hypodermic, but it wasn't her. It was an elderly man in a white lab coat who now stood clutching at his heart, certain he had been killed by a madman, going to his knees, his cane skittering away, clattering against the floor.
“ Damn, damn, damn,” Archer moaned where he stood over the fallen old man, whose eyes had rolled back in his head, the whites staring up at Archer without seeing him. But somewhere he felt eyes upon him and when he turned back, he saw her. Dr. Coran was several offices away from the incident in the hallway, but through the panes of glass through which she had watched, she saw a poorly disguised Dr. Simon Archer attack her serologist, Dr. Robertson. Her eyes told him that she knew that he had come for her.
For a moment they simply stared at one another, hunter and hunted. Then she revealed to him that she had a gun. Pointing it, aiming it at Archer and firing, she burst the three panes of glass between them, but Archer had disappeared. She could not tell if she had hit him or not, but drawing up her nerve, she rushed toward Steve Robertson's prone and still form. Archer had somehow escaped. She wheeled about with the gun extended, her white lab coat flapping about her legs, her cane tucked below her arm. She fought to keep balance, knowing her full weight on her ankles was not good, but she must be prepared to fire again if need be.
She saw that the elevator was taking someone down, possibly Simon Archer being true to form-a coward when faced with a victim who fought back. Every victim of the Claw before now had been defenseless and taken by surprise.
She knelt over Robertson, seeing blood on the floor beside him. She took his pulse and found it weak and erratic; searched frantically for a wound, fearing that flying glass had hit him. But there were no wounds. Robertson was unable to speak and quite possibly unable to hear. Paralyzed somehow by Archer, she knew that but for the grace of God it might well be her lying here paralyzed, in the complete and utter control of the Claw.
“ I hope you can hear me, Robertson… Robertson!” she called out to the injured man. “I'm calling 911. You're going to be all right. Just hang on!”
She realized now that the blood beside Robertson was Archer's blood, that she had wounded him. She saw a trail of it leading in the direction of the elevators. She now pushed upward against her cane to regain her feet, but the cane slipped from beneath her when it found blood. She lay on her back when she saw a shadow dart across the hall down from her, going toward her office and lab. She held firmly to the gun, and hearing something metallic skitter away from her, she found an odd glove with a scalpel firmly attached to it: Archer's new weapon of choice. She placed it safely away- evidence for later.
She wanted to hunt Archer down. Turn the tables on the sonofabitch, see him in the position of his victims, avenge Dr. Darius and all those other victims of the man's madness. One thing she did not want was to see this freak Archer incarcerated in Gabe Arnold's Philadelphia madhouse alongside Matisak. She wanted some modicum of justice this time around.
Regaining her feet, she saw that the elevator she had thought to be going down was coming up. Was he aboard it, or had he taken refuge in the labs, hiding in wait there? She could not be certain. She waited for the elevator to arrive and for the doors to open, her gun extended, at the ready.
The door opened on a stranger to her, his hands going up on seeing her gun pointed at his eyes. “Don't shoot,” he said.
“ Who the hell are you?”
“ Frakley, FBI, like you, Dr. Coran.” He flashed an ID and said, “I got a call from a Captain Alan Rychman, NYPD, about you. The captain was real worried, pressed us for a twenty-four-hour surveillance of your place.”
“ Why the hell wasn't I told?”
“ There's been no time. Something to do with your Claw case and that you might be a target for some guy named Archer you've been trying to nail. Rychman made it sound real urgent.”
“ Jesus, it takes Archer's coming to assassinate me for everyone to believe me. How long've you been watching me?”
“ Just since seven this evening.” Frakley saw Robertson beside her on the floor. He rushed to have a look. “I heard the shot, came straight up.”
“ Get to a phone, Frakley; get help.”
“ Where're you going?”
“ Back to my lab.”
“ But where's this guy Archer?”
“ I don't know, but he's wounded.”
“ I can't leave you like this.”
“ If Robertson doesn't get medical attention now, he'll die. You see to that and I'll secure the floor.”
Frakley reluctantly went in search of a telephone.
In the movies, Rychman would have come racing to her side, instead of sending a Frakley, she thought, moving cautiously through the glass maze of the laboratories here, in search of any sign of the madman. Archer had perhaps found the stairwell and was holed up there somewhere. She only thought that she had seen him duck in here. She relaxed a bit; the place was empty. She had to get the building sealed off, and where the hell was security? She went into her office and dialed. As she did so, she stared out at the lab table where J.T. had been studying a replica that had been made of the claw, something to be used, he said, as a teaching tool for next semester's newcomers. It was in the vise when she had gone out, but now it was gone.
Out of the shadows, as if materializing from air, the claw came crashing down at her, swiping out at her throat and latching onto the telephone receiver instead as she leapt away. Her gun flew off the desk where she had laid it down. The phone went through a glass partition, making enough noise to wake the dead, and certainly to cause Frakley to race in from wherever he was, she thought. But he did not come and she was knocked down and now, standing over her was the Claw, Archer's eyes like those of a raging, mad stallion as he raised the deadly instrument above his head and was about to strike.
“ God damn you, Archer, you've screwed up everything,” said Frakley as he entered, his weapon holstered.
Archer's voice had taken on the croaking sounds of a man in pain. “The bitch shot me. My blood is all over the place.”
“ We can't do her here.”
Archer moved closer to Frakley, the claw dangling at his side like that of a giant crab, his form hideous in the darkened room where the lamp had been overturned. Somewhere on the floor lay her gun. If she could only find it. Her mind raced to piece things together. Somehow Archer had found another weak, easily dominated dupe for him. Somehow the man had hypnotic power over others of a certain personality type.
“ After all, Frakley, you killed her here, not me. I tried to stop you and was wounded in the ensuing struggle,” Archer was saying as he turned Frakley's gun on him and twisted and fired. Frakley fell in a heap on the floor, dead.
Jessica took the opportunity to grab up her cane and she brought it around just at the precise moment that Archer's jaw turned into it, knocking him, claw and all, across her desk, sending what remained there onto the floor with his weight. She scrambled about for a few moments for the gun she had lost. On hand and knee, she wildly pursued the missing gun but could not find it before Archer began clawing his way back up, holding onto the desk, stunned but far from incapacitated.
Jessica tore from the office through a door that led deeper into the labyrinth of the labs. She made her way to another door that opened onto an autopsy room, where she left a spinning stainless-steel table in her wake. She went from room B to C and to D before she remembered the service elevator on the other side of the hall. She struggled on without using her cane, acutely aware that Archer and his deadly claw were right behind her.
When she stepped into the hallway, she saw him at the other end, his dark form like an alien from another planet, the deadly claw clacking as if in anticipation of her blood. He'd kill her and set up the bodies, hers and Frakley's, to make it look as if they'd killed one another, to both prove her right about the dual nature of the Claw and to end any further speculation about him.
There was little telling what the maniac had in mind other than her death. After she was splayed open like a tarpon, he'd feed on her, stuff portions of her into Frakley's mouth for good measure.
She streaked for the service elevator, praying the car was on this floor. It was used for bringing bodies to and from the morgue in the basement. She had a fifty-fifty chance that it would be there. She fairly fell against the big red button that opened the sluggish doors, and the moment they opened, she hurled herself against the far wall.
