And then she sucked his cut finger into her mouth and bit it, and in the same instant with her injured hand she grabbed the bulging crotch of his pants and squeezed.
ARMENTROUT EXHALED sharply, and the heel of one of his shoes knocked three times fast against the side of the desk as his free hand clenched into a fist.
“GOTCHA, DOCTOR,” said a man’s voice flatly from Plumtree’s mouth. “I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package.”
Plumtree had stepped lithely away from the desk, and now stared down at Armentrout with evident amused disgust as she wiped her hands on the flanks of her jeans.
When Armentrout could speak without gasping he said, “I suppose you’re…the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet, is that right?”
Plumtree frowned. “That’s what I’ve told the girls to call me. You were just talking to their mom, weren’t you? Playing ‘Follow the Queen.’“
“Your name’s Omar,” Armentrout said. “What’s your last name?” He was still sitting on the desk, but he straightened his white coat and frowned professionally. “I can compel you to tell me,” he added. “With ECT and scopolamine, just for example.”
“I reckon you could. But I ain’t scared of a little white-haired fag like you anyway. My name’s Omar Salvoy.” Plumtree’s pupils were both wide now. She picked up the telephone receiver, then smiled and held it out toward the doctor.
From the earpiece a faint voice could be heard saying, “Let me up, Richie darling! Pull the plug!”
With a hoarse whimper, Armentrout grabbed the receiver and slammed it into its cradle, and then he opened the second velvet box—but Plumtree had stepped around the desk and crouched by the chair.
“You got a gun in the box there, haven’t you?” said the Salvoy personality jovially while Plumtree’s hand fumbled under the desk. “Think it through, old son. You kill us and you’ve got some fierce ghosts on your ass—we got your number now, no mask is gonna protect you from us. Call your momma back and ask her if I ain’t telling you the truth.”
Armentrout’s heart was hammering in his chest like a jackhammer in an airplane hangar, and he wondered if this was capture, death. No, he thought as he remembered to breathe. No, she can’t have—got a fix on me—in that brief moment, with Long John Beach diffracting my hot signal.
After a moment, Armentrout let go of the derringer and closed the box. Had he been planning to shoot Plumtree, or himself?
“And I’ll bet this button right he-ere,” Plumtree went on, her arm under the desktop, “is the alarm, right?”
An instant later the close air was shaken by a harsh metallic braaang that didn’t stop.
Still too shaken to speak, Armentrout stood up from the desk and fished his keys out of his pocket to unlock the door and swing it open. Security guards were already sprinting down the hall toward the office, and he waved his bleeding hand at them and stood aside.
CHAPTER FIVE
No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
HIS little boy may have watched me kill him,” said Janis Plumtree in a quiet, strained voice.
A waterproof Gumby-and-Pokey tablecloth had been spread on the big table in the TV lounge, and she and Cochran were standing in line, each of them holding a glossy little cardboard bowl and a napkin that was rubber-banded around a plastic spoon.
“You didn’t kill him,” whispered Cochran earnestly. “Cody did.” He looked nervously at the patients on either side of them, but the old woman ahead of Plumtree and the morose teenager behind Cochran were just staring ahead, anxiously watching the ice cream being doled out.
Plumtree had been escorted to the Quiet Room again, directly after her conference with Dr. Armentrout this afternoon, and confined there for an hour, and when she had found Cochran afterward she had told him about the morning’s costly discovery of her multiple personalities, the “dwarves in Snow White’s cottage.” He had listened with unhappy sympathy, withholding judgment but taking the story as at least a touching apology for her occasional rudenesses, which supposedly had all been the doing of the ill-natured “Cody personality.” Apparently there was no Cody-the-roommate, really.
The appalling thing, the stark fact that still misted his forehead every time he thought of it, was that she had actually undergone shock therapy this morning; he was clinging to her insistence that it had been scheduled for her even before Long John Beach had been hit, and he was happy to be talking about topics that had nothing to do with the hospital, for he had not yet found a chance to tell Armentrout what had really happened last night.
“Well,” Plumtree said now, “Cody didn’t kill him either, directly. But we all knew we were going to that Leucadia estate to do somebody harm. Old Flibbertigibbet kept saying that we were just going to stab somebody in the leg. But we all knew what he could do, what he probably would do, and we all cooperated. We didn’t care.” She sighed shakily. “We do what he wants, ever since we got him to…kill a man in ’89.”
Cochran was inclined to doubt that; and he was fairly sure that she hadn’t killed anybody on this last New Year’s Day, either, for she’d surely be in a prison ward somewhere right now if the police or the doctors had found any reason to take her story seriously.
But she clearly believed these things, and was troubled by them—and Armentrout had given her shock therapy this morning!—so he said, with unfeigned concern, “Poor Janis! How did that happen?”
They had got to the front of the line, and a nurse scooped a ball of vanilla ice cream into Plumtree’s bowl and tucked a wafer cookie alongside it. Plumtree waited until Cochran had been served too, and then they sidled off to the window-side corner, by unspoken agreement choosing the far end of the room from where Long John Beach sat blinking and licking a spoon. At their backs, beyond the reinforced glass, a half-moon shone through the black silhouettes of the palm trees outside the courtyard.
“We were in a bar in Oakland,” she said quietly when the two of them had sat down on the linoleum by the nursing-station-side wall, “and Cody got real drunk. I was twenty-two, and Cody was drinking a lot in those days, though I always stayed sober to drive home. And we lost time—or maybe Cody had an actual alcoholic blackout!—and when I could see what was going on again, I was on my back in a van in the alley parking lot, and the boyfriend I was at the bar with was trying to pull my clothes off. Cody had passed out, and he figured he could do what he wanted with an unconscious woman. This was only…well, it was five-oh-four in the afternoon, wasn’t it? Across the bay, you were just about to catch your wife, wife-to-be, when she fell down the winery stairs. Anyway, this guy gave me a black eye but I was able to fight him off because he hadn’t expected me to…wake up. I scrambled out of the van, with him still grabbing at me and me not able to run, with my clothes all hiked up and down. I probably could have got away from him then with no trouble, ‘cause I was awake and outside and I think he was apologizing as much as anything; but I…got so mad…at him thinking he could do that to me when I was passed out that way, that I called a real serious sic im! in my head. You know? Like you would to a pit bull that was real savage but was yours. I can see now that all of us, even drunk Cody, helped call it. We hadn’t ever been that mad before. We knew it was bad, and that it would cost us, but we called anyway. And we woke up Flibbertigibbet.”