switch, plunging the floor into darkness. His body hit the water a split second later, and I jumped to the floor. Waddling like a drunken duck on legs that felt as if they belonged to a toddler, pumping my arms for momentum, I staggered down the corridor toward the stairs. I could hear Kee splashing furiously along behind me, and there was no doubt in my mind that he'd remembered to pick up the gun. I caromed off the wall at the end of the corridor, fell down the stairs and hit the steel door at the bottom. Naturally, the door was locked.
There wasn't going to be any naked dwarf running through the hallowed corridors of Marten Hall.
I spun and crouched in the darkness, trying to make myself as small a target as possible. With two bodies in the laboratory to explain or somehow get rid of, I expected Kee would no longer be concerned with making me a servant of Esobus; he'd want to dispose of me as quickly as possible. It was going to be like shooting a dwarf in a barrel.
I held my breath and waited for the crash of the gun. All I heard was a dull click; the water had fouled the gun's firing mechanism. I waited.
I could hear Kee slowly and cautiously descending the stairs. I'd taught him some respect, but that wasn't going to be enough. Even if I hadn't spent an unknown number of hours underwater, semi-paralyzed by drugs, I'd probably have been no match for the powerful Kee I'd watched flit across the floor and walls of the laboratory like Superman. On the other hand, I couldn't just sit still and wait for him to beat my brains out.
After waiting a few seconds for him to descend further, I lunged up and forward, sweeping my hand through the general area where I hoped his legs would be. I got lucky. I caught his ankle and yanked. Kee yelped with surprise and went backward, landing on his back on the stairs.
There was no way of getting by him. I was very weak, and I assumed Kee was a karate expert. He'd probably break every bone in my body by the time I got halfway past him. But I had an angle on his midsection, and I drove my fist into his groin. That took the power out of a kick that could have killed me; his heel bounced painfully off my rib cage, but did no damage.
Kee was doubled over with pain, his shape just barely visible in the darkness. I could get past him now, but that would just mean playing cat-and-mouse up in the darkness of the laboratory; that was a game I eventually had to lose. I had no choice but to attack.
Grimacing against my own pain, I moved up and clapped my hands over Kee's ears. He screamed and half- rose. That was the position I wanted him in; he was off balance, his concentration shattered. I grabbed hold of both his ears and dropped. Kee flew over me and plummeted down into the darkness. He came up hard against the steel door, and there was a single, sharp cracking sound. I didn't have to go down and feel his pulse to know that Kee was dead, his neck broken.
I tasted blood, and I was very dizzy. I slumped down on a step, braced myself against the wall and waited for my head to clear. Eventually I would go back upstairs, find a phone and call Garth. At the moment I was thinking of something else. The fact that I was still alive was nothing short of miraculous; I should have felt elation, but I didn't. I felt hollowed out. Now that the danger was past, I felt strangely split, not caring about anything at all; I felt a stranger to myself.
I told myself it was just the aftermath of terror, the effects of shock and exhaustion. I was sure the strange feeling of emptiness would pass.
Chapter 18
It didn't.
It had taken me only a few hours to realize that the long submersion in the tank had resulted in much more than a temporarily wrinkled and squeaky-clean dwarf. Smathers and Kee had gutted me, scraped me out, using my own mind against me as a razor-sharp scalpel. I'd lost something in the tank. I wasn't sure
I'd decided that I needed at least a mini-vacation before the bag of skin deflated and I spent the last years of my life in a psychiatric ward at Rockland State. Still unwilling to leave New York with so many questions remaining, I'd packed a bag and moved into the Waldorf. It was a move I'd made before when I felt the need to decompress; I enjoyed the luxury. Also, I'd solved a difficult case for the manager some years before, and there was always a suite waiting for me, at a large discount. But the move had been a mistake; the newly decorated rooms reminded me of a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor. A phone call to the desk would have gotten me another room, but I couldn't manage the call. I couldn't manage anything. Moving into the hotel was the last purposeful action I'd taken.
Someone was knocking on the door. It had to be a mistake, since no one other than Garth, Joshua and the hotel staff knew where I was. Garth or Joshua would have called first, Room Service, which, at Garth's insistence, had been leaving sandwiches and milk at regular intervals outside my door, rapped only once.
I ignored the persistent knocking and stayed in my chair before the window, staring out over the city. I would pick out a car coming up Park Avenue below me, follow it with my eyes until it was out of sight, then pick up another car and repeat the process. That was what I'd been doing with my days. When I felt tired, I slept; when Joshua showed up to give me an injection, I let him in; if I felt hungry, I'd open the door to get whatever Room Service had left me. The rest of the time I sat and stared.
Garth had responded to my call four days before. He and Johnny Barnard had broken down the laboratory door, wrapped me up in a blanket and taken me to the university Medical Center, where I learned that I'd been in Smathers' sensory-deprivation tank for about three and a half days; it had felt like years.
Apparently, there'd been more of a safety cushion built into the series of rabies shots I'd already been given than Joshua had led me to believe; he'd simply given me an extra-large dose to make up for the shots I'd missed, then told me I'd be all right as long as I rested and got the remaining shots. The wound on my thumb had healed to the point where the immersion in the water hadn't done any lasting damage. I was told that there was nothing wrong with me physically, and that I could go home after Garth had taken my deposition. Later, I'd checked into the Waldorf.
The next morning, a Wednesday, I'd tried to get up to go to the Medical Center for my shot; I couldn't. It had taken me almost two hours to
I picked out another car, followed it up the avenue. It was some time before I realized that the person on the other side of the door was shouting.
April Marlowe was the last person in the world I wanted to have see me. Indeed, just the sound of her voice induced my most violent reaction in four days; I jackknifed forward in the chair and clapped my hands over my ears.
Finally I rose and went to the door. I opened it, then quickly stepped back into the dim light of the room. In that instant I'd seen that April was telling the truth: at least a dozen people had been standing around in the hall, watching her pound on the strange dwarf's door. It made me feel even sicker.
April stepped into the room, and I quickly closed the door behind her. Dressed in a white jumper embroidered with red and green flowers, worn over a pale blue sweater, she seemed in that moment the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. The light scent she was wearing drifted into my nostrils. I dropped my eyes and turned away in shame: I knew what I looked and smelled like.
'Robert? What's the
'Hard … to talk,' I mumbled. It was as if each word had to be carefully searched out inside my head, practiced, then, forced through my mouth.
