crimes might have already broken the spell. The best-laid plans of men most often failed or withered short of fulfillment, and a curse was indeed a kind of plan.
A police car was parked in the outer of the two lanes, between the portico columns. John’s Ford stood in front of the cruiser, which had not been there when he arrived.
The hospital driveway continued straight along the front of the building, beyond the portico. At both ends, it curved out toward the street.
The building faced east. The ER entrance lay on the west side. Maybe that farther entrance bustled with activity, but here in the east, long after visiting hours, the night was uncannily quiet, not just the hospital but also the light-stippled buildings of the city beyond, rising toward a moon-ruled sky.
He stood there, enjoying the coolness and the quiet city.
Blinking to clear her stinging eyes, weeping copiously, breathing slightly better but not easily, spitting out the bitter hotness of the capsaicinoids administered by the aerosol projector, Davinia crawls past the long conference table. She frantically paws at the chairs, trying to find the end of them and something else, maybe something she can use as a weapon.
Andy Tane doesn’t need to find a weapon. He’s a walking weapon: his fists, his teeth, the singular viciousness of his rider. Besides, he possesses two deadly weapons. One is the pistol. On his braided utility belt are the swivel holster with the gun, two leather pouches each holding a spare magazine, a Mace holder, a handcuff case, a key strap from which also dangles a gleaming nickel-plated whistle, and a flap-covered holder with two sleeves for pens. He carries one pen and, in the second sleeve, a slim switchblade knife. The blade isn’t issued by the department. It’s not even legal. It’s a drop knife that he can plant on a suspect to explain an otherwise unjustifiable shooting.
By the lightest touch of the inset button on the mother-of-pearl handle, the blade springs out. Five razor- edged inches. A point keen enough to pierce animal hide.
The question is time. There’s not enough precious time both to deflower her and to cut her up alive. One or the other. Debauchment or disembowelment. Ravish or butcher. Either will be a pleasure for the rider. The recorded voice of the alarm is still hectoring. The police are coming. The hospital security guards will be here even sooner, in minutes, and they also will be armed. Rape or cut. The object is to terrorize. Break her spirit. Reduce her to a godless despair.
Having reached the last chair, the end of the long table, the crawling girl finds empty floor and then a console, where she pulls herself to her feet. As Davinia rises, Andy Candy Tane and his rider approach her with the knife and with an order of disfigurement in mind: first the ears, then the nose, the lips and then the eyes.
The pounding at the locked door comes sooner than he expects, and the pounding at once escalates to kicking. The rider has assumed a few minutes will be devoted to one-sided hostage negotiation. But perhaps the three murdered Woburns and the gun-battered aunt on lower floors have disabused these authorities of their modern preference for discussion, concession, and business as usual. Andy can’t win a shootout with them, so his options no longer include either rape or cut. There is now nothing but to kill, and by killing fulfill this phase of the Promise.
Only a step from the girl, he throws away the knife, draws his pistol, and turns toward the floor-to-ceiling- view windows that offer a panoramic city scene. One, two, three shots. A giant pane dissolves outward, and a night breeze shivers in through the exploding glass.
He turns toward lovely Davinia as she swings toward him. In her game of blind-girl’s bluff, on the console she has found a slender two-foot-high bronze sculpture of a caduceus, which has long been an emblem of the medical profession: the staff of Mercury, who was the messenger of the gods. Unable to see Andy but sensing him near, she swings the caduceus, surely hoping for his head, but bludgeoning his right arm instead. His hand spasms and the gun flies from it.
His fractured arm would fail him now if he were just Andy Tane. But he is also something else, and his rider overrides his pain. The girl swings again, the caduceus cuts the air, but Andy ducks. He goes in low, jams her against the console, seizes her wrist, the slender wonder of her supple wrist, and forces her to drop the bronze.
The sound of wood splintering. The
Andy takes the girl in his arms, the sobbing girl, all the sweetness of her in his arms. Pulls her close. Lifts her a few inches off the floor. With both hands, she pummels his face, her fists as light as feathers. He says, “My bride in Hell,” and rushes with her toward the shattered window, staggers toward the window and the city and the night, toward a darkness beyond the night where no stars shine and where no moon has ever risen.
As John unlocked his car, he heard a muffled report simultaneous with the brittle crack-and-jingle of a bursting window, followed by two louder sounds that were definitely gunshots. He looked toward the south end of the hospital, perhaps two hundred feet away, as a rain of glass glimmered down the lighted facade of the building from the highest floor. Instinct and training prompted him to run toward the trouble even as the glass fell, and he kept moving when the debris shattered further on impact, becoming icy puddles on the driveway.
Almost halfway to the scene, shock halted him when two people leaped from the opening where the enormous window had been, as if confident of their ability to fly. In the first instant of the fall, however, John realized the girl was the captive of the man, fighting to escape him even as ruthless gravity ensured that her struggle to survive would be futile. Upon his first glimpse of her high in the night, he knew her by her long blond hair, by her yellow blouse and blue jeans. He had seen many terrible things in his life, but this plunge was as much an abomination as any. For a fraction of their plummet, the flywheel of time seemed to cycle more slowly than usual, and they appeared to come down with an eerie grace. It was possible to think, to pray, that because of some fluke in the laws of physics, they would sink like a stone through water, not like a stone through air, and touch down in the manner of circus aerialists,
Over the years, John had investigated several suicides that might have been murders, and two were jumpers. They had dispatched themselves from heights less than this, ninety feet in one case, a hundred in the other, but this must be 130 feet or more. In each case, the cadaver was recognizably human but not recognizable as the person whom it had once been. Depending on angle of impact, the skeleton snapped and folded—or bloomed—in unpredictable ways. The cracked pelvis could be compressed into the rib cage. The spinal column might become a pike, piercing the head instead of supporting it. For an instant, breaking bones became clashing swords. Even if the jumper did not land on his head, the stress of impact translated upward through the compacting body, reconfiguring the facial bones until the structural incongruity could be greater than that in a portrait by Picasso.
Had the pair fallen eleven stories into sandy earth or into dense feathery shrubs, they might have had one chance in a thousand of surviving. But at such velocity, stopping abruptly on concrete, they were as doomed as bugs encountering the windshield of a speeding car. The presence of skilled medical personnel mere steps from the point of impact mattered no more than the sea of air that torn lungs could not process.
Although no aid could resuscitate the dead, John’s reaction to the
He didn’t fully comprehend the reason for his flight until he was behind the wheel, turning the key in the
