Mortal Fear

“Did you hit him?” she asks, her eyes white and round.

“I don’t think so!”

“Get the light! Then shoot me!”

After a stunned instant, I turn, steady the pistol, and blow the halogen lamp off my desk, throwing us into darkness.

“Edwaarrrd!” she yells, her voice ringing across the yard.

I fire my last bullet in her direction, and watch in horror as she flies backward like a GI taking a round in house-to-house fighting.

The silence is absolute. Not even crickets cheep in this strange lacuna of time.

Then Drewe is beside me again, naked in the dark. Lifting her robe toward her, I sense something like a horsefly beside my left ear and swat at it even as the tranquilizer dartthwack s into one of my guitars, filling the room with jangling noise.

We hit the floor and crawl like alligators toward the office door. I feel a strange weight in the robe. It’s Drewe’s.25. I pause, raise the gun, fire two quick rounds through the intact front window, then feel my way to the door. When I look back, the bright amber message on the screen of the Gateway 2000 floats in the darkness like a tablet of fire brought from a mountaintop. Just as it should.

“What did you do?” Berkmann asks, his voice a fusion of fear and fury.

Drewe’s hand grips my shoulder like a claw.

“It’s the answering machine!” I whisper, at the same time noticing the faint glow of the EROS screen to my right. While Drewe ties on her robe, I raise the.25 and fire through the EROS monitor, shorting it out with a shower of sparks. Now the Gateway screen is the only light.

Holding the hot pistol to my chest, I switch off the hall light, then slide Drewe around in front of me. “Ready?”

She nods.

The second I jerk open the door she scrambles up the hallway toward the kitchen, but I force myself to walk, backward, keeping the.25 pointed at the front door in case Berkmann comes through it. When I reach the kitchen, I turn and run to the washroom where Drewe waits. The smell of gasoline is strong here too. Drewe leans into me, clutching my shirt like a child.

“Maybe we should stay here,” she says in a meek voice.

“We can’t.” I hug her tightly. Her whole body is shaking, as though the bravura performance at the window drained every bit of courage out of her.

With the.25 I part the curtains that cover the small window in the back door. The yard looks blue-black in the moonlight. The long tin roof of the toolshed gleams, beckoning. My eyes move lower. There is a man lying flat on his back just outside the door. His eyes are closed, and there is a screwdriver handle sticking out of his right upper chest. I let the curtain fall closed.

“Drewe, there’s a man on the ground outside. It’s Detective Mayeux from New Orleans. He’s probably dead, but we only heard one shot. He could be alive.”

“I’ll get my bag,” she says automatically, as though someone had just passed out in church.

I squeeze her arm. “We can’t help him. I’m telling you so you’ll step over him.”

She blinks rapidly.

“When I open this door, we’re going to run straight back to the cotton field and keep going. Okay?”

She nods once.

Gripping the.25, I unbolt the door, then freeze as a high brittle plea crosses the space between us. “Don’t let him get close to me, Harper.”

“I won’t.”

Her fingernails dig into my arm, causing me to twist sideways. “If he hits you with a dart, and you can’t see him anywhere… shoot me.”

“What?”

“You do it.”

With that appalling request ringing in my ears, I turn the knob and launch myself into the sweltering night.

CHAPTER 50

I am leaping over Mayeux’s body when two gunshots boom through the night. I whirl and take Drewe’s weight full in the face, and we crash to the ground beside Mayeux.

“Where is he?” she hisses in my ear.

“Front,” I groan, rolling her off me. “Run!”

“What’s he shooting at?”

“I don’t know! Go!”

I know I should run, but Mayeux is half covered with gasoline. I find his carotid artery with my left hand. There’s a pulse. Drewe is still beside me.

“Go, damn it!” I hand her the.25. “Behind the toolshed!”

She takes the gun but doesn’t run. Suffused by a wild anger, I lean over and put my right shoulder into Mayeux’s belly, then heave myself over so that he is lying across me. From there it’s a matter of brute strength, working the leverage until I get my legs under me and he’s lying sacklike over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

With Drewe covering the corners of the house, I half stagger, half run across the grass to the toolshed and collapse under the fig trees behind it, depositing Mayeux on his back. Drewe hands me the.25, then begins testing the screwdriver handle sticking out of Mayeux’s chest. Having an immediate emergency to deal with seems to have restored her composure.

“You’re going to leave that in him?” I ask, as she checks Mayeux for other wounds.

“Better for him,” she says, probing gently under his head. “What makes the printer explode?”

Before I can answer she says, “Look,” and pulls a short, feathered barb from Mayeux’s neck.

“It’ll go off when Berkmann prints your message,” I tell her, peering around the corner of the shed. The yard is empty, the house silent. When I look back, Drewe is staring at me as if I’m an idiot.

“Why should he print the message? He can justread it.”

“Not without scrolling to the next screen.”

“So?”

“That keyboard is programmable. If you want your comma key where the semicolon key is, you can have it that way. All it takes is a few keystrokes.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“I reprogrammed every key that can take him to the next screen to issue the same command: Print Screen.”

“The down cursor?”

“Every cursor. And PAGE DOWN. Since you snipped off the mouse, he has to use the keyboard. The second he does, six hundred volts will zap through the printer’s corona wire, which is cut and buried in the black powder. A spark will arc between the wires, and good-bye Edward.”

Drewe stares blankly, as if trying to compute the odds of success. “Won’t he be suspicious? Expect some kind of trap?”

“Probably. And if your message told him to print it, or tried to trick him into printing it, he’d never do it. But he won’t see this coming. The only question is, will he try to read the whole message?”

She nods. “He’s addicted to it. The computer is his fetish. He may search the whole house first, but he’ll read that message.”

“What did you put in it?”

“Just what you told me to. I-”

“Shh! Listen!”

“What?” Her eyes wide with fear, Drewe cocks her head, listening for the wrong things.