From the Corner of His Eye (63 page)

Celestina didn’t hear gunfire, but she couldn’t mistake the bullets for anything else when they cracked through the door.

The blocking dresser, which doubled as a vanity, was surmounted by a mirror. One bullet drilled through the plywood backing, made a spider-web puzzle of the silvered glass, lodged in the wall above the bed—
thwack
—and kicked out a spray of plaster chips.

When the two vertical panes of the casement window were still less than seven inches apart, they stuttered. The mechanism produced a dismal grinding rasp that sounded like a guttural pronunciation of the problem itself,
c-c-c-corrosion,
and seized up.

Even Angel, mere wisp of a cherubim, couldn’t squeeze through a seven-inch opening.

In the hall, the maniac roared in frustration.

The hateful window. The hateful, frozen window. Celestina wrenched on the crank with all of her strength, and felt something give a little, wrenched, but then the crank popped out of the socket and rapped against the sill.

She didn’t hear gunfire this time, either, but the hard crack of splintering wood attested to the passage of at least two more bullets.

Turning away from the window, Celestina grabbed the girl and pushed her toward the bed, whispering, “Down, under.”

Angel didn’t want to go, maybe because the boogeyman schemed beneath the bed in some of her nightmares.

“Scoot!”
Celestina fiercely insisted.

Finally Angel dropped and slithered, vanishing under the overhanging bedclothes with a final flurry of yellow socks.

Three years ago, in St. Mary’s Hospital, with Phimie’s warning fresh in her mind, Celestina swore that she would be ready when the beast came, but here he came, and she was as
not
ready as possible. Time passes, the perception of a threat fades, life becomes busier, you work your butt off as a waitress, you graduate college, your little girl grows to be so vital, so vivid, so alive that you know she just has to live forever, and after all, you are the daughter of a minister, a believer in the power of compassion, in the Prince of Peace, confident that the meek shall inherit the earth, so in three long years, you don’t buy a gun, nor do you take any training in self-defense, and somehow you forget that the meek who will one day inherit the earth are those who forego aggression but are
not
those so pathetically meek that they won’t even defend themselves, because a failure to resist evil is a sin, and the willful refusal to defend your life is the mortal sin of passive suicide, and the failure to protect a little yellow MM girl will surely buy you a ticket to Hell on the same express train on which the slave traders rode to their own eternal enslavement, on which the masters of Dachau and old Joe Stalin traveled from power to punishment, so here, now, as the beast throws himself against the door, as he shoves aside the barricade, with what precious little time you have left,
fight.

Junior shoved through the blocked door, into the bedroom, and the bitch hit him with a chair. A small, slat-back side chair with a tie-on seat cushion. She swung it like a baseball bat, and there must have been some Jackie Robinson blood in the White family line, because she had the power to knock a fastball from Brooklyn to the Bronx.

If she’d connected with his left side, as she intended, she might have broken his arm or cracked a few ribs. But he saw the chair coming, and as agile as a base runner dodging a shortstop’s tag, he turned away from her, taking the blow across his back.

This back blow wasn’t just sport, either, but more like Vietnam as he sometimes told women that he remembered it. As though pitched by a grenade blast, Junior went from his feet to the floor with chin-rapping impact, teeth guillotining together so hard that he would have severed his tongue if it had been between them.

He knew she wouldn’t just step back to calculate her batting average, so he rolled at once, out of her way, immensely relieved that he could move, because judging by the pain coruscating across his back, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had broken his spine and paralyzed him. The chair crashed down again, exactly where Junior had been sprawled an instant before.

The crazy bitch wielded it with such ferocity that the force of the impact with the floor, redounding upon her, must have numbed her arms. She stumbled backward, dragging the chair, temporarily unable to lift it.

Entering the bedroom, Junior had expected to cast aside his pistol and draw a knife. But he was no longer in a mood for close-up work. Fortunately, he’d managed to hold on to the gun.

He hurt too much to recover quickly and take advantage of the woman’s brief vulnerability. Clambering to his feet, he backed away from her and fumbled in a pocket for spare cartridges.

She’d hidden Bartholomew somewhere.

Probably in the closet.

Plug the painter, kill the kid.

He was a man with a plan, focused, committed, ready to act and then think, as soon as he was
able
to act. A spasm of pain weakened his hand. Cartridges slipped through his fingers, fell to the floor.

Your deeds…will return to you, magnified beyond imagining.

Those ominous words again, turning through his memory, reel to reel. This time he actually heard them spoken. The voice commanded attention with a deeper timbre and crisper diction than his own.

He ejected the magazine from the butt of the pistol. Nearly dropped it.

Celestina circled him, half carrying but also half dragging the chair, either because her nerves were still ringing and her arms were weak—or because she was faking weakness in the hope of luring him into a reckless response. Junior circled her while she rounded on him, frantically trying to deal with the pistol without taking his eyes off his adversary.

Sirens.

The spirit of Bartholomew…will find you…and mete out the terrible judgment that you deserve.

Reverend White’s polished, somewhat theatrical, yet sincere voice rose out of the past to issue this threat in Junior’s memory as he had issued it that night, from a tape recorder, while Junior had been dancing a sweaty horizontal boogie with Seraphim in her parsonage bedroom.

The minister’s threat had been forgotten, repressed. At the time, only half-heard, merely kinky background to lovemaking, these words had amused Junior, and he’d given no serious thought to their meaning, to the message of retribution contained in them. Now, in this moment of extreme danger, the inflamed boil of repressed memory burst under pressure, and Junior was shocked, stunned, to realize that
the minister had put a curse on him!

Sirens swelling.

Dropped cartridges gleamed on the carpet. Stoop to snatch them up? No. That was asking for a skull-cracking blow.

Celestina, the battering Baptist, back in action, came at him again. With one leg broken, another cracked, and the stretcher bar splintered, the chair wasn’t as formidable a weapon as it had been. She swung it, Junior dodged, she struck at him again, he juked, and she reeled away from him, gasping.

The bitch was getting tired, but Junior still didn’t like his odds in a hand-to-hand confrontation. Her hair was disarranged. Her eyes flashed with such wildness that he was half convinced he saw elliptical pupils like those of a jungle cat. Her lips were skinned back from her teeth in a snarl.

She looked as insane as Junior’s mother.

Too close, those sirens.

Another pocket. More cartridges. Trying to squeeze just two into the magazine, but his hands shaking and slippery with sweat.

The chair. A glancing blow, no damage, driving him backward to the window.

The sirens were
right here.

Cops at the doorstep, the lunatic bitch with the chair, the clergyman’s curse—all this amounted to more than even a committed man could handle. Get out of the present, go for the future.

He threw down the pistol, the magazine, and the cartridges.

As the bitch began her backswing, Junior grabbed the chair. He didn’t try to tear it out of her hands, but used it to shove her as hard as he could.

She stepped on a broken-off chair leg, lost her balance, and fell backward into the side of the bed.

As nimble as a geriatric cat, crying out with pain, Junior nevertheless sprang onto the deep windowsill and shoved against the twin panes of the window. They were already partly open—but they were also stuck.

Crouched on the deep sill, pushing against the parted casement panes of the tall French window, using not just muscle but the entire weight of his body,
leaning
into them, the maniac tried to force his way out of the bedroom.

Even above the piston-knock of her heart and the bellows-wheeze of her breath, Celestina heard wood crack, a small pane of glass explode, and metal torque with a squeal. The creep was going to get away.

The window didn’t face the street. It overlooked a five-foot-wide passageway between this house and the next. The police might not spot him leaving.

She could have gone at him with the chair once more, but it was falling apart. Instead, she abandoned furniture for the promise of a firearm, dropped to her knees, and snatched the discarded pistol magazine off the floor.

The shriek of the sirens groaned into silence. The police must have pulled to the curb in the street.

Celestina plucked a brassy bullet off the carpet.

Another small pane of glass burst. A dismaying crack of wood. His back to her, the maniac raged at the window with the snarling ferocity of a caged beast.

She didn’t have experience with guns, but having seen him trying to press cartridges into the magazine, she knew how to load. She inserted one round. Then a second. Enough.

The corroded casement-operating mechanism began to give way, as did the hinges, and the window sagged outward.

From the far end of the apartment, men shouted, “Police!”

Celestina screamed—“Here! In here!”—as she slapped the magazine into the butt of the pistol.

Still on her knees, she raised the weapon and realized that she was going to shoot the maniac in the back, that she had no other choice, because her inexperience didn’t allow her to aim for a leg or an arm. The moral dilemma overwhelmed her, but so did an image of Phimie lying dead in bloody sheets on the surgery table. She pulled the trigger and rocked with the recoil.

The window gave way an instant before Celestina squeezed off the shot. The man dropped out of sight. She didn’t know if she had scored a hit.

To the window. The warm room sucked cooling fog out of the night, and she leaned across the sill into the streaming mist.

The narrow brick-paved serviceway lay five feet below. The maniac had knocked over trash cans while making his escape, but he wasn’t tumbled among the rest of the garbage.

From out of the fog and darkness came the slap of running feet on bricks. He was sprinting toward the back of the house.

“Drop the gun!”

Celestina threw down the weapon even before she turned, and as two cops entered the room, she cried, “He’s getting away!”

From serviceway to alley to serviceway to street, into the city and the fog and the night, Junior ran from the Cain past into the Pinchbeck future.