Allie was aware of Kennedy chugging down the hall, running with a bearlike wobble. The blackened dead cigar jutting from his mouth, his thick legs pumping and his arms swinging wide.
The elevator doors were sliding shut.
He’d never make it.
Would he?
When he was ten feet away the doors met and the elevator lurched into its descent. Pain jolted through the right side of Allie’s head as Hedra sank her teeth into her earlobe, whimpering in the ear like a lover in desperate ecstasy.
Allie tried to push her away and Hedra punched her in the stomach. Allie almost doubled over in pain and heard the breath whoosh out of her. She raised her right foot and stamped down hard on Hedra’s instep. Again! The teeth loosened their grip on her burning ear.
Finding strength where she thought there was none, Allie shoved away the feverish, rigid body pressed against hers. Hedra slammed into the corner. Allie grabbed her hair, her blond hair like Allie’s own, and slammed her head against the wall.
Slammed it again and again until Hedra went limp and slumped to the floor.
Hedra curled her arms over her head for protection, drew up her knees and began to sob.
Allie leaned back against the opposite wall, drained of rage. She stood surprised and awed by the sense of profound pity she felt. This must be what a twin feels when its sibling’s in pain.
The elevator jounced to a stop, and Allie dizzily placed her hands flat against the wall to keep her balance.
Hedra was quiet now. Unmoving.
When the elevator doors opened on the lobby, two plainclothes detectives and two uniformed officers were waiting. In the background hovered the mesmerized pale faces of onlookers, silent, watching intently, their expressions unreadable, their thoughts and fears too deep to reach the surface.
Kennedy appeared, breathing hard and looking angry and concerned. He must have ridden down in the other elevator. He’d lost his cigar, and black ash was peppered over his white shirt front. “You okay?” he asked Allie.
“Okay,” she said, pressing her trembling palm to her ear, aware of a trickle of blood snaking down her arm.
One of the plainclothes detectives, a tall handsome man with neatly parted dark hair, entered the elevator and helped Hedra to her feet.
She glared at him, an accusation of unspeakable betrayal in her eyes. Her lips quivered. Parted. “You’re not Andy. You pretended.”
He gave her a fading, lazy smile as he gripped her elbow and ushered her from the elevator, almost as if escorting her onto a dance floor.
He said, “What’s in a name?”
Epilogue
ALLIE moved out of the Cody Arms the next month. Out of the city. She’d been offered a job in the actuarial department of a large insurance company in Rockport, Illinois. The company’s real-estate division found her an affordable place to live, a small house on an acre of wooded land just outside of town.
It was always quiet there. Her mail was delivered to a rural box on a cedar post at the end of her driveway. Her nearest neighbors, a retired carpenter and his wife, waved to her whenever they saw her in her yard. Cars passed only occasionally.
Her old apartment in the Cody Arms was leased and occupied within days after she’d gone. To a pair of single women who said they were sisters.
About the Author
John Lutz is the prolific author of over 30 novels and 200 short stories. He is perhaps best known for his 1990 novel SWF Seeks Same, which was made into the film Single White Female starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Lutz has also created two popular ongoing detective series. The first, beginning with 1976’s Buyer Beware, follows the detective Alo Nudger and has a comic, quirky tone. A second, more serious sequence of novels beginning with Tropical Heat (1986) follows the adventures of the detective Fred Carver. Lutz has published four collections of short stories, Better Mousetraps (1988), Shadows Everywhere (1994), Until You are Dead (1998) and The Nudger Dilemmas (2001). His short stories have won numerous awards including a Shamus in 1982 and an Edgar in 1985.