Seize the Night

Now my heart was racing.

I was disgusted. If I didn’t get control of myself, I would have to spend the rest of my life sleeping under my bed, just to be sure the boogeyman couldn’t slip beneath the box springs while I was dreaming.

Holding the unlit flashlight in a tight circlet of thumb and forefinger, with my other three fingers extended, intending to prove to myself that this superstitious dread enjoyed no basis in fact, I reached into the tomb-perfect darkness. And touched a face.

4

The side of a nose. The corner of a mouth. My little finger slid across a rubbery lip, wet teeth.

I cried out and recoiled. As I stumbled backward, I managed to click on the flashlight.

Although the beam was pointed at the floor, the backsplash of light revealed the entity before me. It had no fangs, no eyes full of crackling hellfire, but it was composed of a substance more solid than ectoplasm. It wore chinos, what appeared to be a yellow polo-style shirt, and a pecan-brown sports jacket. Indeed, it wasn’t something from beyond the grave but something from the Sears men’s department.

He was about thirty years old, maybe five feet eight, as stocky as a bull standing on its hind feet in a pair of Nikes. With close-cropped black hair, eyes as mad-yellow as those of a hyena, and thick red lips, he seemed too formidable to have glided soundlessly through the seamless dark. His teeth were as small as kernels of white corn, and his smile was a cold side dish, which he served in a generous portion as he swung the club that he was holding.

Fortunately, it was a length of two-by-four rather than an iron pipe, and he was too close to execute a bone-shattering arc. Instead of recoiling farther at the sight of the club, I stepped into the guy in an attempt to minimize the impact, simultaneously trying to bring the Glock to bear on him, figuring that the very sight of it would cause him to retreat.

He swung the two-by-four not from overhead, not like a woodsman wielding an ax, but low from his side, like a golfer teeing off. It grazed my left flank and caught me under the arm. The blow wasn’t devastating, but it was unquestionably more painful than Japanese-massage therapy. The flashlight flew out of my hand, tumbling end over end.

His yellow eyes flared. I knew that he had registered the pistol in my right hand and that it was an unpleasant surprise for him.

The tumbling flashlight struck the farther wall, bounced to the floor without shattering the lens, and revolved like the pointer in a game of spin the bottle, casting luminous spirals over the glossy blue walls.

Even as the flashlight clattered to the floor, my smiling assailant was winding up to take another swing, handling the two-by-four like a baseball bat this time.

Rocked by the first blow, I warned him: “Don’t.”

His yellow eyes revealed no fear of the gun, and the expression on his broad blunt face was pitiless fury.

I squeezed off a shot as I twisted out of his way. The club cut the air with sufficient force to have driven shards of bone and splinters of wood into my left temporal lobe if I’d not been able to dodge it, while the 9- millimeter slug ricocheted noisily but harmlessly from wall to wall of the concrete passage.

Instead of pulling the blow, he followed all the way through, allowing the momentum of the club to swivel him three hundred and sixty degrees. As the spinning flashlight slowed, the attacker’s distorted silhouette pumped around the corridor, around and around, pumped like a carousel horse, and out of his own galloping shadow, he rushed at me when I stumbled backward against the featureless wall opposite the doors.

He was as condensed as a cube of squashed automobiles from a salvage-yard compactor, eyes bright but without depth, face knotted and florid with rage, smile fixed and humorless. He appeared to have been born, raised, educated, and groomed for one purpose: hammering me to pulp.

I did not like this man.

Yet I didn’t want to kill him. As I said before, I’m not big on killing. I surf, I read poetry, I do some writing of my own, and I like to think of myself as a sort of Renaissance man. We Renaissance men generally don’t resort to bloodshed as the first and easiest solution to a problem. We think. We ponder. We brood. We weigh the possible effects and analyze the complex moral consequences of our actions, preferring to use persuasion and negotiation instead of violence, hopeful that each confrontation will culminate in handshakes and mutual respect if not always in hugs and dinner dates.

He swung the two-by-four.

I ducked, slipped sideways.

The club cracked so hard against the wall that I could almost hear the low vibrations traveling the length of the wood. The two-by-four dropped from his numbed hands, and he cursed vehemently.

Too bad it hadn’t been an iron pipe. The recoil might have been nasty enough to loosen some of his milk- white baby teeth and make him cry for mama.

“All right, that’s enough,” I said.

He made an obscene suggestion and, flexing his powerful hands, snatched the club off the floor, rounding on me.

He seemed to have little or no fear of the gun, probably because my reluctance to fire it, other than to squeeze off a warning shot, had convinced him that I was too chickenshit to blow him away. He didn’t impress me as a particularly bright individual, and stupid people are often dangerously sure of themselves.

His body language, a sly look in his eyes, and a sudden sneer told me that he was going to feint, fake another swing with the club but not follow through. He would come at me some other way when I reacted to the false move. Perhaps he’d drive the two-by-four like a pike straight at my chest, hoping to knock me down and then smash my face.

While I like to think of myself as a Renaissance man, persuasion and negotiation were unlikely to bear fruit in this situation, and I manifestly do not like to think of myself as a dead Renaissance man. When he feinted, I didn’t wait to see what the bastard’s real plan of attack might be. With apologies to poets and diplomats and gentle persons everywhere, I pulled the trigger.

I was hoping to hit him in the shoulder or arm, though I suspect it’s only in movies that you can confidently calculate to wound a man rather than kill him. In real life, panic and physics and fate screw things up. Most likely, more often than not, in spite of the best intentions, the polite wounding shot drills through the guy’s brain or bounces among his ribs, off his sternum, and ends up dead-center in his heart — or kills a kindly grandmother baking cookies six blocks away.

This time, though I wasn’t firing another warning shot, I missed his shoulder, arm, heart, brain, and everything else that would have bled. Panic, physics, fate. The bullet tore into the club, spraying his face with splinters and larger fragments of wood.

Suddenly convinced of his own mortality and perhaps recognizing the incomparable danger of confronting a marksman as poor as I am, the weasel pitched his makeshift cudgel, turned, and ran back toward the elevator alcove.

I juked when I saw he was going to throw the club, but my Big Bag of Really Smooth Moves was empty. Instead of ducking away from the club, I cunningly dodged straight into it, got rapped across the chest, and fell.

I was getting up even as I was going down, but by the time I made it to my feet again, my assailant was nearing the end of the hall. My legs were longer than his, but I wasn’t going to be able to catch up with him easily.

If you’re looking for someone to shoot a man in the back, I’m not your guy, regardless of the circumstances. My attacker safely turned the corner into the elevator alcove — where he switched on a flashlight of his own.

Although I needed to nail this creep, finding Jimmy Wing was an even higher priority. The boy might have been hurt and left to die.

Besides, when the kidnapper arrived at the top of the ladder, a toothy surprise would be waiting for him.