Intensity

'Let's see if you are.'

'No.'

'Oh, be adventurous, sweetheart. Let's see if you're lucky,' he said, and he pulled the trigger.

Although the weapon had failed to fire three times, she expected it to explode in her face, because that seemed to be the way luck was running for her, and she flinched.

Click.

'You are lucky, even more so than I am.'

Chyna didn't know what he was talking about. She couldn't focus her thoughts on anything but the pistol by the sink, this last miraculous chance.

'When Fuji started to pull this piece on me,' the killer said, 'didn't you hear what I promised him?'

All this talking and the bastard's calm demeanor unnerved Chyna even further. She expected him to shoot her, cut her, beat her, and probably rape her, torture answers from her before or after, but she didn't expect to have to chat with him, for God's sake, as if what they had been through was only a pleasant little road trip, a shared vacation that had taken a couple of interesting twists.

Still pointing the revolver at her, he said, 'What I told Fuji was, 'Don't, or I'll shove the bullets up your ass.' I always keep my promises. Don't you?'

His patter finally captured her undivided attention.

'In such poor light, and with all that blood everywhere, not wanting to look, squeamish, you probably didn't see that Fuji's pants were pulled down.'

He was right. After a glance showed her that the clerks were both dead, she had averted her eyes and stepped around their bodies.

He said, 'I managed to insert four rounds in him.'

Now she closed her eyes. Opened them at once. She didn't want to see him, looming and handsome with his nice smile, dry bloodstains on his clothes and nothing disturbing in his eyes. But she didn't dare look away.

Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.

'I put four bullets in,' he said, 'but then they started popping back out. A little postmortem gas release. It was ridiculous, quite funny, really, but I was pressed for time, as you might understand, and finally it was just too much trouble to do the fifth.'

Maybe this was best. Maybe one more round of Russian roulette, and then peace at long last, no more trying to understand why there was so much cruelty in the world when kindness was the easier choice.

He said, 'This is a five-shot weapon.'

The empty socket of the muzzle stared blindly at her, and she wondered if she would see the flash and hear the roar or whether the blackness in the barrel would become her own blackness, without any awareness of the exchange.

Then the killer turned the revolver away from her and pulled the trigger. The blast rattled windows, and the slug tore through a cabinet door along the nearest wall, spraying splinters of pine and shattering dishes inside.

Bits of wood were still flying when Chyna grabbed a drawer and yanked it out of the cabinet. It was so heavy that it almost pulled out of her hand, but she was suddenly strong with desperation, and she slung it upward at the killer's head, the contents spilling from it as it arced high toward his brow.

Spoons, forks, butter knives dueling in the air, flashing with cold fluorescent reflections, ringing down on him and across the tile floor, startled him backward into the dinette table.

Even as the killer stumbled away in surprise, Chyna was moving toward the sink. An instant after she heard the empty drawer crash against something, she put her hand on the grip of the pistol. She saw a red dot on the steel frame, which was probably exposed when the safety was off, as on other pistols with which she was familiar, and she didn't have to worry about empty chambers, as with the revolver, because if there was even one bullet in the magazine, just one, it would be in the breech, please, and at this close range one round might be all that she needed.

But her trigger finger was already stiffening and swelling, and when she tried to hook it through the guard, the flare of pain rocked her. She bobbled on a black tide of nausea, swayed, fumbling at the trigger guard with her middle finger.

Skating across the littered floor with an ice-brittle clatter-clink of scattering tableware, the killer reached Chyna before she could bring the gun up and turn. He slammed his arm down on hers and trapped her hand against the countertop.

Reflexively her finger pulled the trigger. A bullet smashed the backsplash. Chips of yellow ceramic tile sprayed in her face, and she might have been blinded if she hadn't squeezed her eyes shut in time.

He slammed the heel of his hand against the side of her head, sending a spray of darkness across the backs of her eyes, like shards of exploding black glass, and then he clubbed his fist against the nape of her neck.

With no memory of having fallen, Chyna was lying on the kitchen floor, with a bug's-eye view across the vinyl tile, gazing through a cataclysmic tumble of eating utensils. Interesting. Spoons were the size of shovels. Forks as big as pitchforks. Knives were lances.

The killer's boots. Black boots. Moving around.

For a moment she became confused, thinking that she was back in the Templeton house in the Napa Valley, hiding under the bed in the guest room. But there hadn't been flatware scattered across that bedroom floor, and when she focused on the stainless-steel utensils again, her thoughts cleared. 'Now I'm going to have to wash all these,' the killer said, 'before I put them away.'

He was circling through the kitchen, picking up the flatware and being methodical about it, keeping spoons with spoons, knives with knives.

Chyna was surprised that she could move her arm, which was as heavy as a great tree limb, a petrified tree once wood but now stone. Nevertheless, she managed to point at the killer and even curl her throbbing trigger finger, swallowing her pain and the bitter taste that came with it.

The gun didn't fire.

She squeezed the trigger again, and still there was no boom, and then she realized that her hand was empty. She wasn't holding the pistol.

Strange.

One of the knives was near her hand. It was a table knife with a finely serrated edge, suitable for spreading butter or for slicing well cooked chicken or for cutting green beans into bite-size pieces, but not ideal for stabbing someone to death. A knife was a knife, however, better than no weapon at all, and she quietly closed her hand around it.

Now all she had to do was find the strength to get off the floor. Curiously, she couldn't even lift her head. She had never before felt so tired.

She had been hit hard on the back of the neck. She wondered about spinal injury.

She refused to weep. She had the knife.

The killer came to her, stooped, and extracted the knife from her hand. She was amazed at how easily it slipped from her fingers, even though she clutched it ferociously, as if it hadn't been a knife at all but a sliver of melting ice.

'Bad girl,' he said, and rapped the flat of the blade against the top of her skull.

He continued with the cleanup.

While trying not to think about spinal injuries, Chyna managed to get her hand around a fork.

He returned and took that away from her too. 'No,' he said, as though he were training a recalcitrant puppy. 'No.'

'Bastard,' she said, dismayed to hear a slur in her voice.

'Sticks and stones.'

'Fucking bastard.'

'Oh, very pretty,' he said scornfully.

'Shithead.'

'I should wash your mouth out with soap.'

'Asshole.'

'Your mother never taught you words like that.'

'You don't know my mother,' she said thickly.