Vess plucks another sausage from the display rack, neatly chews off the end of the plastic wrapper, and slides the tube of meat out of the package. He inserts the shorter sausage (missing the Asian's bite) into the wrapper and twists the end shut. He puts this in his pocket with the videotape-for Ariel.
He pays for the sausage that he threw away, making change from the open register drawer.
On the counter is a telephone. He unplugs it from the jack and smashes the keypad with the butt of the shotgun.
Now he goes shopping.
Chyna was relieved when the lights went off, frightened by the hammering, and then alert in the subsequent silence.
She had crept out of the cooler-lighted aisle and returned to her shelter at the end of the shelf row, where she had quietly peeled open the cardboard-and-plastic package that contained the disposable cigarette lighter. While the overhead fluorescents had been on and the flickering flame couldn't betray her, she had tested the lighter, and it had worked.
Now she clutched this pathetic weapon and prayed that the killer would finish whatever he was doing-maybe looting the cash register and just, for God's sake, get out of here. She didn't want to have to go up against him with a Bic butane. If he stumbled onto her, she might be able to take advantage of his surprise, thrust the lighter in his face, and give him a nasty little burn-or even set his hair on fire-before he recoiled. More likely, his reflexes would be uncannily quick; he'd knock the lighter out of her hand before she could do any damage.
Even if she burned him, she would gain only precious seconds to turn and flee. Hurting, he would come after her, and with his long legs, he would be swift. Then the outcome of the race would depend on whether her terror or his insane rage was the greater motivating force.
She heard movement, the creak of the counter gate, footsteps. Half nauseated from protracted fear, she was gloriously heartened when it seemed that he was leaving.
Then she realized that the footsteps were not crossing toward the door at the front of the store. They were approaching her.
She was squatting on her haunches, back pressed to the end panel of the shelf row, not immediately sure where he was. In the first of the three aisles, toward the front of the store? In the center aisle immediately to her left?
No.
The third aisle.
To her right.
He was coming past the coolers. Not fast. Not as if he knew that she was here and intended to whack her.
Rising into a crouch but staying low, Chyna eased to the left, into the middle of the three passages. Here the glow from the coolers, one row removed, bounced off the acoustic-tile ceiling but provided little illumination. All the merchandise was shelved with shadows.
She started forward toward the cashiers' counter, thankful for her soft-soled shoes-and then she remembered the packaging from which she had extracted the Bic lighter. She'd left it on the floor where she'd been squatting at the end of the shelf row.
He would see it, probably even step on it. Maybe he would think that earlier in the night some shoplifter had slipped the lighter out of the packaging to conceal it more easily in a pocket. Or maybe he would
Intuition might serve him as well as it sometimes served Chyna. If intuition was the whisper of God, then perhaps another and less benevolent god spoke with equal subtleness to a man like this.
She turned back, leaned around the corner, and snatched up the empty package. The stiff plastic crinkled in her shaky grip, but the sound was faint and, luckily, masked by his footsteps.
He was at least halfway down the third aisle by the time she started forward along the second. But he was taking his time while she was scuttling as fast as she could, and she reached the head of her aisle before he arrived at the end of his.
At the terminus of the shelf row, instead of a flat panel like the one at the far end, there was a freestanding wire carousel rack holding paperback books, and Chyna nearly collided with it when she turned the corner. She caught herself just in time, slipped around the rack, and sheltered against it, between aisles once more.
On the floor lay a Polaroid photograph: a close-up of a strikingly beautiful girl of about sixteen, with long platinum-blond hair. The teenager's features were composed but not relaxed, frozen in a studied blandness, as though her true feelings were so explosive that she would self-destruct if she acknowledged them. Her eyes subtly belied her calm demeanor; they were slightly wide, watchful, achingly expressive, windows on a soul in torment, full of anger and fear and desperation.
This must be the photograph that he had shown to the clerks.
Ariel. The girl in the cellar.
Although she and Ariel bore no resemblance to each other, Chyna felt as though she were staring into a mirror rather than looking at a picture. In Ariel, she recognized a terror akin to the fear that had suffused her own childhood, a familiar desperation, loneliness as deep as a cold polar ocean.
The killer's footsteps brought her back to the moment. Judging by the sound of them, he was no longer in the third aisle. He had turned the corner at the back of the store and was now in the middle passage.
He was coming forward, leisurely covering the same territory over which Chyna had just scuttled.
She wanted to take the photograph but didn't dare. She put it on the floor where she had found it.
She went around the paperback carousel into the third aisle, which the killer had just left, and she headed toward the end of the shelf row again. She stayed close to the merchandise on the left, away from the glass doors of the lighted coolers on the right, to avoid throwing a shadow on the ceiling tiles, which he might see.
When she was moving, she could still hear his heavy footsteps, but unless she stopped to listen, she couldn't tell in which direction he was headed. Yet she didn't dare stop to take a bearing on him, lest he circle again into this aisle and catch her in the open. When she reached the end of the row and turned the corner, she half expected to discover that he had changed directions, to collide with him, and to be caught.
But he wasn't there.
Sitting on her haunches, Chyna leaned back against the end panel of the shelf row, the very spot from which she'd started. Gingerly she put the empty Bic lighter package on the floor between her feet, in the same place from which she had retrieved it less than a minute before.
She listened. No footsteps. Other than the noise made by the coolers, only silence.
Thumb poised, she clutched the lighter in her fist, prepared to strike the flame.
Vess stuffs two snack packages of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, one Planters peanut bar, and two Hershey bars with almonds into his raincoat pockets, in which he's already carrying the pistol, the Polaroid, and the videotape.
He totals the cost in his head. Because he doesn't want to waste time going behind the register to make change, he rounds the figure to the nearest dollar and leaves the payment on the counter.
After picking up the fallen photograph of Ariel, he hesitates, soaking up the atmosphere of aftermath. There is a special quality to a room in which people have recently perished: like the hush in a theater during that instant between when the final curtain falls on a perfect performance and when the wild applause begins; a sense of triumph but also a solemn awareness of eternity suspended like a cold droplet at the point of a melting icicle. With the screaming done and the blood pooled in stillness, Edgler Vess is better able to appreciate the effects of his bold actions and to relish the quiet intensity of death.
Finally he leaves the store. Using the tagged key that he took from the pegboard, he locks the door.
At the corner of the building is one public telephone. With its armored cord, the handset isn't easily torn loose, so he hammers it against the phone box five, ten, twenty times, until the plastic cracks, revealing the microphone. He tears the mike out of the broken mouthpiece, drops it on the pavement, and methodically crushes it under his boot heel. Then he hangs the useless handset on the switch hook again.
His work here is done. Although satisfying, this interlude was unexpected; it has put him behind
