How tiresome this creature is, he thinks. “To be sure. But right now a sandwich is in order. Must refuel the old tanks.” He takes her head in his strong hands, resisting the temptations that well up within him. “Be a love and go rustle us up some grub. Anything. Meanwhile, I want to try out the wet bar in here. Drinkie sound good?"
“Anything you say, lover.” And she gives him her drink order, another wet kiss, and trots off fetchingly to prepare his feast, the obedient, wiggling, jiggling, bikinied maid. She goes around the pool, casting her tall, curvaceous shadow into the floodlit water. Any other man would have but one thought. Only lust at the sight of her. But Joseph goes into the cabana thinking, I'll have earned this one. He smiles to himself, whistling softly.
He will take her under right there in the Jones-Seleska pool. Watch her fight him as she goes through the ballet of reflexive laughter and disbelief, anger, fear, surprise, panic terror, death awareness. Be watching her fill her lungs with pool water and chlorine as she screams in a shock wave of mindless struggling, her voice muffled by the water, laughing at her as she fights without hope. He will show her the penalty for having forced her foul affections on him. He will show this pretentious female scum the dues to be extracted from one who would interfere with his plans. He will make this bitch pay, he laughs to himself, through the nose so to speak, as she feels every sensation of her impending death.
But she is there watching him prepare a hiding place in the floor, an excavation the size of a body, and she comes within a hair's breadth of speaking, of asking him to explain what it is he's doing making that hole in the nice floor and why the lye sacks but oh my GOD no she knows that she is looking at a burial place even though the signals to her brain have not arrived yet and the overload of information freezes time for her momentarily and she is on Central Standard Opium Time now, time that stops completely. Halts. Ceases ticking. Comes to a dead end. Tick.... Nothing. Then time reverses. Goes backward, rewinding sooooooooo slllloooooowwwwwlllly-kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk-ccccccccccccccccccccc ccccc-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-TTTTTTTTTT! And a foot stops in midstride. She has come in to change her choice of potables, a woman's eternal prerogative: to change her mind. And she comes in soundlessly through recently oiled hinged doors coming in the cabana and in a quick take her mind puts her body on Opium Time and it is in this first microsecond that her time-shifting brain saves her lovely butt because as she opened her mouth to speak Opium Time freezes her face and it would take thirty seconds to say the first word of her soundless query, “W H A T” in real time, so she has plenty of opportunity to stop the movement of the foot in midstride, making that fraction of a second rewind as some miracle of survival instinct warns her and she kicks off her shoes and the former tomboy Noel is backing out, creeping out of the room just the way she came in, afraid even to swallow, time now
starting to
slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwllllllllyyyyyyyyy move
forward again
oh no no NOOOOOOO
don't start moving yet TICK Oh Godddddddddd TICK
TICK TICKTICKTICK moving now and she is running like hell for the car knowing deep inside that for days she has made love to a man who is who is oh oh oh oh ooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhGodnoohno no no no inside her secret heart she knows that she is running from DEATH! Running behind her now she can hear the footfalls thudding behind her and mindless of the pain she runs barefooted across the drive and oh jeez the keys are inside in my purse she thinks and then no she remembers the emergency key in the small metal thing under the bumper and she snatches at the magnetic box and it won't come loose and she feverishly rips it off, ripping her long blood-red nails in the process, and fumbles with the key, lurching in behind the wheel and smashing the door locks down as she grinds the ignition on, his hand grabbing the door just as she locks it, his arm back in a killing mode as she guns the motor, smashing out with a deadly elbow as she tromps the accelerator peeling out in a scrrrrreeeeeeee of smoking tires as, the window beside her spider tracks in a heart-attacking explosion from the thrown elbow strike and he leaps into his own vehicle and grabs the key off the visor but behind the wheel of a car Noel Collier is his equal and the Rolls roars away through the night, the killer close in pursuit.
She will drive to the police station. He won't dare follow her there but she remembers who this man is and he is already closing on her fast. She heads for her own house nearby, operating by reflex now, squealing into the drive with her hand on the automatic door opening a block away and she is running inside and oh my Christ he is in there waiting for her in the darkness and she feels his strong grip knock the automatic from her hand and her heart almost leaps out of her beautiful chest as the voice of the cop Jack Eichord whispers in her ear, “Get down in the spa room."
And she is almost in shock and starts to ask, “What...” the first word only a quarter second from her mouth. “What? W H A...” barely out and another hand clamps her mouth hoarsely saying, “Don't talk. Hurry. Move!” Shoving her rudely toward the desired direction and she stumbles through the door and down the stairs and into the stone room just as the killer slams out of the vehicle and he is so fast and deadly, and he smiles at the sureness of his movements as he moves toward the woman who is in the house.
All of Eichord's concentration now is shifted from a defensive posture to an attack mode. And the thoughts you think at a time like this come in a lightning blur, intensified by the survival instincts and triggered by the clutching talons of danger, Eichord watching both the image recognition pattern of the DEtection MONitor and the doorway to his right knowing the killer is coming and then seeing the conflict and wondering who or what but no time now and in the midst of all this a ridiculous thought.
He thinks, If this was a movie the music would be playing a woodpecker electro-motif. The Wizard of Oz ad told him about it the other day. Something the Soviets had once used on areas of the recalcitrant populace they wanted to punish. Ozzie Barnes had played a few seconds of it over the phone. It was an incessant variant of the Chinese water torture, a note repeated staccato endlessly, the sort of thing that was punishing enough just to hear via a taped shortwave monitor, and it would have made a nice background score for that second in time. That was the absurd thought his mental defense mechanisms evoked as he thumbed back the hammer on the Smith and when the dark form crashed through the door he squeezed one off just a hair below the eye slits. No “Freeze! Police!” Just forearms resting on a chair back, trying not to make any mistakes, no freeze—just a squeeze, and the maggie loud in the house, pyrotechnics momentarily blinding as his bullet smashed out drilling the intruder smack dab between the running lights.
It was never over until you made sure. Making sure was the hardest part, but it was the next step and he slapped the wall a couple of times with his left hand, right hand still in the weapon-up position, not hearing the screams of the terror-stricken woman down in the stone room, hammer thumbed back again, smoking muzzle pointing at the prone man's head, and he stepped over on the muscular wrist as a precaution and reached over to touch the head, instantly realizing it had been a mistake.
Joseph Hackabee a/k/a Joseph Houtcheson was about half empty of gray matter. Eichord's single shot had covered Noel Collier's nice white wall in red, dripping mist and assorted nasties and brain-burger bits, and some of it was on his hand. He fought bile back and wiped it off. Joe had a fourteen-inch Randall-type fighting knife which Eichord picked up and walked out of the open door and into a crowd of police.
“(something).” Michaels was patting him on the back and he caught “IAD” and “shooting team” and he popped his neck and it cracked, and he swallowed, and he could hear a little now, still half-deafened by the gun report after all the silence.