She choked off a useless scream of warning when the man's hand flashed out, snake-swift. The butt of his pistol connected with Connor's head, and he dropped to the ground without a sound. The man knelt beside him for a moment, touching his throat. He stood up, pressing against his belly with his hand. He looked around.
He looked up. Their eyes locked It was the man she had seen when she had gone to see Bill Haley. Her mother’s friend, Ed Riggs. Older and heavier, minus the mustache, but there was no mistaking him. He had tried to kill her seventeen years ago. He was back to finish the job.
He disappeared under the porch roof. She looked around the empty room with a sickening sense of deja vu. God, stuck again in a bedroom with no weapons. The lamp was useless, a fragile frame of dusty bamboo and muslin. There was the whiskey bottle on the dresser. She grabbed it, hefted it. Almost empty. Only slightly better than nothing.
He was not going to be taken in by her lurking behind a door with a bottle, and there was no point in cowering and waiting for him to come to her. She'd tried that approach, and could say with complete authority that the waiting-and-cowering option truly sucked the big one. Particularly since nobody was rushing to her rescue this time. Seth was off pursuing the Corazon. Connor was laid out cold on the gravel outside. She hoped to God he wasn't dead or seriously injured.
It was up to her. But then again, it always had been.
Raine gripped the neck of the whiskey bottle. Saw the heavy, palm-sized padlock lying next to it, and grabbed that, too. She hid the bottle behind her leg, dragged in a long, slow, hitching breath, and started for the head of the stairs. She was scared to death, but she would pretend not to be. Who knew better than she how to pretend? Her whole life was leading up to this moment. The grand, ultimate pretense. She did not bother to walk quietly. In fact, she stomped. As much as one could stomp, in a pair of floppy clown shoes.
“Hello, Ed.”
Riggs turned the corner at the landing. His jaw sagged.
It was a tableau from a cheap graphic novel. The girl poised at the top of the stairs, looking down her nose at him. Legs planted wide, chest stuck out. In that ragged, sexpot outfit with her hair frizzed out all over the place, he could see why Novak wanted her. Even the bruises under her eyes didn't detract from her allure. She looked like a whacked out fashion model on a cocaine binge, sexy and wild and completely unpredictable.
Eyes on the prize, he reminded himself. This was for Erin.
He lifted the gun and pointed it at her. “I don't want to hurt you.”
The contempt on her face did not change. “Then why are you pointing that gun at me, Ed?”
“You have to come with me now,” he told her. “If you don't do anything stupid, you won't get hurt.”
She took a step down. Before he realized what he was doing, he had retreated back a step, as if she were a threat to him.
“You killed my father.” Her voice vibrated with hatred.
He kept the gun trained on her, but she didn't seem to notice, or care. “Old news,” he said, sneering. “Besides, that was a mercy killing. Peter was a suicide waiting to happen. I just put him out of his misery. Come on down, nice and slow, Katie. Make this easy on yourself, OK?”
Her eyes were glowing oddly, like Victor's when the mood was on him. Her face was unearthly pale, like a vampire in a horror flick.
“Why should I?” she said. “You're just going to kill me anyway. Like you tried to do when I was a kid. Remember that, Ed? I sure do.”
“You were a snotty little bitch back then, too. I remember that,” he snarled. “Come on, Katie. Be a good girl. One foot after the other.”
“Fuck you. You killed my daddy, you pig.”
Her lips drew back from her teeth in a snarl, and her arm whipped out from behind her, where she'd been hiding the liquor bottle. She let out an ear-splitting shriek and hurled it at him.
He flung up his arm and took the goddamned thing on the same sore arm that had blocked the brass lamp last night. He roared with pain, yelped again at the shiny metal thing that spun out of nowhere right after it, clipping him on the jaw.
Then the crazy little bitch took a flying leap, right at him.
Chapter 25
The bottle shattered. The gun went off, and splinters exploded off of some wooden surface. Raine barreled into him, deafened. They hurtled together down to the bottom of the landing.
Ed hit the wall hard, and she was savagely pleased at the thud, his heavy grunt. There was no time to savor it, though— in a split second she bounced off him and half-tumbled, half-slid down the rest of the stairs, bumpity-bump, thud. She bounced up and sprinted through the kitchen, seizing objects at random and hurling them at him.
The toaster bounced off his shoulder, the blender missed him and smashed against the wall. She darted into the office, spun around and almost got him with a stereo speaker. He ducked and dodged her missiles, screaming something, but she couldn't understand what he said, because she was screaming too, as if pure sound could be a weapon. All the rage she'd ever tried to control came rushing out in a shrill, endless, crazy shriek. She felt capable of any violence, any madness or folly.
He thundered after her into the office. Now he was between her and the other exit. She was boxed in, brainless idiot that she was. No chance now of outrunning him outdoors. She grabbed a sports trophy off the bookshelf and flung it. He shielded his face, cursing as it bounced off his elbow, and charged her again, his face purple with trapped blood.
She shimmied behind the big desk with all the computer equipment, shoving it away from the wall to give her more room. The wild, manic energy had begun to ebb. Fear was sinking its claws in again. She threw everything that came to hand: notebooks, software manuals, a modem. A rain of paper clips and tacks, a handful of loose CDs. She yanked a handful of pencils and pair of scissors out of a heavy jar, flung it. He dodged the jar. The pencils bounced and skittered harmlessly off his coat. He dove across the desk, and jerked back with a shout when she stabbed at his hands with the scissors.
Ed seized the desk. It squealed across the floor as he slammed it into her hip painfully hard, squashing her against the wall. He lunged across the desk again, dodging her frantic stabs with the scissors.
"You stupid bitch,” he panted. 'Tm not going to hurt you.”
“No, you're going to kill me” she panted “And I won't let you.”
“Shut up!” he shouted. “I'm not supposed to kill you! If I had wanted to kill you, believe me, you would be dead! I was supposed to take you to Novak.”
“Novak?” She froze, clutching the scissors like a dagger.
He gave her an evil, openmouthed smile, panting and pressing his hand against his belly. She could smell his sour, fetid breath all the way across the wide desk. “Yeah. Novak. He wants you, honey. I don't think he's planning on killing you, either, at least not at first. He's got other things in mind for you. Lucky girl. You know, I was feeling kind of sorry for you before, but it’s funny... I don't feel so sorry any more.”
He wrenched the desk away from me wall. Raine scrambled backwards, tripping over the tangle of dusty electrical
cords and stumbling into the corner. “It was you who attacked me last night at my house, wasn't it, Ed?” she hissed. “I recognize your stink.”
A crazy grin split his distorted face. “Ooh, that cuts me to the quick, honey. What a little charmer.” He wrenched the desk out farther, and the electrical cords attached to the power strip behind the desk began to stretch and pull. “Suffering Christ,” he muttered, his lips curling back in disgust. “You look exactly like your slut of a mother.”