The living room was carpeted. He took two silent steps into it before stopping again to orient himself.
Zillis’s scorn for furniture was a blessing. There weren’t many obstructions to worry about in the dark.
Billy heard faint voices. Alarmed, he listened. He couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Having expected to find Zillis alone, he considered retreating. But he had to know more.
A dim glow marked the entrance to the hallway that led off the living room to the two bedrooms and bath. The hall fixture was off, but soft light entered the far end from the open doors of the last two rooms.
Those rooms faced each other across the hall. As Billy recalled, the one on the left was the bathroom, Zillis’s bedroom on the right.
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Judging by pitch and timbre, not by content, he thought there were two voices, one male and one female.
He held the Mace in his right hand, thumb under the safeguard, squarely on the button trigger.
Instinct whispered that he should trade the Mace for the pistol. Not every instinct was more reliable than reason.
If he started by shooting Zillis, he had nowhere to go. He must first disable him, not wound him.
Moving along the hall, he passed the make-believe abattoir where the mannequins sat in bloodless mutilation.
The better he could hear them, the more the voices had a make-believe quality, too. They were actors sharing a bad performance. A vaguely tinny quality suggested they issued from the speakers of a cheap TV. The woman suddenly cried out in pain, but sensuously, as if her pain were also her pleasure.
Billy had nearly reached the end of the hall when Steve Zillis exited the bathroom, to the left.
Barefoot, bare-chested, wearing pajama bottoms, he was scrubbing his teeth with a brush, hurrying to see what was on the television in the bedroom. His eyes widened when he spotted Billy. He spoke around the toothbrush:
“What the fuh—”
Billy Maced him.
Police Mace is highly effective up to a distance of twenty feet, although fifteen is ideal. Steve Zillis stood seven feet from Billy. Mace in the mouth and in the nose will somewhat inhibit an attacker. You can stop him hard and fast only if you squirt him liberally in the eyes. The stream doused both eyes, point-blank, and also hosed his nostrils. Zillis dropped the toothbrush, covered his eyes with his hands, too late, and turned blindly away from Billy. He collided at once with the end wall of the hallway. Making a desperate wheezing sound, he bent over, retching, and spewed gobs of toothpaste foam as if he were a rabid dog.
The burning in his eyes was hellacious, his pupils open so wide that he could see only a fierce blurred brightness, not even the form of his assailant, not even a shadow. His throat also burned with the chemical that had gone
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down by way of his nose, and his lungs tried to reject every tainted breath that he drew.
Billy went in low, grabbed the cuff of a pajama leg, and jerked the man’s left foot out from under him.
Clawing the air in search of a wall, a doorway, something that would offer support, finding nothing, Zillis dropped hard enough to make the floorboards vibrate.
Between gasps and wheezes, between fits of choking, he shrieked about his eyes, the pain, the stinging brightness.
Billy drew the 9-mm pistol and rapped him along the side of the head with the barrel, just hard enough to hurt.
Zillis howled, and Billy warned, “Quiet down, or I’ll hit you again, harder.”
When Zillis cursed him, Billy rapped him with the gun once more, not as hard as promised, but that got the idea across.
“All right,” Billy said. “Okay. You’re not going to see well for twenty minutes, half an hour—”
Still inhaling in rapid shallow pants, exhaling in shudders, Zillis interrupted Billy: “Jesus, I’m blind, I’m—”
“It was just Mace.”
“What’re you nuts?”
“Mace. No permanent damage.”
“I’m blind,” Zillis insisted.
“You stay there.”
“I’m blind.”
“You’re not blind. Don’t move.”
“Shit…”
A thread of blood unraveled from Zillis’s scalp. Billy hadn’t hit him hard, but the skin had broken.
“Don’t move, listen to me,” Billy said, “cooperate, and we’ll get through this, it’ll be all right.”
He realized that he was already comforting Zillis as if the man’s innocence were a foregone conclusion.
