She was slow to open her eyes. Shielding her face from the spotlight at the top of the guillotine, she sat up with the idea that bulletproof vests were overrated. She wished she had died. Bones had been cracked by the concussion of the bullet. The vest had saved her from penetration but not from the force of the projectile fired at how many miles per second? She felt for and found the rib that was broken. Now her breath came in tears. Had she punctured a lung?
An overturned trunk lay by her side. The disembodied head of the Max Candle waxwork was lying just behind it. The resemblance to Charles was lying on its side and staring up at her.
The gun. Gaynor had taken her gun.
The rear window was still a mass of dangerous shards. He had not gone that way. And Edith – where had she gone? She must know a hundred hiding places in this cellar.
She stared up at the blazing sun atop the guillotine. Only Edith knew where the light was tripped.
There was a sharp pain in her chest as Mallory stood up. She turned off the switch for the globe lamp and then walked to the guillotine. The flashlight lay on the floor by the wooden hand locks. Edith's hands had been in the locks when the trick was done the first time. She knelt down and felt for the light switch. A small block of wood gave way under her exploring fingers. She pressed on the button, plunging the basement into the equalizer of darkness. Flashlight in hand and wax head under her arm, she went hunting.
The lightning lit the window again and she saw the silhouette of Gaynor flash into brilliant tabloid detail for an instant. The gun was wrapped in a wad of shiny plastic. It was a snub-nose revolver and not the Long Colt he was holding. How many bullets, she wondered? She had stopped in Edith's apartment long enough to count two bullets in Charles's body. And then there was the second gun, hers, with a full load of ammo. She set Max Candle's head on the top of a steamer trunk, pulled loose change from her pocket, and stepping back, she tossed the coins at the trunk. She pressed the button on the flashlight and aimed the beam at the wax face which so resembled Charles.
A shot cracked in the darkness. The flashlight clicked off. The bullet had gone wild of the head. So, Gaynor's reaction time was slow, and he was a poor shot at any distance. She dropped a coin to the floor and held the beam of the light to her own face. The light clicked off and a bullet fired into the air where she had been standing.
Her foot connected with something hard. She reached down to the floor and touched a length of pipe. She picked it up and felt the solid weight of the iron in her hand. She would have to get within swinging distance before he could switch to the second gun. Now, she was living intensely in the moment, excitement rising as though she were going to meet a lover and not to beat a man senseless, to let his blood, to drag out the pain, and lastly, to kill him. She walked on through the spray of rain.
She turned the flashlight on her face and clicked on the beam.
Gaynor leveled the gun and pulled the trigger. The gun only clicked with the sound of no bullet in the chamber. The second click was lost in the roar of a gunshot followed up by the flash of lightning. For a moment, Mallory could almost believe in magic. It seemed as though his bullet had doubled back and struck him, making a bloody hole in his body, Gaynor was turning and twisting as he fell backward with the force of the bullet in his shoulder, arms waving loose and disjointed. And the surprise on his face was the dumb look of the strawman twisting in a cornfield. The gun fell from his hand and skittered across the floor.
She turned off the flashlight and watched in silence as Edith approached Gaynor's body. The old woman was holding the Long Colt that was Mallory's own. Mallory pulled back behind the trunk which held Max's head.
Edith turned slowly, eyes searching, the gun barrel following the sights of her eyes. Mallory silently circled a stack of boxes and came up behind her, grabbing the old woman's wrist with enough force to leave prints on the flesh. She twisted the gun from Edith's hand with one swift motion.
Edith gasped, turning to face Mallory, her lined face illuminated by the poor light of the back window. The old woman smiled too quickly, too wide.
"Oh, Kathy, thank God. I thought you were dead. Oh, thank God."
"Yeah, right."
Mallory clicked on the flashlight and knelt down by Gaynor's body, wholly dissatisfied with the man's continued breathing. His head had struck the wall. He was unconscious but not dead, and the wound was not life-threatening.
And a gun was in her hand.
"Kill him," said Edith, standing over Gaynor. Kneeling down now, coming closer, her lips near to Mallory's ear, "Finish it," she whispered softly, her magnified blue eyes growing even wider. "No one will know."
"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Edith?"
Markowitz would not have liked that at all.
Mallory stared at Gaynor. Markowitz's killer was in her hands. The rain ran into her eyes as she turned to Edith. "I don't suppose I could trust you to go upstairs and call the ambulance… No, I suppose not." She picked up the fallen snub-nose revolver. Plastic still clung to the metal by a fusion of heat. Gaynor had not fired fast enough. There was one bullet left in the chamber. She pulled the plastic loose and handed the gun to Edith, using two fingers on the rough side grip of the handle. The old woman looked down on the weapon in her hand, eyes glistering.
Mallory checked Gaynor's pulse and then pulled back the lid of one eye. He showed no signs of coming around. "I'm going for the ambulance. I don't think you'll need to use the gun."
She wadded up the plastic bag which had fallen away from the gun, and slipped it under her jacket.
"I understand," said Edith, nodding slowly. "I do understand." She was smiling as Mallory turned her back and headed for the way out.
After passing through the cellar doorway, she reached up to turn the overhead light bulb in its socket. When she was standing in the light again, she thought to turn around, to go back and undo this thing. She lost this thought as she stared up the winding metal of the staircase and into the eyes of Jack Coffey standing on the level above her. Beyond Coffey, a uniformed officer was motioning Henrietta Ramsharan back into the hallway and closing the door.
"Mallory?" Coffey was staring from the blackened hole in her shirt to the gun which dangled from her hand. Now he looked into her eyes and one hand tightened on the railing and there it froze.
She continued to hold him, to pin him to the landing with her eyes. Only a second longer.
A gunshot exploded in the room behind her.
Jack Coffey and the uniformed officer were pounding down the staircase, guns drawn, pushing past her on the way through the cellar door.
Mallory slumped against the wall of the stairwell. Later, she would have trouble remembering how much of this she had planned.
Yeah, right.
She started up the steep stairs. First her mind stumbled and then her feet. Yet she did not pick her way more carefully as she continued up and up. She was in that moment when the guts flutter and rise, the heart pounds, the brain waffles between belief and disbelief, and she did not care if she fell, nor how far.
EPILOGUE
Mrs Ortega scanned the hospital room with the all-encompassing eye of a career cleaning woman as she settled the pink geraniums into an empty water glass on the bedside table. She pulled up a chair on the other side of the bed and as far from Mallory as she could get.
"That was thoughtful of you," said Charles. "They're lovely flowers."
"They're plastic," said Mrs Ortega. "They live longer."
Charles gave her his widest, looniest smile and the legs of her chair scraped away from him. He turned his smile on Mallory, who seemed less unnerved by lunacy.
"So, I'm assuming it was a traffic accident," said Charles. "How many accidents around the house could lodge a piece of metal so close to the heart? Am I right?"