wrapping his thumb and forefinger with Saran Wrap, picked up the cartridge.
'A. 22,' he said. He looked at her. 'A fuckin'. 22.'
'You put that there,' she said.
'Bullshit. You know I didn't put it there. And I'll tell you what – I bet it's got your fingerprints on it. I bet it'll check out when they do the metallurgy, won't it? What'd you do, drop a box of. 22s in the closet? Shuck out a clip or something? How'd the cartridge get into your closet, Carmel?'
Davenport seemed to recede from her. He loomed over her in real space, but the pressure on her was so great that he seemed to squeeze down, until he looked like a little man seen through the glass peephole on an apartment door. Carmel's brain stopped: she couldn't bear this. She said something to him, but she didn't know what, and walked stiff-legged out of the bedroom. He was talking to her, at her, reached out to her, but she batted his arm away.
She was screaming back at him, but a broken, isolated part of her brain seemed to be in control, now. She walked straight across the living room, picked up a fistful of car keys from the entry table, and went out the door, leaving the door open, Davenport staring after her, saying something incomprehensible at her back…
Out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, pushing blindly at the buttons, out the door at Five, into the parking ramp, down the ramp to the blue Volvo, into the trunk, into the gym bag, out with the gun.
Because this is where she'd put the gun she got from Rinker: the car, with her mother's registration under her mother's new married name, nobody to know, nobody even to look at such an out-of-character non-Carmel-like motor vehicle.
She marched back through the door, propelled by the rage, got the elevator where it waited, the gun solid in her hand.
Lucas watched her go out the bedroom door, thought,
'Whoa.' He followed after her, holding the shell. He had to tell her that he was taking the shell with him: she had to see the shell go in his pocket. But something about the way she was walking, robotlike, across the front room. And suddenly he feared she'd had some kind of a stroke, and he said, 'Carmel?
Carmel? Are you all right?'
Then she was gone down the hall. He stood uncertainly in the bedroom door for a moment, expecting her to come back, then flipped out his cell phone, punched a speed dial button and said, when Sherrill answered, 'This is me. I think something's happened to Carmel. She just went out of here, acting weird.'
'Want us to come back up?'
'No. I'll… Well, maybe. Yeah. Come on back. Think of some reason to come back, I'm gonna check on her.'
Lucas walked across the living room, out into the hall – and she was gone.
Either through the door into the stairway, or the elevators. Lucas walked down to the elevators and pushed the button. He bounced on his toes for a moment, thought about going down to look at the stairway door, then thought about the apartment door and hurried back, checked that it wasn't locked and started to pull it shut. At that precise moment, an elevator dinged, and Lucas stepped toward it. 'Carmel?'
She stepped out of the elevator: Lucas didn't see it as it was coming up, didn't instantly recognize it in the context, but then…
Carmel fired at him as the sights crossed the line of his face and saw the surprise and the gun jumped and Davenport was moving sideways and down and she felt the rush of a kill and tracked him with the barrel and fired again and again and then…
Lucas felt the first shot sting his neck and then he was moving, diving back into the apartment, felt another shot across his shoulders, and then, back in the living room he was rolling across the fabulous carpet, as a hornet's nest of bullet fragments ricocheted off the door a few feet away. As he fought to get upright and oriented, his cheek stung, then something hit him in the thigh, and his own gun was coming out and Carmel was in the doorway…
Lucas fired one shot and Carmel felt as though she'd been hit by a baseball bat.
The. 45 took away a fist-sized chunk of skin just below her rib cage, and she staggered back. Hurt. Bad hurt. Hospital. She still had the keys to the cars in her left hand, and she turned and lurched down toward the elevators. The doors were just closing, and she slapped at the button and they started to open and she looked back and saw Lucas peek from behind her doors and she fired again, and let herself fall into the elevator.
Lucas fired twice more, but had a bad angle at the closing doors; one slug hit the doors, the other might have slipped inside… He crawled toward them and pushed the down button.
'Fuckin' gun,' Sherrill said to Sloan, in the lobby, their guns coming out.
'That was a fuckin' gun. A big fuckin' gun.'
'Wait for the elevator, it's coming down,' Sloan said, 'I'm taking the stairs.'
'Too far, too far,' Sherrill said, but Sloan was moving: 'Gotta block them, gotta block the parking ramp.'
'Careful,' she shouted after him.
'Call in,' he shouted back, and Sherrill got her cell phone out and pushed the speed-dial for dispatch and began shouting into it as the numbers came down to five. Then it stopped, and Sherrill ran to the stairway and yelled up, 'Elevator stopped at five, watch the ramp.'
'Got it,' Sloan called.
The other elevator was going up again and Sherrill, without thinking, punched the Up button, trying to get Up. The first one, the elevator that stopped at five, started down. But the other rose inexorably to twenty-seven before it stopped. She ran back to the stairway access and shouted after Sloan, 'The elevator's on twenty-seven…'
At that moment, the second elevator dinged in the lobby. She shouted at the frightened security guard, 'Turn off that elevator, Stop it. Can you stop it on this floor? Stop it!'
He ran to the elevator as the door opened, but then almost slumped, stopping outside of it: 'My, God, there's blood…'
Sherrill pushed him aside, saw a puddle of blood in the middle of the carpet.
'How do you stop it?' she asked.
'Pull the red emergency-stop button.'
She saw it, a red knob the size of her thumb, and pulled it out. 'That'll do it?'
'Yeah, that…'The security guard looked up at the numbers above the elevator doors. 'The other one's coming down.'
'Oh, fuck. Get out of the way.' She stood back from the elevator doors, her pistol level at gut level: remember the chant, two in the belly and one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead…
Then the elevator doors opened and she saw Lucas on the floor with his gun pointing at her chest and blood streaming into his eyes and Sherrill screamed,
'Lucas, Lucas, Jesus…'
The elevator seemed to move at a deliberate and insolent crawl; Carmel pushed herself up, realized that her arm was burning; looked, and saw more blood. Her body was on fire. She staggered into the hallway at five, out to the parking ramp. The stairwell came up just inside the parking ramp door, and somebody was on the stairs, coming up. 'Fuck you,' Carmel screamed down at the man. She could see his arm, still three flights down. He stopped and looked up at her, and she fired the gun, once, twice.
Sloan braced himself. He was only on three-and a-half, confused. Carmel? Two shots sailed past, and he aimed blindly up, and fired once.
Carmel, fearless now, the pain tightening her, fired another shot, then another, and then got a click. She'd used up the clip. 'Fuck you,' she screamed again, and lurched out into the ramp. A dozen steps, and she was at the bloody-murder red Jag, which was right there. Fumbling with her keys. On fire, she was on fire.
She backed out, aimed the Jag down the ramp, and stepped on it.
Sloan heard the parking-ramp door bang shut. He took another quick peek, then another, then ran up to the next landing. He heard the Jag start, screech away.
He was on four-and-a-half now. He ran back down, through the fourth-floor door, heard her coming all the way. Lifted the. 38, and as she turned the corner, fired a shot at the windshield. No effect, and the car's back end twitched out as Carmel gunned it again, and he fired another shot at the driver's side window as she passed him; but he was slow and the shot smashed through the back window and then she was down the ramp and around the corner.
