  Almost.

  Aaron Mandle was in custody and under high-alert guard at Kincaid Memorial Hospital. The Night Spider murders had ended, finally and forever. If Nina hadn’t ignored Horn’s instructions and sneaked that gun into bed, then fired that shot . . .

  Horn tried not to think about it but his mind kept returning to the night before like a dog returning to something buried not quite deep enough.

  Mandle had almost won. He’d almost killed Nina and almost made his escape. Only the crack of the gunshot in the early morning hours had made the difference.

  The hard fact was, Mandle had outsmarted them. Lying in his hospital bed, waiting for the courts to decide his fate, he’d be thinking about that and it would mean a lot to him.