His head was being bent backward now. How quickly his exposed throat could be slit, how easily his spine might be snapped.
He let go of the steering wheel. He reached behind his back, fumbling for the door handle.
If he could open the door and thrust with sufficient force, he might unbalance his assailant, knock him down, and either break his grip or lose the hair at last.
To reach the handle—slippery in his sweaty fingers—he had to twist his arm behind himself so torturously and bend his hand at such a severe angle that he didn’t have the range of movement to work the lever action. As if sensing Billy’s intent, the freak leaned all his weight against the door.
Billy’s head was largely out of the car now, and a face suddenly appeared above him, upside-down to his face. A countenance without features. A hooded phantom.
He blinked to clear his vision.
Not a hood. A dark ski mask.
Even in this poor light, Billy could see the fevered gaze that glistered from the eyeholes.
Something sprayed the lower half of his face, from the nose down. Wet, cold, pungent yet sweet, a medicinal reek.
He gasped in shock, then tried to hold his breath, but the single gasp had undone him. Astringent fumes burned in his nostrils. His mouth flooded with saliva.
The masked face seemed to lower toward his, like a dark moon coming down, the cratered eyes.
77
The sedative wore off. Like a winch line turning on a drum, pain gradually hoisted Billy from unconsciousness.
His mouth tasted as if he’d drunk waffle syrup and chased it with bleach. Sweet and bitter. Life itself.
For a while he didn’t know where he was. Initially he did not care. Raised from a sea of torpor, he felt saturated with unnatural sleep and yearned to return to it.
Eventually the unrelenting pain forced him to care, to keep his eyes open, to analyze sensation and to orient himself. He was lying on his back on a hard surface—the church parking lot.
78
He could smell the faint scents of tar, oil, gasoline. The vague nutty, musty fragrance of the oak tree spreading overhead in the darkness. His own sour perspiration.
Licking his lips, he tasted blood.
When he wiped his face, Billy found it slick with a viscous substance that was most likely a mixture of sweat and blood. In the dark, he could not see what had been transferred to his hand.
The pain was mostly in his scalp. He first assumed that it was a lingering effect of having had his hair nearly pulled out.
A slow pulsing ache, punctuated by a series of sharper pangs, radiated across his head, not from the crown, however, where his hair had been severely tested, but from his brow.
When he raised one hand and hesitantly explored the source, he found something stiff and wiry bristling from his forehead, an inch below the hairline. Although his touch was gentle, it triggered a spasm of sharper pain that made him cry out. Are you prepared for your first wound?
He left the exploration of the injury for later, until he could see the damage.
The wound would not be mortal. The freak had not intended to kill him, only to hurt him, perhaps to scar him.
Billy’s grudging respect for his adversary had grown to the point that he did not expect the man to make mistakes, at least not major ones. Billy sat up. Pain swelled across his brow, and again when he got to his feet.
He stood swaying, surveying the parking lot. His assailant was gone. High in the night, a cluster of moving stars, the running lights of a jet, growled westward. On this route, it was probably a military transport headed for a war zone. Another war zone different from the one down here. He opened the driver’s door of the Explorer.
Crumbled safety glass littered the seat. He plucked a Kleenex box from the console and used it to scrape the prickly debris off the upholstery. He searched for the note that had been taped over the ignition. Evidently the killer had taken it.
He found the dropped key under the brake pedal. From the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, he retrieved the revolver.
79
He had been allowed to keep the gun for the game ahead. The freak didn’t fear it.
The substance with which Billy had been sprayed—chloroform or some other anesthetic—had a lingering effect. When he bent over, he grew dizzy. Behind the wheel, with the door closed, with the engine running, he worried that he might not be fit to drive.
He turned on the air conditioner, angled two vents at his face. As he assessed his transient dizziness, the interior lights went off automatically. Billy turned them on once more.
He tilted the rearview mirror to inspect his face. He looked like a painted devil: dark red, but the teeth bright; dark red, and the whites of the eyes unnaturally white.
When he adjusted the mirror again, he saw at once the source of his pain. Seeing did not immediately mean believing. He preferred to think that the residual dizziness from the anesthetic might be accompanied by
