Authors: Renee Simons
She came to on a battered sofa whose fake leather upholstery felt brittle and cold beneath her hand. To have regained consciousness at all surprised her. Apparently, Anthony Volpe was not quite ready to end the game.
Sitting up, she tasted blood where her teeth had cut the inside of her torn and swollen bottom lip. A lump the size of a golf ball had risen at the back of her head. Her focus was off but she could see Volpe well enough. At the moment, nothing else mattered.
He leaned against the edge of a metal desk. Behind him, a bank of monitors glowed with a cold gray light that revealed the dim insides of the project. She realized with a shiver that Tony had brought her here to die. Stupid, she thought. They'll know who did it. Arrogant as he was, maybe he didn't care.
He lit a cigarette, started to offer her one and seemed to reconsider. "You don't smoke, do you?" His voice was low, menacing in its lack of expression.
She shook her head once, a mistake, as pain flooded her skull. The room spun. She closed her eyes again and waited for things to settle down. "You know what the Surgeon General says."
"If it's only your health you're concerned about, then you can have one, 'cause in a few minutes, you won't have no more worries on that score."
"Killing me isn't going to change what happens in that courtroom. Except to make things worse. You must know that."
"Yeah, but it's going to happen all the same. 'Cause I never leave unfinished business and that's what you are."
"Doing away with this piece of unfinished business could mean the difference between life in prison and a lesser sentence. Don't be a fool."
"Thanks to my pal, Terry, the least they'll hand me is twenty-five years, no matter what I do," he said, sitting beside her.
He took her face in one hand and examined her, giving her the opportunity to notice that he was considerably older than she'd thought. He'd done something to his hair, or maybe hadn't done anything to it, letting the gray show. To gain the jurors' sympathy?
His mouth came down on hers, hard and cold as the amber eyes staring at her. His nostrils twitched and he licked his lip as if savoring the taste of her blood. The wolf dream had never seemed more real. She sat without moving, waiting for the revulsion to subside. Her body shook with anger. At least, she hoped it was anger.
Finally, he straightened and bared his teeth in a smile as cold as his kiss. "You see me up close so maybe you can tell I'll end my years inside. I need some pay back for that. Finishing you off gives me the satisfaction of knowing that you'll all be gone - your lying father, your crazy mother and now you. And that makes it a job well done." He twisted her face to examine the bruises, then wrapped her arm in an iron grip. "C'mon."
Once outside the construction trailer, he pulled her along, never allowing her to gain any balance. She stumbled after him, dragging her feet to slow him down. The site was dark, except for small areas of icy blue where safety lights hung. Tony stumbled in the darkness. She tried to pull away but he tightened his grip on her arm.
"Don't try it," he said from deep in his throat. But she felt compelled to try something, anything.
Time is running out, she thought, and there's no one here to help.
Tony cursed and muttered something about the damned darkness. Having found the wolf's weakness, she acted before his eyes could adjust. She swiveled quickly, breaking his grip, then lowered her head and butted him in the midsection. He lost his balance and crashed to the ground, grabbing for her ankle to keep her from getting away. She stomped on his wrist with her other foot. He let go. Leaving him still struggling to his feet, she took off for the utility stairs. This was almost home ground by now. She had a good chance of losing him in the darkness, especially if he didn't know his way around. She gambled that he didn't.
Grateful she’d dressed casually for the show, she moved swiftly, skirting discarded scrap materials that lay about in rusting and rotting piles. She found gloves in her jacket pockets and pulled them on while she ran. As she scrambled over the mound of concrete and metal from the collapsed walkways, one hand settled on a piece of coiled steel about a foot long. She didn't know what it was, but hoped it would make a good weapon. She jammed it down the front of her jacket and raised the zipper higher. The gloves made grabbing for handholds easier.
Tony banged into something that fell noisily to the ground. She climbed faster. Once on the other side of the rubble, she darted in and out of a maze of steel and concrete uprights and finally found the metal staircase leading to the top floor. Each time she passed a safety light, she gave it a twist until it went out. She removed the metal coil from her jacket and used it to smash bulbs beyond her reach. The resulting darkness seemed worth the noise.
On the last level, the girders of the walkway still stretched intact. How had they survived when those below had collapsed? Maybe because the concrete hadn’t been poured up here yet?
“Focus, dammit. You’ve got to get to the other side.”
Once across, she could make her way to the roof of the building that abutted the site. Somewhere below, Tony stumbled and cursed his way toward her. When she looked down the stairwell, she could see a small light darting, weaving. He'd found a flashlight, but the beam didn't seem powerful. She expected to stay beyond its range.
Her heart pounded against her rib cage. Her mouth felt dry. Perspiration ran down her body, but she hesitated to remove her jacket. The dark colors helped her blend into her surroundings, providing added protection as she made her way across the steel floor.
Only two thin guy wires marked the boundary between the deck's perimeter and oblivion. She moved cautiously. Taking a leaf from Tony's book, she dug into the change pocket of her slacks and removed the mini-flashlight that dangled on a black cord from her key ring. At least she could see where her next step would be before she took it.
A sweep of the area with the small beam of light convinced her she was too far to the right to get to the girders. Volpe had picked up speed, no mean feat at his age.
“Probably works out every day,” she whispered. With his own trainer. In his private gym.
He wasn't far below her now. She sprinted laterally across the deck. Slanting the light downward and a foot ahead of her, she started for the edge. A moment before the light tangled in the guy wires, she sensed the change.
The darkness thickened, turning an inky black unrelieved by any form or light that might have lessened its intensity. Silence filled the open space, growing more dense nearer the floor of the courtyard, as if the dimensions of the place could be measured by the degree of quiet. An updraft shattered the illusion as it swirled around the open space with a sigh, strumming the guy wires with a gentle stroke, making them hum.
She trained the light over the courtyard and moved it from side to side. It reached just far enough to pick out the girders in the dim glow. After taking ten steps to the left she had only to take another over the wire and out onto either one.
The sound of Volpe pounding up the stairs had stopped. Either he'd paused to rest or he'd made it up to the deck. The Wolf would find her before long. She needed to keep moving, but fear of the unknown kept her rooted in place. So pretend you're up on the board, she thought, and get out there. Only no dives, fancy or otherwise. The degree of difficulty is too great.
"I know you're up here, Baby Doll. You got no place else to go, so why not stop this and make things easier on both of us?" The oily persuasion in his voice galvanized her.
The girders stretched out into the darkness, two steel beams set several feet apart with nothing but open space between them. She chose the one on the right and stepped forward, keeping one arm out for balance, angling the mini flashlight downward with her free hand to guide her feet.
She moved cautiously, a step at a time across the wide expanse of space. Balancing proved to be impossible with only one arm. She put the flashlight between her teeth and lifted her right arm shoulder high. Better, she thought with a sigh of relief. Her mouth was dry with fear so saliva wouldn't be a problem.
The angle of the light became more difficult to control. She shortened her stride to keep it within the narrow circle. Eventually, she found herself simply sliding her right foot forward and allowing her left to follow behind. The solidity of the steel beneath her soles gave her a sense of security that kept her moving.
Volpe continued to talk to her, cajoling one minute, berating the next, the anger and tension in his voice increasing as he failed to get a response. Suddenly, his tone changed, becoming soft, almost tender and oddly intimate, although his words filled the air.
"Do you know what I'm gonna do when I catch up with you? I'm not gonna kill you right off. You and I are gonna spend some time together. Like we did all those years ago, when you were just a baby. Only now you're not a baby any more. Now you know what to do. How to please a man. And that's what you're gonna do. Please me. So when I'm in the joint I'll have something good to remember. After all, you'll be the last woman I ever have."
She listened in horror as he proceeded to recount in detail what had happened before and what would happen again. She tried not to listen, tried to concentrate on getting across the courtyard. She remembered her hatred for him, the pain his assault had caused, the shame that had taken years to wipe away, the times she'd run from relationships because her fears had kept her closed off from love. She recalled her father's dead eyes and the last tortured year of her mother's life. His voice filled the courtyard, however, its echoes swirling around her as the breeze had earlier, his words circling the inner space of the courtyard to attack her. Finally, she could go no further.
She wrenched the flashlight from her mouth as a scream worked its way up through her body. She forgot where she was and whirled around, managing somehow to maintain her balance as fourteen years of pain and anger tore from her throat. She raised the flashlight to find him in the darkness, directing her anguish at him as he stood some ten feet away trying to maintain his balance. In her distress, the meager light became the flaming torch of her dream and she held it out before her, advancing toward him, flinging wordless sounds of rage and vile epithets like missiles.
He raised his gun and got off one shot that grazed her cheek but failed to stop her. Like a crazy woman, she aimed the light at his eyes and kept coming. He started to back away, more out of instinct than fear, his strange eyes watching her unblinking, the pupils wide and filled with confusion.
She raised her left hand to point at him and he flinched. His flashlight flew out of his hand. Incredibly, he reached out as if to bring it back but it tumbled down and out of reach. The movement upset his already precarious balance on the girder. She stopped screaming. He struggled to steady himself, sawing the air with one arm, feeling for a place to set down his leg.
With nothing solid beneath him, he slipped between the two girders. He grabbed for a hand hold; the gun got in the way. He reached out with his free hand. His jaw hit the edge of the steel beam, driving his bottom teeth through his lip and snapping his head backward. In the quivering light of her mini flash, she watched him drop out of sight. His cry of outraged indignation descended the courtyard, ending in a dull thud and silence.
Her throat felt raw, her cheek burned as if branded. Her chest hurt with every ragged breath. Through the fog encasing her mind, she wondered if her rubbery legs would carry her back across the girder to safety. She forced them to move, repeating the sliding motion she'd used on the way out.
After an eternity, the little circle of light picked up the guy wires. She lifted one shaking leg over, then the other and sank to the deck, stretching flat to feel the solid cold steel against her throbbing cheek. With no tears left to cry, no desperation to fuel her movements, no energy to climb back down to street level, she lay there listening to the quiet until even that faded away.
The darkness wrapped around her, protecting her, soothing her; the hard deck anchored her. As she drifted off, the pain in her cheek, her slow steady pulse and her own warm breath on the hand resting beside her mouth assured her she would come back. The same could never again be said for Anthony Volpe.
*
*
*
She didn't know how long she lay there before becoming aware of the sound of Drew's voice talking softly to her.
"Time to wake up, dear girl.
Time to come back to us.
Won't you at least try?"
"I'm here, Drew."
"Good for you. Think you can sit up?"
She leaned against his shoulder. "Why is it so bright?"