I figured she knew what to do with it.
I pulled Janice’s head closer to mine as I stepped through the open doorway.
“Circe,” Janice begged. “Listen to him. Give him a chance to tell you what he wants-”
I tugged her hair and we went back another step. The adjoining room was small and dark, its lone window draped with spiderwebs and a half-dozen fat black arachnids. Crammed with boxes and bookshelves, this was obviously a storage area. I hadn’t spotted a door yet, but I hoped I’d see one soon. I didn’t like the idea of going out through the window with all those damn spiders Circe cocked her pistol.
“No!” Janice said. “Oh, Circe…please don’t shoot!”
“Shut up,” Circe said.
Janice squirmed. I yanked her hair.
“Move again and I’ll cut your head off,” I warned.
Janice whimpered.
“She’s having a really bad day,” Circe said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It doesn’t seem fair. We should settle this. Just the two of us.”
“That suits me.” Circe lowered the gun. “It could be I’m wrong. Maybe we can work it out. Like you say: just the two of us.”
As soon as she stopped talking, I knew that wasn’t what she wanted at all. Something stirred behind me. Instantly, I knew Circe had taken a page from Janice’s book. She was stalling me, too.
She didn’t want to talk. She wanted me dead.
Some things never change.
I pushed Janice into the kitchen and whirled just in time to see Spider Ripley raising a pistol in the darkened storeroom. He was wedged in behind a stack of boxes but that didn’t stop me.
The K-bar gleamed as I went for him. Ripley elbowed a couple boxes in my direction and managed to dodge as the blade came down for the wrist of his gun hand. I was in close and his gun was aimed at the floor. There was no way he could get a shot off, but that didn’t mean he was helpless. Ripley slammed an elbow into my head and knocked me off balance. Then he followed through with his knee, catching me hard in the belly, and I dropped my knife as I stumbled backward.
I slammed into a bookcase. Books rained down on me as the case rocked back and hit the far wall. Then it fell forward, just as Spider got a shot off. The bullet tore through a paperback and into the wall as I leapt at Ripley, and the bookcase continued forward and caught the door that led to the kitchen. The door slammed closed and we were in the dark then and I hit Spider hard, both of us plowing into the near wall as the bookcase crashed to the floor and blocked the doorway.
Circe was on the other side, rattling the knob, shoving at a door she couldn’t open. I dug my fists into Ripley’s scarred belly and he grunted and dropped the gun and it was lost in a pit of shadow that was much too far from the webbed window.
No light crawled there. But a Spider did.
He did more than crawl. He came for me, and he came hard. I ducked two sweeping hooks, then caught another elbow. The room went black as the first midnight flash of a strobe light. A lost second and I was back with him and the fist he sank into my ribs was like a chisel on ice. He pounded with it, again and again, chipping away until I went down hard, flat on my back.
Cold cold pain froze my ribs but my anger burned it off when I felt the K-bar pinned beneath me on the floor.
I snatched it up and went for Spider Ripley again.
Pain knifed my ribs and brought me up short.
I only managed to slash Ripley’s chest.
He fell back against the wall, caught in the spider web of sickly light from the lone window, and that was when I saw it.
Not his torn shirt, or the blood pulsing from a fresh slash beneath it, or the branded ankh on his chest.
No. The thing I saw eclipsed Ripley’s ankh.
It hung on a crude rawhide necklace that snared the big man’s neck.
It was a silver crucifix.
In dead light born of a brewing storm, Spider Ripley’s blood pulsed over polished metal.
I stared at him, and he stared at me.
Hate and embarrassment burned in his eyes. Then the doorknob rattled again.
It was Circe. She’d had enough. Just as Spider was about to launch another attack, a shot went off and a hole appeared near the doorknob. Ripley jumped back and Janice Ravenwood screamed from the kitchen, but that didn’t stop Circe. She fired another shot, and the bullet tore through the door and broke the window, sending a half-dozen spiders scurrying in their webs.
I still didn’t know how Ripley had entered the storeroom. 1 hadn’t found another door, and I didn’t have time to look for one. In the kitchen, Circe yelled at Janice, telling her to get out of the way or else she was going to end up dead, and then another bullet pierced the door and Spider ducked low.
“Ripley!” Circe screamed. “If you’re not dead, open the fucking door!”
Spider didn’t answer. He didn’t even raise his head.
And I didn’t waste any time. I jumped through the window. My ribs screamed as I dove into a puddle of rainwater that was much too shallow, but I came up fast and started running.
Bullets splintered wood and hissed past me into the forest. I didn’t look back at all.
3
I had a lot of questions.
I needed some answers.
I didn’t know how quickly I could get them.
But I knew where to start looking.
I spotted the mailbox right off. The huge rubber tarantula spiked to the top was a dead giveaway. Given life by a steady stream of pelting raindrops, the tarantula’s rubber legs danced over dull gray metal as if the impaled bug were trying to scramble free and escape into the primeval forest beyond.
Spider Ripley’s place was set back from Surf Glenn Lane. A gravel road snaked into a stand of dying trees, but I didn’t turn off. I stuck to the main road, slowing the Toyota to a crawl, studying the house through a net of twisted branches bristling with rusty red needles as I passed by.
Spider Ripley certainly wasn’t an average man. There was nothing average about his house, either. Ripley lived in a pyramid. Oh, not the kind built by ancient Egyptians, whose gods he had worshipped in his younger days. Spider’s pyramid looked like it had been designed by a misguided granola-eating architect with a revolutionary selling point -your home now, your crypt later. That was the only explanation I could come up with, unless the guy had simply tired of building geodesic domes. Either way, whoever was responsible for the monstrosity that loomed before me definitely had more money than sense, which left him ahead of Spider Ripley in at least one department.
Like the House of Usher, the pyramid had definitely seen better days. I was willing to bet that it dated to the seventies, the golden age of neo-hippie architecture. Three stories high, it was covered with redwood shingles. Of the two walls I could see, one was going green with moss and the other looked like a sick tree that was ready to shed its bark. The few windows shone as black as Ray-Ban lenses, narrow horizontal slits that could easily accommodate the barrel of a sniper’s rifle.
No cars were parked out front. What was behind the pyramid, I didn’t know. A miniature sphinx wouldn’t have surprised me. But as long as there wasn’t a car parked back there, I’d be happy.
I followed the main road, and the pyramid disappeared behind me as the forest thickened. Under other
