He was beginning to think they might escape. His left arm ached where
the bullet had grazed it, and the fingers of that hand were stiff. The
pain in his bad leg had subsided to a continuous dull throb that made
him grit his teeth occasionally but which didn't interfere too much with
his rappelling.
in a couple of steps he reached the seventeenth floor.
in two more jumps he came to rest against the sixteenth-story window
ledge-where Frank Bollinger had decided to set up an ambush.
The window was closed. However, the drapes had been drawn back.
One desk lamp glowed dimly in the office.
Bollinger was on the other side of the glass, a huge silhouette.
He was just lifting the latch.
No! Graham thought.
In the same instant that his boots touched the window ledge, he kicked
away from it.
Bollinger saw him and pulled off a shot without bothering to open the
rectangular panes. Glass sliced into the night.
Although Bollinger reacted fast, Graham was already out of his line of
fire. He swung-back to the wall seven or eight feet below Bollinger,
rappelled again, stopped at the fifteenth-story window.
He looked up and saw flame flicker briefly from the muzzle of the pistol
as Bollinger shot at Connie.
The gunfire threw her off her pace. She hit the wall with her shoulder
again. Frantic, she got her feet under her and rappelled.
Bollinger fired again.
Bollinger knew that he hadn't scored a hit on either of them.
He left the office, ran to the elevator. He switched on the control
panel and pushed the button for the tenth floor.
As the lift descended, he thought about the plan that he and Billy had
formulated yesterday.
' Yo u'll kill Harris firs t. Do what you wan t with th e woman, but be
sure to cut her up.'
'I always cut them up. That was my idea in the first place.'
'You should kill Harris where it'll cause the least mess, where you can
clean up after.
'Clen up? '
'When you're done with the woman, you'll go back to Harris, wipe up
every speck of blood around him, and wrap his body in a plastic tarp. So
don't kill him on a carpet where he'll leave stains. Take him into a
room with a tile floor.
Maybe a bathroom.
'Wrap him in a tarp?'
'I'll be waiting behind the Bowerton Building at ten o'clock.
You'll bring the body to me. We'll put it the car. Later, we can take
it out of the city, bury it upstate someplace.
'Bury it? Why?'
'We're going to try to make the police think that Harris has killed his
own fiancee, that he's tho Butcher. I'll disguise my voice and call
Homicide. I',U claim to be Harris, and I'll tell them I'm the Butcher.
