The shot, the womanish shrieking-Dorie assumed the worst. The next few seconds were as bad as any she’d experienced in the last week-and that was saying something. When she heard Pender shouting that the key was under the head of the mattress, it was like whiplash, emotional whiplash. She recovered quickly, tried to puzzle it out. Easier to say that the key was under the mattress than to reach it, if you were lying on your back with your arms cuffed through the headboard.
Guess what, though: it’s possible. You have to scooch way up, and contort yourself as far onto your side as you can, and pronate both wrists no matter how tight the cuffs are, and slide your fingers under the mattress, which is pressed tight against the box spring by your weight, so you have to scooch even farther to the side, which puts more strain on your wrists-but it can be done. If the key is less than a finger’s length from the edge, you can find it, you can slide it out. And then if you crane your head at an angle that would break an owl’s neck, so you can see what you’re doing, and get the key inserted in the keyhole without dropping it-whatever you do, don’t drop it- and turn the key, you’ll hear the sweetest sound you’ve ever heard.
Dorie followed the sound of the bellowing and shrieking into the kitchen, quickly knelt behind Pender, unlocked his cuffs. As Pender scrambled to his feet, he saw Childs rising to his knees, moaning, one hand still clapped to his eye, blood leaking out between the fingers; his other hand was flailing the air as if he were blind. Pender punted him in the ribs to knock him over, then kicked him in the head a few times, until he lay still. Subduing the suspect, it was called.
As Pender cuffed Childs, Dorie knelt by the woman lying across the cellar doorway. “Are you all right?”
“I’m bit.”
“You’re hit?” Dorie had heard a shot, not a snake.
“Bit. Coral snake got me,” said Linda. “It got Childs worse, though,” she added-there was a world of triumph in those five words.
Pender was already on the line with the 911 operator. “What kind of snake, did you say?”
“Eastern coral.” Linda raised her head wearily. “Tell ’em Animal Control had the antivenin at Conroy Circle.”
“Eastern coral, antivenin, Conroy Circle-got it,” said Pender, who had no idea what she was talking about.
Dorie hauled Linda-she assumed it was Linda Abruzzi-the rest of the way up the steps into the kitchen. The woman looked like hell-her thin face was dark and puffy and both eyelids were drooping. Dorie glanced over at Childs, who hadn’t moved since Pender had “subdued” him. “Is he dead?” she asked Pender when he got off the phone.
“Not yet.”
“Is he
“I don’t know.” Pender sat down on the floor next to Linda, helped her turn over onto her back, and cradled her head on his lap. “I guess you’re our resident snake wrangler,” he told Linda, not so much for information as to give her something to do with her mind, to help keep her present and awake. He didn’t know much about snake bites, but he knew you didn’t want the victim slipping away. “What do you think?”
Although it was getting hard to concentrate on anything besides the pain, and drawing her next breath, Linda tried to piece together what little data she had. The coral had bitten Gloria, and she was dead. Linda herself had been bitten before Childs, and she was still alive. It had only nipped her on the back of her wrist, though-Childs got it in the eye. And he had to have received twice as much venom-the enraged coral had gone for him with a vengeance and hung on for dear life, or rather, grim death. But he also weighed nearly as much as Linda and Gloria combined. And there was that delayed reaction Reilly had mentioned.
“If we’re both alive…when the antivenin…gets here,” she told Dorie between gasps, “I think we’ll both make it.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” said Dorie, turning toward the revolver she’d seen under the table when she entered the kitchen. But it was no longer there-it was on the floor beside Pender. “Could I see the gun for a second?” she asked.
Pender had probably done Simon a favor, knocking him out like that. Not only had he released Simon from his agony for a few minutes, but while Simon was unconscious his respiration and heart rate had slowed appreciably, thereby retarding the progress of the neurotoxin through his bloodstream.
Dorie was on her feet, standing over Pender, reaching her hand out for the Colt.
“I think it would be better if I held on to it for a while,” he told her. They both understood what she was asking; they also knew what his answer had been.
“Suit yourself,” she said, picking up the Buck knife from the table.
“What are you planning to do with that?”
“Cut his throat,” said Dorie, matter-of-factly.
“Don’t do it,” Pender said. “Please.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“No, I don’t,” said Dorie, looking down at the knife in her hand. She was almost certain she could have shot Simon-though she had never fired anything but a twenty-two in her life, and then only at a paper target-but she was far from sure she’d have the nerve to kill him with this. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Because…I don’t know, because it’s wrong.” Pender was surprised to find himself fumbling for words. “Because it brings us down to his level.”
Dorie cocked her head, listening not to Pender, but to the faint sound of a siren in the distance. It was now or never; she knelt beside Simon, her back turned to Pender. Simon’s face was dark. One eye was a bloody mess, the strangely naked eyelid of the other was at half-mast, but fluttering as if he were struggling to open it.
“Get back,” called Pender, easing himself out from under Linda, edging away so as not to deafen her if he had to fire. “Get away.”
Dorie tilted Simon’s head up, held the point of the blade against his throat. “You’ll have to shoot me first,” she said, without turning around.
As if in answer, the gun barked twice. The body jumped; the sound of the shots reverberated around the kitchen. Dorie still hadn’t moved. Slowly she pulled the knife back-it was still unbloodied; now she’d never know whether she could have done it-and saw a dark, viscous liquid oozing from two holes in the side of Simon’s mustard yellow and dung brown sport shirt, just below the heaving rib cage. As she watched, the heaving slowed, then stopped; so did the trickle of blood and bile and enteric fluid. She turned to Pender, her ears still ringing.
“We have about two minutes to get our stories straight,” he said, as the sound of the sirens grew louder. “Linda, honey, you still with us?”
She raised her head weakly. “You guys work it out.”
“Hang on,” Pender told her. “The ambulance is almost here.”
Hang on? thought Linda, closing her eyes and letting her head fall back to the hard plank floor. I’ve been hanging on for twelve fucking hours-when do I get to let go?
Epilogue
October 31, 1999
The cold, clear weather held for three more days. Dorie finished
