He met no resistance. He got up, trying to shake some of the fear. Maybe he had been wrong and there was no killer at home. He started to relax, when he heard a crashing noise from behind, near the fireplace.
He turned and blasted two rounds out of the pump gun, one into the mirror above the fireplace and one through the adjoining window, blowing the glass out. He jumped back as a small, black kitten darted past and ran through the dining room into the kitchen. The crashing noise had been caused by the cat knocking a soapstone sculpture off the mantle above the fireplace.
A scraping noise from somewhere in back of him sent a warning tingling up his spine. He turned and pumped a round into Ann’s antique rocker, blowing a twelve inch hole through the straight wooden back, sending splinters and pellets into the wall behind.
Someone had been in the house. When he left, he had locked it tight. There was no possible way that cat could have gotten in by itself. He turned toward the fireplace, heard a loud tortured cat-kitten scream from behind and once again he whirled around, pumping the shotgun, shooting from the hip.
The first shell smashed into the dining room table and the second blew apart the television, exploding it in a hail of sound and glass, causing him to pump and dry fire. The riot gun was empty.
The cat darted across the room and he threw the shotgun at it, missing by five or six feet. He cursed. Somehow the kitten had caused him to empty the riot gun, depriving him of his best weapon.
The kitten dashed into the kitchen. Rick decided to follow. He drew the forty-five and moved across the carpet toward the dining room. He stepped past the damaged rocker and the destroyed television, stepping around broken glass. In the dining room, he smiled at the crystal vase sitting on the center of the badly mauled table. Ann bought the vase in Prague, and during her life, had kept it full of flowers. By some miracle it survived the shotgun blast to the table and he took it as a sign that he would survive, too.
He skirted the table, eyes on the vase, and something hard, soft, sticky and wet slammed into the side of his face with gale force.
He jumped back from the headless pigeon as he emptied all thirteen shots from the forty-five into the empty kitchen, screaming louder than the deadly roar of the bucking pistol. When he was out of ammunition and silence again reigned, he realized the kitchen was empty. Whoever threw the bird had used his pitching arm from the back landing, sending the headless Dark Dancer flying in through the back door, through the kitchen, into the dining room.
He dropped the forty-five onto the carpet and withdrew the thirty-eight from his hip pocket and warily entered the kitchen to find that he had killed both the microwave and the blender and had severely wounded the refrigerator.
J.P. heard a car pull into the drive downstairs and felt a surge of short-lived relief. His first thought was that his mother had come to save him, but his second thought quickly pushed the first aside. If his mother came into Rick’s house the Ragged Man would get her, and who could tell what horrible things he would do to her. He hoped she would back the car out of the drive and go away. His heart sank when he heard the engine cut off.
Only moments ago he thought things couldn’t get worse. He sat in the water that wasn’t warm anymore, looking at the digital clock, frozen in fright. At 8:44 the Ragged Man poked his head in the door, stinging him with a quick penetrating stare that scared the living shit out of him, and now his mother had arrived just in time to be the Ragged Man’s next victim.
He sat in the water and listened to the silence. If there was only a way out. Again he looked around the bathroom. There had to be something. There had to be. He figured a way out of the trunk against impossible odds and anybody that could figure their way out of that, could figure their way out of this. In the trunk he had only minutes to act. Here he had till noon, but maybe not that long. Maybe the Ragged Man had lied and was going to kill him sooner. And maybe he was going to kill his mom now.
His heart screamed as he struggled, trying to slip his hands through the ropes, but they wouldn’t give.
He started to get an idea and a glimmer of hope began to inspire him. Then he heard two loud explosions. He stopped his struggle, confused and scared. Had the Ragged Man killed his mother or had his mother killed the Ragged Man? He screamed against the tape, but he knew the weak sound wasn’t able to penetrate the bathroom walls.
Another explosion followed by a loud screech and two more explosions. It sounded like a battle was going on downstairs. It wasn’t his mother down there. It was Rick. Rick had come to save him. Rick was fighting the Ragged Man. He hoped that the Ragged Man was losing and losing big time.
He checked the clock. 8:47. A lot had happened in just three minutes, he thought, and he was beginning to hope that maybe he would be saved after all, when he heard several rapid gunshots, followed by more silence.
Chapter Twenty-four
Rick, thirty-eight in hand, ran through the kitchen to the back landing. Panting, he studied the landscape and saw nothing out of the ordinary, and again he thought it was too quiet, but he couldn’t put his mind on what was wrong.
He ran his eyes over the edge of his property to the woods beyond, and then he trained them on the Donovan house. Judy’s back door was open.
He had the killer on the run, but why didn’t the killer blow him away when he drove up the drive, or when he entered the house, or when he stood in the living room and emptied the shotgun into windows and walls? And why challenge him with a dead pigeon when a bullet would have been much more effective?
At first Rick thought the killer was toying with him, playing a deadly game of cat and mouse, but then the truth flashed before him. The killer didn’t have a gun.
All of the murders had been committed with a knife. Maybe the killer had an aversion to guns or maybe he just plain enjoyed using the Bowie knife. In either case, the end result was the same. He was facing a clever killer who had managed to sucker him into firing at air and now his big guns, the riot gun and forty-five were useless.
Staring at Judy’s back door, he was reminded of the kiss and the unanswered questions that it posed. How had she known to run her tongue along his scar and why had she called him Flash? Ann, and only Ann, would have done those things. Ann, and only Ann, he thought.
He needed to see Judy again. He needed to ask her about the kiss. He needed to ask her about Ann. But first he needed to deal with the Ragged Man. And now he had no doubt, the killer was the Ragged Man.
He took the steps from his landing to the ground below, one hand on the rail, the other holding the thirty-eight, but he kept his finger off the trigger. He had been suckered into using up his starting offense and he didn’t plan on throwing away his last quarterback.
On the ground, he made his way to the loft, then he knew what had bothered him earlier. He had become used to the billing and cooing of J.P.’s pigeons. It took him awhile to miss the sound of the birds, but he missed it now.
When he got closer to the cage, he saw why. The bastard had killed them all.
He tightened his hand on the butt of the gun as he passed the cage, making sure he took in the horrible sight. He didn’t want to forget it. When he caught the son-of-a-bitch, he wanted to make him pay. Pay for the birds. Pay for J.P. Pay for Ann. Pay for his friends. He wanted the bastard to pay and pay and pay, and then he wanted him to pay some more.
He went up Judy’s landing, the way he’d gone down his, one hand on the rail the other holding the gun out in front of himself, finger next to the trigger, but not on it. He would be hard to fool this time.
He cautiously peered into the laundry room and recoiled. The washing machine and dryer were covered in blood and feathers. The walls had been smeared in the stuff and the remains of several mangled, headless bird bodies covered the floor.