I let out a grunt as he lifted my body on his foot and somersaulted backward, hurling me through the air.
I took a long, helpless, turning fall through the darkness. My back hit the floor hard, the jolt punching the breath out of me. Still, I managed to roll forward, managed to scramble to my feet, managed to swivel round and set myself, ready for Stark’s next onslaught. But while Stark was on his feet too, he wasn’t coming after me. He was turned away from me, bending forward . . .
And I realized: the gun. My Glock. I’d thrown it to the floor right there, right at the doorway. I started racing toward him, but too late. He already had the weapon in his hand. He was already straightening, already turning.
Then I reached him. Caught his arm in both my hands as it came around toward me. I tried with all my strength to wrestle the gun away from him as he tried with all his strength to strike me down and pull it free—and battling like that, we spun and banged and jostled down the corridor into the dark, the rectangle of light from the open doorway getting smaller and dimmer as we moved.
He wouldn’t let go of the gun. I couldn’t get it away from him. I had to hold on to his arm—which left him free to try to strike at me with his fist. He looked for a way to get at my throat or my eyes. Finally, he hit. Hard. A blow to the temple that made the shadows spark around me. I lost my grip on him. I fell back. Stark staggered, his hand thrown high—but he still had the gun. He lowered it at me.
I had one half-second before he fired—one half-second to see and understand that we had come all the way down the hall to the stairway, that Stark was standing right at the head of the stairs, right at the edge of the stairs, with me against the wall in front of him.
I ducked and charged him and he fired.
The gun must have been right by my ear because the explosion seemed to go off inside my head and for the next few moments, I could hear nothing. I didn’t know if I’d been shot. I didn’t know if I was wounded or bleeding out, seconds from death. All I knew was that I had barreled full force into Stark’s midsection, driving him over the edge of the top step. Now he and I were falling—falling and turning and tumbling together down the stairway into the lightless living room below.
It was a weird, dreamy fall, a weird, dreamy spiral of pain and fear—fear because I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control anything: all the jolts and jars and somersaulting confusion—a helpless tumble through dreamy silence that wasn’t silence but the endless deafening explosion of the gun obliterating every other sound.
Then we hit the floor. We spilled into the living room, losing our grips on each other, so that for a long, long, terrible second, I had no idea where Stark was or where the gun was or what was about to happen.
Searching in the dark, I made him out, the awful figure of him, a skeleton scrabbling like a lizard across the floor, his white head lifted, luminous in the shadows, his white hands clawing their way over the edge of the rug—and toward the gun. The gun had fallen and spun a few yards away from him. He had almost reached it.
I somehow got my feet under me and sprang at the crawling killer. Landed on top of him. Wrapped my arm around his throat.
I got a good grip, a good choke hold, the crook of my elbow wedged in his gullet, preventing him from tucking his chin in, from getting a breath. He knew it too—and he knew he had only seconds before he lost consciousness. So he didn’t try to fight me. He just kept going. He just kept crawling, scrabbling, driving across the floor, dragging me—amazingly—along with him as he tried to reach that gun.
I tightened my stranglehold. I could hear again now—and I could hear him gagging. But he kept crawling and now his fingers were on the gun’s grip. I choked him. Choked him. He had to stop. Had to go under. But he didn’t. Wouldn’t. He willed himself on. He wrapped his fingers around the gun. He raised it with an unsteady arm.
I tried to hold him down. Tried to stop him. Tried to cut the blood flow to his brain, closing my grip around his throat with all the force I could muster.
And still—God help me, still—he kept lifting the weapon in his hand, lifting it over his shoulder, pointing it back at me so that I had to choose whether to get out of the way or to keep my hold on him.
I kept my hold on him. I would not let him go, not again, not ever again. Even if he did it. Even if he shot me. Even if he killed me. Even if he sent me straight to hell, I would keep this grip around his throat and drag him into the fire with me.
I squeezed his throat tighter . . . tighter. He lifted the gun over his shoulder. The barrel touched my head. He pressed the muzzle against my eyebrow.
I felt the cold metal on my flesh. I felt the black bore burrowing into me. I waited for Stark to pull the trigger and went on choking him, defying him, defying the bullet that was going to go through me. Waiting for the explosion I would never hear.
But he collapsed then, before he could pull the trigger. His hand—his gun—dropped heavily to the floor. His body went slack beneath me, twitching weakly, trembling weakly, finally falling still.
I would not let him go—I couldn’t; I couldn’t relax my arm—until long after he was dead, until long after I felt the life go out of him.
Then, at last, my own strength broke. I lost my hold. I rolled off Stark’s body onto the floor. I lay on my back beside the corpse, gasping for breath.
And suddenly: a gunshot. From upstairs.
Samantha . . .
I choked on my terror. The Fat Woman . . . had she gotten free?
I had to get up there.
I turned quickly to Stark. Saw him lying dead, his face twisted to the side, his skeletal features still, his tongue lolling out between his bared teeth, those eyes, those bulging, glassy eyes, staring, empty. Quickly, I reached for his hand. Got the gun, the Glock, peeled it from his limp fingers. I climbed painfully to my feet. Staggered forward.
Samantha . . .
Weak, I moved unsteadily to the base of the stairs. A sour acid of fear was running through me. I took hold of the banister. My legs were so rubbery, I had to use the strength of my arm to haul myself up. I climbed slowly, gripping the banister, gripping the gun. Only my will kept me moving. Because I had to get to her.
I reached the landing.
The door at the end of the hall was half-open. I could see nothing but a narrowed wedge of yellow light at the end of the long corridor of shadows. I willed myself step by step through the darkness to that light. Step by slow step with no strength, the light growing larger in front of me.
Two steps before I reached the door, I smelled the gun smoke. Then I came into the doorway. Pushed the door back. Moved over the threshold.
I saw Samantha first. She was standing in front of the desk, her arms down by her side, her face in quarter profile to me. She was looking at something but her eyes were empty. Her mouth was slack. She seemed in a state of waking unconsciousness. She had Stark’s pistol gripped loosely in her fingers.
I followed her gaze to the Fat Woman. The creature was still tied to the chair. Her head was thrown back. What was left of her face was tilted up toward the ceiling. In the midst of that nearly featureless swirl of burned brown and white flesh, the bullet hole seemed merely another blemish, this one right between her marbly, soulless eyes. Funny: Those eyes looked no more dead now than they had when she was living. Her body, though—the huge mass of it seemed to have sagged into itself, like a hollow thing that had been stepped on, crushed; that’s where you could see that she was gone. And by the blood, of course, dripping heavily from the back of her head. In the quiet of the room, I could hear it pattering on the floor behind her.
We held our places there a moment, we three—Samantha, the Fat Woman, and I. Still and speechless. I felt dazed—dazed to find that it was all over. Or at least I thought it was all over . . .
But it wasn’t. Not quite.
Because then, in one smooth, deliberate motion, Samantha lifted her hand, lifted the gun, and put the barrel into her mouth.
I had time to shout—one word: “No!”
I had time to rush to her, to drop my Glock, to grab her hand. But there was no time to stop her. If she had not hesitated, she could have pulled the trigger, could have blown the back of her head all over the walls.
But she paused. Just a second. Just long enough to shift her gaze—just long enough to look at me.
I don’t know what she saw, but it seemed to wake her up somehow. That look that had been in her eyes, that look I’d seen in the eyes of so many abused children—that look of retreat into distance or fantasy or empty despair—seemed all at once to be overcome, the emptiness all at once flooded with life from within, her eyes like the eyes of someone coming out of a trance.
The gun barrel was still at her lips. My hand was still on her hand. My eyes were on her eyes and now her eyes were awake to me.
“No,” I said again, more gently.
She let me pull her hand away. Turn the pistol away. Gently draw it out of her fingers. Toss it aside.
I wrapped my arms around her, pulled her to me. She pressed her face into my shoulder. She let out one loud, awful sob—one spasm that racked her entire body—but she didn’t cry.
“I killed her,” she said.
I kissed her hair. “She deserved to die.”
“She was tied to the chair and I . . .”
“It’s all right.”
She shuddered against me. Placed her palm against my chest and pushed away until she could look up at me. Now that she was awake to herself, she had no defense. Her eyes were wide. She saw everything.
“Danny . . .” she breathed.
I lifted my hand to her cheek, touched her soft skin. “It’s all right,” I said again. “It’ll be all right.”
She looked around, only now beginning to think about it, really think about it, only now beginning to understand. “Will I have to go to prison?” She seemed to ask it more of herself than me, but when she heard the words, they went through her, and she turned to me in fear and repeated, “Will I have to go to prison? I couldn’t do that, Danny. I couldn’t go to prison, I . . . There isn’t enough left of me. I don’t have the strength for that . . . I’d die. I’d die.”
She was drifting away again, but I brought her back. Touching her cheek, gently moving her head till she was looking up at me, into my eyes.
“You’re not going to prison,” I said.
“I’d die.”
“You’re not going to die and you’re not going to prison.”
“But . . . but what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen now?”
I drew her face to me and pressed my lips against her forehead. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her.
I sat Samantha down on a pile of files against the wall. She went where I took her, docile, quiet. She sat where I left her with her hands folded on her lap, like a little girl waiting for the bus to take her home from school.
I went to work on the scene. I found a letter opener in the desk drawer. I went around behind the Fat Woman’s corpse. I cut the cord off her. Her big arms swung free. That was the only time Samantha flinched—when the Fat Woman moved like that. But then she saw how it was. She settled down again and sat quietly.
I got Stark’s pistol off the floor. Wiped Samantha’s prints off it with my jacket and tossed it down again. I found the little knife Samantha had used and pocketed that.
Finally, I took a look at the laptop. It took only a few seconds to discover what was there. The sight of it made my heart speed up. I shut it, tucked it under my arm.
Then I took Samantha by the hand and led her to the doorway.
She paused there, in spite of my tugging at her. She paused and looked back over her shoulder at where the Fat Woman sat in her chair, her big arms dangling down beside her, her head thrown back, her mouth open, her dead eyes staring at the ceiling. Samantha went on looking at her until I shifted my grip and took her by the arm.
“Come on,” I told her. “There’s nothing there now. She’s gone.”
Samantha went on looking back over her shoulder as I led her away.
I torched the place. It was wood mostly, easy to burn.
I found a plastic gas can in the carport, a length of tubing wrapped around it. I siphoned a couple of gallons out of the big sedan. I stood and let them flow into the can while the dead watchman lay at my feet, showing me what used to be his face, watching me with what used to be his eyes.
When I was done, I carried the gas can back inside. I sloshed the gas around the ground floor. Splashed it over the curtains and the walls. Went back out for two more gallons and spread those around as well.
Everywhere I went, Samantha followed me. Quiet, docile, like an obedient child. She watched everything I did but only in the most distant and uninterested fashion. Her eyes were wide and her gaze was steady, but for the most part, her face was expressionless.
When the smell of the gas first reached her, she wrinkled her nose. “What are we going to do, Danny?” she said. Just like that. As if she were still a child.
“No one needs to know what happened here,” I told her, working the gas can. “Not exactly anyway. I’m going to burn the place.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Like we did before.”
“That’s right, baby. Like we did before.”