it across the room. I grabbed the left hand, prying the flashlight from her fingers as she tried to hit Two Toes with it. She struggled against him, but he overpowered her. I used the flashlight to find the gun, turned to see her flailing her fists against Two Toes in impotent fury.
He backhanded her hard against the face. She lay stunned from that blow. He smacked her across the face again. He was pinning her wrists above her head in one hand now, sitting astride her. He was about three times her size. He raised his hand for another blow.
“No,” I said. “Two Toes, no!”
He paused, looked up at me.
“Get off me, you filthy cocksucker!” Lisa shouted.
He smacked her again.
She started crying.
He was raising his hand.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“She needs to be punished,” he said simply.
“Not by you,” I said, trying to think of a way through to him. “You’re my guardian angel.”
She laughed. “What? Did he tell you he used to be a bodyguard? I thought Roberta made that up.”
He smacked her another time. “I’m guarding her. You hurt people. You hurt me.”
For all the anger and disappointment I felt in her, I couldn’t stand idle, letting Two Toes beat her senseless right before my eyes. “Guardian angels don’t hurt anyone,” I said. “They take care of people. You take care of me.”
He paused, but seemed undecided.
One of the first prayers I ever learned, one I probably knew by heart before I was five, came back to me. I said it to him in the same singsong way I had said it as a child:
He smiled. “Say it again.”
I repeated it.
“My side hurts,” he said, and reached a hand down to the ribs on his righthand side, opposite of where I sat with the flashlight. When he brought the hand up again, it was covered with blood. “See?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said, and moved so that I could see his other side. A dark stain was slowly spreading on his jacket.
“No, just an angel,” he said seriously.
“We’d better tie her up,” I said. “Then I’ll try to help you. Do you have a knife?”
He nodded, reached into his jacket, and tossed a pocket knife to me. I used it to cut the straps off Lisa’s knapsack. I tied her hands tightly.
“I don’t understand you,” I said to her.
She didn’t say a word.
As I tied her ankles, I saw that the bottoms of her running shoes had mud encrusted in them-and little pieces of date palm debris. I was willing to bet her footprints would match the cast taken of the ones leading into the hotel. She would have picked up the mud and debris on the way into the hotel on a rainy night. She hadn’t picked that up when she walked across the grounds with me this afternoon-Keene’s crew had cleaned up just before then. The debris in the shoes would probably match the pulp left on Roberta’s office carpet.
I untied her shoes and pulled them off.
“Hurry,” Two Toes said.
I convinced him to prop himself up against a wall. I set the gun down. He eyed it.
“Forget it,” I said.
He let me open his jacket, allowed me to unbutton his shirt.
He had a sly smile on his face.
“Forget that, too. Keep an eye on Lisa.”
I pulled the shirt away and found another. Three layers down, I found the wound.
“Ow!” he said as I pulled his undershirt away from it.
“Sorry.”
The wound was just above his hip. It looked as if the bullet had grazed him. Painful, but not too deep, and if I could staunch the bleeding, probably not fatal.
“Press on it,” I told him, placing his hands near it. “Like this. Don’t let up on it. I’ll try to make a bandage.”
“Socks,” he said. “Get the socks.”
“What socks?”
“In the treasure room, where we hid.”
“Upstairs?”
“In here,” he said impatiently, as if I really did not know a thing.
I stood up and went to the closet.
I shined the flashlight in it. There was a shelf in the closet. On the shelf was a big cardboard box.
I brought it out into the room.
“That’s it!” he said. “In there, with the magic spells from the Holy Bible.”
“Magic spells?” I said, and lifted the lid.
On top of papers full of facts and figures I doubted he would ever understand, Two Toes had stored two other items taken from Lucas. Dress socks and a leather belt. I pulled them out of the box and Two Toes smiled.
“Those are clean!” he said.
Clean socks. No wonder he called it the treasure room.
I used them as a bandage, the belt to hold them and put pressure on the wound.
“Why do you call them magic spells?” I asked, trying to distract him as I picked up the gun again. But he had little interest in the weapon now.
“The Prof kept them in the altar. He hid them there.”
“He wasn’t a professor!” Lisa said angrily.
“I don’t like you!” he said, just as angrily.
“You know what, Lisa? I don’t like you much, either,” I said, moving to the window. Sooner or later that security guard would have to cruise by again. I didn’t want to leave Two Toes with Lisa, so I would need to signal the guard from here. Taking Two Toes down the stairs with me was out of the question; it would be asking too much of a bandage made of socks and a belt.
“He was a professor!” Two Toes insisted, still glowering at her.
“Oh, what do you know!” she said.
“The Selmans know all kinds of things, don’t they? Three post-graduate degrees in the family, and at least two murderers.”
“Just two,” she said. “Leave Jerry out of this.”
“So you do know,” I said.
“About Nadine? Let’s say I’ve had a strong suspicion for years. It doesn’t matter, really. I was cleaning up after Andre’s other transgressions-cheating the public. I wish Lucas had just left things as they were. I didn’t want to have to silence him. I really didn’t. But I guess it was going to come to that, anyway. Until I took a look at that fax ribbon, I didn’t even know he suspected the truth about Nadine.”
I was stunned. This was too much to take in. “I’ve learned some horrible things about your father today, but the idea of him using you to help-”
“Using me? Using me to help?” She laughed hysterically.
“She’s crazy,” Two Toes said.
