With tremendous effort, he raised his face from the Berber, and saw that Connie had been lifted off her feet. Ticktock pinned her against the wall and shook her furiously. The back of her head and the heels of her shoes drummed the Sheetrock.
Ricky, now Connie.
First everyone you love…
Harry got up as far as his hands and knees, choking on carpet fibers that were stuck to the back of his throat. Every cough sent a quiver of pain through his chest, and he felt as if his rib cage was a vise that had closed around his heart and lungs.
Ticktock was screaming in Connie’s face, words Harry couldn’t understand because his ears were ringing.
Gunfire.
She had managed to draw her revolver and empty it into her assailant’s neck and face. The slugs jolted him slightly but didn’t loosen his grip on her.
Grimacing at the pain in his chest, pawing at a stark Danish-modern dresser, Harry lurched to his feet. Dizzy, wheezing. He pulled his own gun, knowing it would be ineffective against this adversary.
Still shouting and holding Connie off the floor, Ticktock swung her away from the wall and threw her at the two sliding glass doors to the balcony. She exploded through one of them as if she had been shot from a cannon, and the pane of tempered glass dissolved into tens of thousands of gummy fragments.
No. It couldn’t happen to Connie. He couldn’t lose Connie. Unthinkable.
Harry fired twice. Two ragged holes appeared in the back of Ticktock’s black raincoat.
The vagrant’s spine should have been shattered. Bone and lead shrapnel should have skewered all of his vital organs. He should have gone down like King Kong taking the plunge off the Empire State Building.
Instead, he turned.
Didn’t cry out in pain. Didn’t even wobble.
He said, “Bigshot hero.”
How he could still talk was a mystery, maybe a miracle. In his throat was a bullet wound the size of a silver dollar.
Connie had also blown away part of his face. Missing tissue left a large concavity on the left side, from jaw line to just under the eye socket, and his left ear was gone.
No blood flowed. No bone lay exposed. The meat of him was not red but brown-black and strange.
His smile was more terrible than ever because the disintegration of his left cheek had exposed his rotten teeth all the way back along the side of his face. Within that calcium cage, his tongue squirmed like a fat eel in a fisherman’s trap.
“Think you’re so bad, big hero cop, bigshot tough guy,” Ticktock said. In spite of his deep and raspy voice, he sounded curiously like a schoolboy issuing a challenge to a playground fight, and even his fearsome appearance could not entirely conceal that childish quality in his demeanor. “But you’re nothing, you’re nobody, just a scared little man.”
Ticktock stepped toward him.
Harry pointed the revolver at the huge assailant and—
— was sitting on a chair in James Ordegard’s kitchen. The gun was still in his hand, but the muzzle was pressed to the underside of his chin, as if he were about to commit suicide. The steel was cold against his skin, and the gunsight dug painfully at his chin bone. His finger was curled around the trigger.
Dropping the revolver as if he had discovered a poisonous snake in his hand, he bolted up from the chair.
He had no memory of going to the kitchen, pulling the chair out from the table, and sitting down. In the blink of an eye, he seemed to have been transported there and encouraged to the brink of self-destruction.
Ticktock was gone.
The house was silent. Unnaturally silent.
Harry moved toward the door—
— and was sitting on the same chair as before, the gun in his hand again, the muzzle in his mouth, his teeth biting down on the barrel.
Stunned, he took the.38 out of his mouth and put it on the floor beside the chair. His palm was damp. He blotted it on his slacks.
He got to his feet. His legs were shaky. He broke into a sweat, and the sour taste of half-digested pizza rose in the back of his mouth.
Although he didn’t understand what was happening to him, he knew for certain that he did not have a suicidal urge. He wanted to live. Forever, if possible. He would not have put the barrel of the gun between his lips, not voluntarily, not in a million years.
He wiped one trembling hand down his damp face and—
— was on the chair again, holding the revolver, the muzzle pressed to his right eye, staring into the dark barrel. Five steely inches of eternity. Finger around the trigger.
Sweet Jesus.
His heart knocked so hard that he could feel it in every bruise on his body.
Carefully he put the revolver in his shoulder holster, under his rumpled coat.
He felt as if he were caught in a spell. Magic seemed to be the only explanation for what was happening to him. Sorcery, witchcraft, voodoo — he was suddenly willing to believe in all of it, as long as believing would buy a pardon from the sentence that Ticktock had pronounced on him.
He licked his lips. They were chapped, dry, burning. He looked at his hands, which were pale, and he figured that his face was even paler.
After getting shakily to his feet, he hesitated briefly, then started toward the door. He was surprised to reach it without being returned inexplicably to the chair.
He remembered the four expended bullets that he had found in his shirt pocket after shooting the vagrant four times, and he recalled as well the discovery of the newspaper under his arm as he’d walked out of the convenience store earlier in the night. Finding himself three times in the kitchen chair with no recollection of having gone to it was, he sensed, merely the result of a different application of the same trick that had put those slugs in his pocket and the paper under his arm. An explanation of how the effect was achieved seemed almost within his grasp… but remained elusive.
When he edged out of the kitchen without further incident, he decided that the spell was broken. He rushed to the master bedroom, wary of encountering Ticktock, but the vagrant seemed to have gone.
He was afraid of finding Connie dead, her head turned around backward like Ricky’s had been, eyes torn out.
She was sitting on the balcony floor in glittering puddles of tempered glass, still alive, thank God, holding her head in her hands and groaning softly. Her short dark hair fluttered in the night breeze, shiny and soft. Harry wanted to touch her hair, stroke it.
Crouching beside her, he said, “You all right?”
“Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“I want to tear his lungs out.”
Harry almost laughed with relief at her bravado.
She said, “Tear ‘em out and stuff ‘em where the sun don’t shine, make him breathe through his ass from now on.”
“Probably wouldn’t stop him.”
“Slow him down some.”
“Maybe not even that.”
“Where the hell did he come from?”
“Same place he went. Thin air.”
She groaned again.
Harry said, “You sure you’re all right?”
She finally raised her face from her hands. The right corner of her mouth was bleeding, and the sight of her blood made him shiver with rage as much as with fear. That whole side of her face was red, as if she had been slapped hard and repeatedly. It would probably darken with bruises by tomorrow.
If they lived to see tomorrow.
“Man, could I use some aspirin,” she said.
“Me, too.”
From his coat pocket, Harry removed the bottle of Anacin that he had borrowed from her medicine cabinet a few hours ago.