"Where did you go during that two years you took off from high school? Inspector Hawkin thought it was Mexico, but I—"
"All right, enough crap. I don't have all night."
"What do you want, Andy?" Vaun's even voice distracted Lewis, almost, but not quite—enough for Kate to tense up in preparation, for what she did not know. He stood looking down at Vaun speculatively. She met his eyes, waiting.
"What do I want?" he said to himself. "What did I ever want? I loved you, and you treated me like shit."
"You never loved me," she chided him gently.
"No? Maybe you're right. I did nearly kill you, you know, when you told me you'd rather paint than be with me."
"Yes, I know that. But what you did was worse, wasn't it?"
She gave him her knowledge and the pain of those years in her voice and face, and he went very still. After a moment he looked at Kate, but she had ready a slightly puzzled expression to hide her fear and fury. Damn the woman, what was she playing at? Surely she could see that the very worst thing for all of them would be to push Lewis into a corner, to let him know how trapped he was. He looked back at Vaun, warily, reassessing her.
"What I did."
"What are you going to do now, Andy?" she asked him, and Kate felt like screaming at her not to push him into any action, stretch it out, give Hawkin a chance, but Vaun would not look at her, and Lee sat frozen.
"I'll tell you what I thought of doing," he said absently, and Kate knew then that all was lost. "I thought of knocking off these two and making it look like you did it. You'd never get out in just nine years after that. I could still do it."
"No, Andy. They know everything."
" 'Everything'? Oh, right."
"They do. Tommy's Time magazine. Drugs in your apartment in San Jose. That garage. Your fingerprints and some hairs from one of the children in the postal van. They'd never think I had anything to do with killing anyone."
Madness, thought Kate, this is madness speaking, she probably thinks he'll shoot her first and give us a chance, but it's impossible, I've got to stop her. But Kate couldn't think of a way that wouldn't set him off, so she prayed for Hawkin and readied herself for an unavoidable, futile lunge from the depths of the sofa.
The cruel smile crept back onto his lips, and Lee made a faint sound of protest as his left hand went down onto Vaun's head, gently playing with her curls, caressing the back of her head and cupping the nape of her neck, dipping his forefinger under the collar of her shirt. And then he froze.
Slowly his hand came back up, the cord between his first two fingers, and Vaun's alarm button emerged from the front of her shirt. He looked at it, and at Vaun, who sat through his touch and his discovery with unmoving aloofness, looking up at him. He twisted his hand around the cord and brought it up, and up, until the black line was biting into Vaun's pale throat. She watched him as her hands came up and plucked without passion at the cord. For the first time the gun moved away from Kate, but abruptly the clasp broke. Vaun jerked back into her seat, and Lewis took a sharp recovery step back and stood with the thing dangling from his hand.
And this is the Andy Lewis that that preacher's daughter saw just before being beaten to a pulp, thought Kate. His skin was dark with fury, his hand trembling with this evidence that he, Andy Lewis, might have been tricked, trapped, thwarted, outsmarted. He brought his eyes up to Kate, looked at her shirt, dismissed her, turned to Lee.
"You. Let me see."
She looked to Kate for direction, but Kate could only nod. Slowly, slowly Lee's hands went up to the back of her neck, and slowly she pulled her own black cord over her blonde curls, and then she held the button out to him.
He stared at the small device swinging from Lee's fingers, his eyes narrowing in disbelief.
"You pushed it, didn't you? When we were coming down the hallway, you were all bent over. You had your hands on it, didn't you? Oh, Christ, you stupid bitch, you're going to be very sorry you did that."
"Mr. Lewis," Kate began in the calm and reasonable voice demanded both by training and by good sense, "I'm afraid you'll find there are police all around the house. However, I should point out that as of this moment we have nothing on you, in spite of what Vaun just said. With a good lawyer—"
"Shut up!" he snarled, and jammed his gun into Lee's hair. Kate froze.
"I don't care what evidence you have," he said. "I've got hostages. I'll get away, you won't risk losing 'Eva Vaughn,' now will you? I'll get away. But I don't need you. Three hostages is too many, and a cop doesn't count anyway."
"Andy," Vaun said quietly, "don't hurt her. Tie her up if you like, but let her go. If you do, I'll go with you. If you kill either of them, you'll have to kill me too."
His head turned to her, his face screwed up as if he were about to spit, or to cry, and indeed the answer he spat out climbed rapidly into a shriek.
"You? You think I care what I do to you? I should have killed you years ago. All of this happened because of you, you goddamned bitch. I should have wrung your neck that night. I should have poked your cold little eyes out."
His rage poured out onto Vaun, and still Kate sat, knowing he was about to explode, knowing he would see her move, knowing that in a matter of seconds time would have run out and she would have to make her hopeless bid for their lives. Lee might reach him—she was out of his sight— but Lee sat, still clutching the button, stunned by his sheer animal fury.
Vaun, though. Vaun the passive, Vaun the mirror, Vaun the observer and chronicler of the world's torments, Vaun was meeting him, shaking herself free almost visibly from the restraints of a lifetime, caught up in a rising bubble of exhilarating, intoxicating, liberating rage. Her face was alive, furious, unrecognizable, her pale cheeks flushed with passion, her pale eyes glittering like a pair of blue diamonds, every bit as hard and as cutting. She threw back her head and called her death to her in the vast relief of one final clash, all bars off, no quarter given, all her confusion and torment coming to a single focus on this, her lover, her enemy, her death. She rose up to meet him, took one step back, and stood braced to hurl her words at him.
"Yes, Andy, you should have. But you didn't, did you? And everything I've done in the last fifteen years, everything I've painted, has been thanks to you. Thanks to you, Andy. These hands," she held them up and shook them in his face, "these hands have changed the way people see the world, thanks to you—"
"You'll never paint again!" he shrieked at her, and the heavy gun jerked slightly toward her, and then all three of them could see his mind reassert itself and take control of the hand's movement. He looked at her in astonishment and began to laugh, the madness and hysteria all the way up to the surface now.
"You think I'm going to kill you, you stupid bitch? That's what you want, isn't it? But I'm not going to make it that easy for you. You're going to wish you were dead—it'll make being locked up for ten years seem like a fairy tale because you're going to live knowing what your precious painting did, you're going to have to live knowing that because of your precious fucking painting people died, that those hands you're so proud of might as well have been around those skinny soft little throats and on this gun, and you're going to have to live knowing that precious little Jemma and Tina and Amanda who tried to bite me, the little bitch, and what's the other one's name? Samantha and now your good friends Lee and Casey, all of them died because of your precious fucking painting hands, and even if your hands can hold a brush when I'm finished with you, all you'll be able to paint is blood and death, and you did it all, you did it, Vaunie, it was you."