She wheeled and barged into a large, freestanding tank, larger than a diving tank. Unsure what was inside the unmarked metal receptacle, she nonetheless grabbed firmly the nozzle and flint attachment. She quickly snatched up the hose handle and turned the gas on-propane, she guessed. Striking the flint, she sent out a spewing gasp of fire into Matisak's eyes, suddenly blinding him, singing his bushy eyebrows and burning his left cheek. He let out a scream of pain and backed away, but she took the fire to the length of its tether, backing him further from her.
“ Bloody bitch!” he screamed.
As he continued to back away from the fire, fending it off with his arms now while still holding firmly to his recovered syringe, Jessica saw her chance to put an end to him.
She tugged on the nozzle hose, keeping the fire at his face, dragging the now-toppled, rolling tank with each step she took, keeping him at bay.
Matisak might have turned and run, but he instead jousted with the fire, trying to rush into and through it to overpower her, but the heat was too intense.
“ Burn, you son of a bitch! Burn!” Jessica shouted.
Matisak continued to back away. She continued to pursue, hoping the propane would last even though a blinking yellow light on the gauge indicated that it was low.
At the same moment that Matisak backed into the array of mannequins and papier-mache animals that were careening by, one of the needle-pointed, razor-sharp hooks mechanically anticipated him, and the ugly hook caught him at the base of the skull, viciously slicing into him, its upward-thrusting tip meeting the brain stem. But death was not instantaneous by any means. The robotic hook arm, feeling weight on its end, now lifted the man from the sawdust and raised him several feet into the air. One leg was caught in a pair of gripping stirruplike arms, but the other flailed wildly with his human arms, and Matisak's entire body quivered and showered blood as away he flew with the rest of the floating carnival all around her.
Jessica dropped to her knees and released the jet flow of the propane torch, the light gone with the flame. Her face now was streaked with tears as well as dirt and grime.
Overhead, a portion of the ceiling creaked, moaned and collapsed in on itself, revealing a black, roiling sky beyond, a kind of black hole that had opened up perhaps to suck in Matisak's soul, which she imagined would rise only so far as Hell.
Once again the whirling, spinning track overhead brought Matisak into her line of vision. She saw that he was still somehow alive, responding spasmodically to the pain and torture dealt him. She searched the dirty floor for one of the two guns she'd brought to kill Matisak with, but was unable to locate either without light to see by.
Finally, she pulled her flashlight from below the netting that Matisak had hoped to trap her beneath, and with the beam she found her. 38 police special. She raised it now, awaiting Matisak's return trip.
He looked to be still now as he moved closer toward her, the terror of his pain clearly etched on his unremittingly grimacing face, yet the spasms had ceased. He appeared dead. He was finally dead.
But then his head fell forward and his open eyes stared down at her and he grinned.
She prepared to fire, aiming for the forehead. She squeezed the trigger inward, inward… about to put him out of his misery… but then decided otherwise.
She thought of the suffering he'd brought into this world. He had created chaos and horror, not only for all his victims, but for her as well. She was his victim.
She lowered her gun, located her coat and watched the dying man's parade of horror continue on and on and on with the tumult of metal wheels rolling about steel grooves. She then went for the exit, leaving Matisak to his death, his last scream diminished by the rattling mechanical pulleys, chains and tracks and the pounding winds further rattling the warehouse walls and exterior.
Jessica stepped out into God's breath, the storm winds now at gale force, having found landfall somewhere along the Louisiana coastline. For all she knew she was stepping into the eye of Hurricane Lois. But it didn't matter. Matisak was dead, and she was free of the ugliest human force she'd ever encountered.
She saw a light sluicing back and forth along the wharf ahead of her, and she heard the insistent shouting which came from Kim Desinor. Kim and Alex Sincebaugh parted the mists around them, racing toward her, Alex throwing a dry blanket over her shoulders. For the first time, Jessica allowed herself a moment's attention, realizing she was ill-equipped to deal with the raging wind which buffeted her about like a crumpled paper boat on the waves of a great ocean. Missing her shoes, her blouse ripped, a cut above her left eye, she still managed a broad smile, for seeing the others was like looking again on life and light. She crumpled into Kim's arms, tears coming freely. Hurricane Lois was still in the Gulf, lingering there as if to tease, as the three of them stood on the wharf below the eyes of the tattered alligator in the backdraft of a roiling air pocket. Alex ushered the women toward his car, asking about Matisak. Jessica simply said, “You'll find him inside. It's finally over.”
A great cloud of closure had enveloped her, a sense of completion and wholeness and strength which even Kim with her amazing sensibilities could not begin to fathom. Kim placed a protective arm over Jessica's shoulder and guided her through the stormy night, down the length of the pier and toward Alex's waiting car, where the strobing light seemed the only beacon left in the world. Overhead, the satanic wind threatened to destroy everything in its path.
Even as she climbed into Alex's car, feeling the machine rocking left to right under the pressure of the storm wind, Jessica only felt relief, for at last she'd managed to do what she'd only dreamed of doing for so long: from the day that she had examined his first victim so many years before in that black little cabin in Wekosha, Wisconsin, from the moment he'd maimed her, from the second he'd killed Otto Boutine, and since the day of his arrest. Real revenge was rare and so long in coming in this life…
“ How… how are you, Jess?” Kim asked.
She looked up into her friend's eyes as the storm whipped Kim's hair wildly about her head. “It's over at last… no more struggling with the devil of devils… I can dream again… can believe in a safer, better world… hurricanes, earthquakes, and killer storms notwithstanding… and it's already a better world without him in it.”
After a look inside the warehouse, where he'd located the power switch which illuminated the place, Alex returned to the car, a stricken look on his face, and called it in. Within minutes squad cars jammed the entryway to the wharf and warehouse area, everyone working a beat interested and curious about the latest twisting development in the Mad Matthew Matisak affair, as many as possible turning out for a look at the monster Coran had brought down, anxious to lay eyes on the sight of him dangling at the end of a meat hook.
Fouintenac was indeed one of Lew Meade's operatives; his real name Leon Stedman, and he'd had a wife and several children. He'd taken on the character of real-life Deputy Mayor Fouintenac merely to remain close to Jessica Coran, to act, as Sand had acted, in the capacity of bodyguard. Apparently, he'd let his guard down. Stedman, alias Fouintenac, had to be bagged, as did Matisak's remains, and Lew Meade was flying in a pathologist from nearby Mississippi to do the honors. Meade, Police Commissioner Stephens and Carl Landry put in appearances.
Meanwhile, Alex saw to it that both Kim and Jessica Coran were ushered off to a safe location where they might gather perspective and breathe a little easier.
He later returned to make sure that evidence techs did their jobs to the fullest, and he even helped by bagging a shardlike piece of glass, thin and beveled to a point-a high-tech blow dart likely dipped in poison, which had miraculously remained in Fouintenac's neck despite the rough treatment Jessica Coran's. 38 had given the dead man's torso. If Jessica's story could be believed, and he had no reason to doubt her, she'd fired three times into Fouintenac's lifeless body when she'd mistaken it for Matisak.