No one to blame
Get out, out of my life
I’m not your mother
Won’t be your wife
Go on, go out that door
Don’t you mess
with me no more
It’s all over
Just leave it be
I’m over you
Get away from me
Heather Wells, “Get Out”
It’s still raining—harder than ever, actually. The sky is a leaden gray all around me.
I’ve never realized it before, but Fischer Hall is the tallest building on the west side of the park, and the penthouse terrace affords spectacular views of Manhattan on four sides, of the Empire State Building to the north, just visible through the mist, the fog-shrouded void where the World Trade Center had once stood to the south, the sodden East and West Villages.
An excellent place, I realize, to shoot a scene from a movie.Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, perhaps.
Except that this is no movie. This is real life.My life. For however much longer it lasts.
The wind up on the twentieth floor is strong, and drizzle spits in my face. I have a hard time figuring out just where I’m headed, since everywhere I look, I see only geranium planters precariously perched on low stone balustrades over which I can picture my body very easily tumbling.
Not knowing where else to go, I duck my head and start running around the sides of the Allingtons’ apartment, to the opposite side of the terrace. With no sign of Rachel following, I have a minute to pause and open my backpack, still hanging from its strap across my shoulders, and fumble inside it for that canister of pepper spray I could swear was still in it. I have no idea if the thing will still work, but at this point, anything that will keep me from meeting the volts from that stun gun is worth a try.
I find it. I release the safety catch when a deafening crash occurs just behind me, and in a shower of splintering wood and flying glass, Rachel leaps through a set of French doors—like Cujo, or a teenage mutant ninja turtle—not even bothering to unlatch them first. She hits me with the full force of her body, and we both go down onto the wet flagstones.
I land solidly on my sore shoulder, effectively knocking all the breath from my chest. But I try to keep rolling, over shards of wood and glass, to get away from her.
She’s on her feet before I am, and coming toward me at full charge. Through it all, she’s managed to hang on to the Thunder Gun.
But I still clutch the pepper spray, hidden in my fist. When she bends over me, her dark hair already becoming plastered to her face by the rain, her lips are curled back in a snarl not unlike Lucy’s when she’s riled by a tennis ball or a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
“You’re so weak,” Rachel sneers at me, and she waves the stun gun under my nose. “How can you tell a brunette?”
I try to maneuver myself into a position from which I can spray her directly in the face. I don’t want the wind whipping the stuff back at me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I wheeze, still breathless from the impact of my fall. God. I can’t believe I once bought this woman flowers.
And okay, they were only from the deli. But still.
“You know how you can tell a brunette?” Rachel grins, her face just inches from mine. “Turn a blond upside down!”
As she lunges to blast 120,000 volts into my right hip, I lift my hand and launch a stream of pepper spray into her face. Rachel shrieks and backs up, throwing an arm up to protect her face…
Only the nozzle won’t push all the way down. So instead of a jet of chemical poison hitting her in the eye, the stuff just foams down the side of the canister, soaking into my stitches and burning me badly enough to make me go, “Ow!”
Rachel, realizing she hasn’t been hit after all, starts to laugh.
“Oh God,” she brays. “Could you be more pathetic, Heather?”
But this time, when she lunges at me, I’ve rolled to my feet, and I’m ready for her.
“Rachel,” I say, as she comes at me. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time. Size twelve”—wrapping my stinging fingers around the hard canister, I slam my fist as hard as I can into Rachel’s face—“is not fat.”
My knuckles explode in pain. Rachel screams and staggers back, both her hands going to her nose, from which an astonishing amount of blood is spurting.
“My nose!” she shrieks. “You broke my nose! You fucking bitch!”
I’m barely able to stand, my shoulder is throbbing so badly, my hands feeling as if they’re on fire from the pepper spray. I have shards of glass stuck to my back, the knuckles on my right hand are numb, and blood is coming from a cut somewhere in the vicinity of my forehead: I’m blinking both rainwater and my own blood from my eyes. All I want to do is go inside and lie down for a while and maybe watch the Food Network, or something.
But I can’t. Because I have my psycho boss to deal with.
She’s standing there, holding her nose with one hand, and the stun gun in the other, when I tackle her, flinging my arms around her narrow waist and bringing her down like a hundred and twenty pounds of Manolo Blahniks. She falls, writhing in my grasp, while I desperately try to snatch the stun gun from her hands.
And all the time, she’s sobbing. Not with fear, like she should have been—because, make no mistake about it, I have every intention of killing her—but with anger, her dark eyes glittering with such intense hatred of me that I wonder how I missed seeing it there before.
“Nice girls finish last, huh?” I say, as I kick her as hard as I can in the knee. “How’s this, then? Is this nice enough for you?”
Except that it’s like I’m kicking one of those crash test dummies. Rachel seems impervious to pain… unless it’s something to do with her face. Her precious nose, for example.
And she’s strong—so much stronger than I am, despite my killing rage, and my advantage in height and weight. I can’t budge the gun from her hands. I’ve read about people who, in moments of desperation, develop the strength of someone twice their size—mothers who lift cars off their injured infants, mounted cops who pull their beloved horses out of sinkholes, that kind of thing. Rachel has the strength of a man… a man who sees his life disintegrating before him.
And she’s not going to give up until someone’s dead.
And I’m starting to get a very bad feeling that that someone is going to be me.
It’s all I can do to keep my hands fastened over hers on the grip of the stun gun. My fingers are slick with rain and blood, and sore from the stitches and the pepper foam. It’s hard to hold on. Rachel has managed to climb to her feet in spite of my attempt to kick her legs out from under her, and now the two of us struggle in the pouring rain for mastery of the weapon. The force of our struggle has sent us staggering dangerously close to the terrace wall.
Somehow, Rachel manages to twist herself so that it’s my back that’s pressed up against a overflowing geranium planter not unlike the one that nearly killed Jordan. My face toward the sky, I can’t see with all the rain streaming down. I close my eyes and concentrate on the nearly impossible task of keeping Rachel’s arms high above me, not letting those buzzing prongs anywhere near my body. I feel the planter wobble, and then I feel it give, and though I don’t open my eyes, I hear the enormous crash it makes seconds later as it hits the sidewalk below.
The most frightening part, however, is the length of time that elapses between the moment the planter
