Kuhl shifted now, feinted toward him. Ricci didn’t buy it. His hands still blocking, he wove around him, found an opening under the massive arms, came in low with a right uppercut meant for the chin.
Faster than he looked, Kuhl parried the blow sidearm, tried grasping hold of Ricci’s outthrust wrist to pull him off his feet. But Ricci slipped the grab, got back away from his reach, and then rounded again, setting himself to throw another punch across Kuhl’s body.
This time Kuhl was even more prepared, his left foot snapping out at the moment before contact, getting between Ricci’s legs to kick the inside of his opposite shin and throw him off balance. Before Ricci could recover, a right hook came smashing hard against his cheek.
Ricci went staggering, the side of his face exploding with pain, blood filling his mouth, his vision momentarily dimming. And then Kuhl was coming in on him again, hitting him with a series of powerful jabs, his fists repeatedly, brutally pounding Ricci’s face and neck.
Ricci felt gravity pulling him down, dragging at his legs and head, and managed to resist it barely in time to duck an overhand right that seemed to shoot straight for his eyes out of a grainy nowhere. He sucked in a breath to fill his chest with air, inhaled again, again, and then shuffled a little to get his heart pumping and dispel the motes of swirling nothingness from his vision.
Kuhl was not about to give him that opportunity. He launched forward, his fingers pointed outward, going for Ricci’s eyes, trying to blind him, gouge his eyes from their sockets with the tips of those stabbing fingers. Ricci shifted back, bobbed down under the hand, swallowed more air, got more of the blackness out of his face, and then came up under the Killer’s throat, came up fast, jamming his cocked right elbow into it with all the strength he could muster, connecting with it right below the knob of his Adam’s apple.
Kuhl grunted, swayed a little. A small, moist sound escaped his throat. Ricci pressed him, knowing this might be his only break, needing to make the most of it. Chin low, feet planted wide, he bored into Kuhl, pistoning his fists into Kuhl’s stomach and sides, pounding him with lefts, rights, jabs, pressing, pressing, his knuckles hammering him with one blow after the next.
Then Ricci felt the Killer loosen up, or maybe slip, he wasn’t sure, didn’t care, just knew he had him where he wanted him, and rammed his kneecap up between his legs, digging it into his groin.
Kuhl went down to the floor, kneeling, sagging forward, attempting to brace himself from going flat on his face with his outspread palms. But Ricci stayed on top of him, kicking his face, arms, legs, and body, making him bleed, opening wounds all over him, watching the redness spurt from his torn, lacerated flesh.
Wanting to bring him down as low as he possibly could.
And then, suddenly, coming up in the Killer’s fist, a bright flash of steel.
The combat knife.
He’d gotten the knife off the floor.
It flicked up, and then out, as Kuhl successfully thrust the blade in Ricci’s direction, jabbing its point into the back of his right leg.
Ricci felt its hot/cold penetration deep in his thigh muscle, swung a final kick at the Killer’s hand with his opposite foot, managing to land it between his wrist and elbow.
Kuhl’s fingers opened, dropping away from the knife handle. Lurching forward, his head bowed, blood and saliva pouring from his mouth, the Killer propped himself on his knee, tried to thrust himself to his feet, failed, and started to topple forward.
Ricci caught him by the front of the shirt on the way down.
“Here, murderer,” he said, the knife still sticking out of his thigh. “Here’s a little help for you.”
He hauled Kuhl up onto his rubbery legs, simultaneously turning him toward the terrace, forcing him backward, standing him up against the glass doors, using his own weight to prop Kuhl’s limp, weakened body against the doors as he reached out over his shoulder, slid one of them partially open by its handle, and again pushed him backward — through the opening now, into the wind and rain, back and back and back across the terrace to the guardrail.
The rain swirling around them, lashing them, washing their blood down onto the terrace floor so it mingled together in flowing, guttering cascades that went spilling over the lip of the terrace into the drop, Ricci held the Killer up and looked into his face, shaking him hard, his fists around the bunched wet fabric of his shirt, holding him, holding him there against the iron guardrail above the vertiginous, storm-swept plunge of the canyon and staring into his eyes for one last, long moment of time.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You son of a bitch, we did this to each other.”
And pushed him over into the abyss.
Thibodeau had heard the crashing in the room on the cabin’s second floor and wondered what in the name of everything holy was going on.
Upstairs now, working his way down the hall past Derek Glenn, Julia being hustled out of the cabin behind him, it was the room’s sudden dead silence that had gotten his mind racing everywhere at once.
Thibodeau tried to push in the door, found it blocked, and ordered the men behind him to put the ram to it.
Moving through the splintered doorframe into the room, he noticed two things that made his eyes grow wide.
The first was Ricci sitting on the floor, rain blowing over him through an open terrace door. He had propped himself back against the wall, a wide pool of blood under his right leg, a slick reddened knife on the floor beside him.
The second thing Thibodeau noticed was that he was alone.
Thibodeau put away his questions for the moment, rushed across the room, and crouched over him.
“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig, gonna need something to stop the flow,” he said. Then he saw that Ricci had gotten open the tac pouch on his belt and was struggling to fish something from inside it. “What’re you looking for in there? I can help you get it out…”
Ricci looked at him, hesitated a beat.
“Wound-closure gel,” he said, nodding for him to reach inside.
THIRTEEN
Entering her dining room, Ashley Gordian glanced up at the wall clock above the Sword op’s head and was amazed to see that morning had turned into afternoon. What sleep she’d gotten since Julia’s disappearance had come only when she let her guard down against it, and in each instance she hadn’t kept her eyes shut for long. Ten minutes here, fifteen there, she wouldn’t let herself yield to more than that. Ashley’s reluctant sub-missions to fatigue had felt more like automatic power-downs than true periods of rest — the physical equivalent of going offline for system maintenance, she supposed — and between them she had lost all sense of time’s orderly progression. Yet afternoon it was. The hands of the clock had moved on since she’d last been in the room… even if the Sword op hadn’t since she’d last entered it.
Seated below it at a mahogany lowboy he’d been using as a workstation, his shirt sleeves rolled up, he was hunched over the laptop computer in front of him, staring at the screen. Ashley wasn’t sure of his name; his ID tag was on his jacket, and his jacket was slung over the back of his chair. There were so many of her husband’s security people around the house and its grounds giving everything of themselves, working well past their scheduled shifts, defying exhaustion in ways she couldn’t fathom. Some were men and women Ashley recognized, others were people she’d never seen until a day or so ago, but all wore the same look of implacable resolve on their faces. Her admiration and gratitude went beyond words, and she’d provided whatever assistance she could, making them as comfortable as possible, bringing them food and drinks to keep them going, little things that made her feel useful in a way she paradoxically thought almost selfish. She needed to do something, needed to participate, even though her participation hardly seemed to measure up to their efforts. The alternative was to succumb to the crushing sense of futility and helplessness that always seemed to be lurking just past the next moment.