From the curb, Mitch watched until the cruiser left the highway two blocks ahead. It turned left into the north end of the Village.
Evidently Taggart hadn't yet sufficiently recovered his wits to give them a description of the Honda.
Mitch took a very deep breath. He took another. He wiped the back of his neck with one hand. He blotted his hands on his jeans.
He had assaulted a police officer.
Easing the Honda back into the northbound traffic, he wondered if he had lost his mind. He felt resolved, and perhaps reckless in a venturous sense, but not shortsighted. Of course, a lunatic could not recognize madness from the inside of his bubble.
Chapter 57
After Holly extracts the nail from the plank, she turns it. over and over in her stiff sore fingers, assessing whether or not it is as lethal as she imagined when it was sheathed in wood.
Straight, more than three but less than four inches long, with a thick shank, it qualifies as a spike, all right. The point is not as sharp as, say, the wicked point of a poultry skewer, but plenty sharp enough.
While the wind sings of violence, she spends time imagining the ways the spike might be employed against the creep. Her imagination is fertile enough to disturb her.
After quickly grossing herself out, she changes the subject from the uses of the spike to the places where it might be hidden. What value it has is the value of surprise.
Although the spike probably won't show if tucked in a pocket of her jeans, she worries that she'll not be able to extract it quickly in a crisis. When they had transported her from her
house to this place, they had bound her wrists tightly with a scarf. If he does the same when he takes her away from here, she will not be able to pull her hands apart and, therefore, might not be able to get her fingers easily into a particular pocket.
Her belt offers no possibilities, but in the dark, by touch, she considers her sneakers. She can't carry the nail inside the shoe; it will rub and blister her foot, at the least. Maybe she can conceal it on the outside of the shoe.
She loosens the laces on her left sneaker, carefully tucks the nail between the tongue and one of the flaps, and reties the shoe.
When she gets to her feet and walks a circle around the ringbolt to which she is tethered, she quickly discovers that the rigid nail is an impediment to a smoothly flexed step. She can't avoid limping.
Finally she pulls up her sweater and secrets the nail in her bra. She isn't as extravagantly endowed as the average female mud wrestler, but Nature has been more than fair. To prevent the nail from slipping out between the cups, she presses the point through the elastic facing, thus pinning it in place.
She has armed herself.
With the task complete, her preparations seem pathetic.
Restless, she turns to the ringbolt, wondering if she can set herself free or at least augment her meager weaponry.
With her questing hands, she had earlier determined that the ringbolt is welded to a half-inch-thick steel plate that measures about eight inches on a side. The plate is held to the floor by what must be four countersunk screws.
She is unable to say with certainty that they are screws, for some liquid has been poured into the sink around each one and has formed a hard puddle. This denies her access to the slot in the head of each screw, if indeed they are screws.
Discouraged, she lies on her back on the air mattress, her head raised on the pillow portion.
Earlier, she had slept fitfully. Her emotional exhaustion breeds physical fatigue, and she knows that she could sleep again. But she does not want to doze off.
She is afraid that she will wake only as he falls upon her.
She lies with her eyes open, though this darkness is deeper than the one behind her eyelids, and she listens to the wind, though there is no comfort in it.
A timeless time later, when she wakes, she is still in darkness absolute, but she knows she isn't alone. Some subtle scent alerts her or perhaps an intuitive sense of being encroached upon.
She sits up with a start, the air mattress squeaking under her, the chain rattling against the floor between manacle and ringbolt.
'It's only me,' he assures her.
Holly's eyes strain at the blackness because it seems that the gravity of his madness ought to condense the darkness around him into something yet darker, but he remains invisible.
'I was watching you sleep,' he says, 'then after a while, I was concerned that my flashlight would wake you.'
Judging his position by his voice is not as easy as she might have expected.
'This is nice,' he says, 'being with you in the numinous dark.'
To her right. No more than three feet away. Perhaps on his knees, perhaps standing.
'Are you afraid?' he asks.
'No,' she lies without hesitation.
'You would disappoint me if you were afraid. I believe you are arising into your full spirit, and one who is arising must be beyond fear.'
As he speaks, he seems to move behind her. She turns her head, listening intently.
'In El Valle, New Mexico, one night the snow came down as thick as ever it has anywhere.'
If she is correct, he has moved to her right side and stands over her, having made no sound that the wind failed to mask.
'The valley floor received six inches in four hours, and the land was eerie in the snowlight…'
Hairs quiver, flesh prickles on the back of her neck at the thought of him moving confidently in pitch-black conditions. He does not reveal himself even by eyeshine, as might a cat.
'…eerie in a way it is nowhere else in the world, the flats receding and the low hills rising as if they are just fields of mist and walls of fog, illusions of shapes and dimensions, reflections of reflections, and those reflections only reflections of a dream.'
The gentle voice is in front of her now, and Holly chooses to believe that it has not moved, that it has always been in front of her.
Startled from sleep, she should expect her senses to be at first unreliable. Such perfect darkness displaces sound, disorients.
He says, 'The storm was windless at ground level, but hard wind blew at higher elevations, because when the snow abated, most of the clouds were quickly torn into rags and were flung away. Between the remaining clouds, the sky was black, festooned with ornate necklaces of stars.'
She can feel the nail between her breasts, warmed by her body heat, and tries to take comfort from it.
'The glassmaker had fireworks left over from the past July, and the woman who dreamed of dead horses offered to help him set them up and set them off.'
His stories always lead somewhere, although Holly has learned to dread their destinations.
'There were star shells, Catherine wheels, fizgigs, girandoles, twice-changing chrysanthemums, and golden palm trees….'
His voice grows softer, and he is close now. He may be leaning toward her, his face but a foot from her face.
'Red and green and sapphire-blue and gold bursts brightened the black sky, but they were also colorful and diffusely reflected on the fields of snow, soft swaths of pulsing color on the fields of snow.'
As the killer talks, Holly has the feeling that he will kiss her here in the darkness. What will his reaction be when inevitably she recoils in revulsion?
'Some last snow was falling, a few late flakes as big as silver dollars, descending in wide lazy gyres. They
