Rebecca hit the floor on her back.
Her head still ringing from the impact, she realized she was laying half-in and half-out of the bathroom. Looking up, she saw the killer’s huge body coming for her, a look of supreme triumph tattooed across his face.
Twisting her body away from him, Rebecca flipped onto her tummy and began a frantic hand-over-hand scramble out into the corridor in a last desperate attempt to flee. But the polished tiles just made her hand squeak as her sweaty skin slid uselessly over its frictionless surface.
The floor suddenly flew away from her and she felt herself lifted bodily by the scruff of her clothing into the air, dragged away from the rapidly receding safety of the corridor and back into the bathroom.
“I get to kill you twice,” Byron Portia whispered to her. “How cool is that?”
Rebecca clawed helplessly at the air and, when finally she was able to draw sufficient oxygen into her lungs, she knew it was already too late. Her scream of terror was cut short as the door swung closed behind her.
Forty-Nine
“You know, I recognized you as soon as I saw you. It’s just so amazing!”
Byron Portia, until recently Tony Gallagher, shook his head in amusement at the irony. “What do you think the chances are? A billion to one? A trillion? Or maybe it was not chance at all? Hmmm? Bet you haven’t given that any thought at all have you? No, of course you haven’t, you have other things on your mind right now don’t you, sweetie?” His hand tightened around Rebecca’s throat, squeezing off more air so only a rasping gurgle escaped from between her lips.
He reached out to the sink counter with his free hand and picked up the straight razor, exposing the wet blade with a flick of his wrist. Becky’s eyes widened and her body stiffened as he ran its cold edge lightly along her throat.
“Want to see something interesting?” he asked her. “Sure you do. Sure you do.” He closed the blade into the handle and deftly inverted the razor with his thick fingers. A silver stud near the end of the handle looked just like the other three that apparently kept the two pieces of black pearl together, but when Portia fingered it, a second blade snapped out from its hiding place. Five inches of glistening steel and, unlike the shaving blade, this was a double-sided dagger; flat and insanely sharp on both sides the glinting blade tapered down to a lethal point. It was small, but deadly enough if the user knew what they were doing, and Rebecca’s oxygen starved mind knew through terrible personal knowledge that this man had a lot of experience with it.
“Clever, eh? A gentleman can’t be too careful on the road you know. Lot of undesirables out there these days. A lot of undesirables. Not my instrument of choice, as I’m sure you realize, but needs-must-when-the Devil—drives, right?” He grinned at the choking woman, revealing his tombstone teeth, white against his tanned skin. “I think I would have raised a few eyebrows if I had tried to get my tool of choice past security. You remember that don’t you sweetie?” Rebecca’s struggling mind dragged the memories of her final moments from the crypt she kept them locked away in, deep within the basement of her brain; the memory of the untarnished blade of this man’s hunting knife played back and forth before her eyes before he… before— Rebecca’s eyes rolled back up into her sockets, her skin was beginning to take on a slight blue tinge as hypoxia took hold of her. Her earlier frantic attempts to beat the big man’s hand from her throat now became little more than autonomic twitches as her vision and cognition faded away from her.
Portia watched her suffering with fascinated attention, his head tipped slightly to his shoulder. With expert judgment he timed her slide toward death until, at the final moment before he sensed her escape into unconsciousness, he released his grip from around her throat.
Instinctively, Rebecca drew in a long labored gasp of air, her oxygen deprived muscles unable to hold her up, and she sank down the wall of the bathroom into a gasping puddle of folded limbs. Her eyes fluttered open as her chest heaved and strained to drag more of the precious air into her system. Vaguely aware she was still alive, she looked up into the face of the man who had killed her once already, and who was, she was sure, preparing to end her life once again.
“Oh boy,” he said, “are we having fun now, or what?”
A bead of blood trickled over Rebecca’s chin. She felt its warm stickiness as it flowed down the arc of her throat before being absorbed into the material of her torn blouse.
“I really wish I had the time to spend with you that I feel this situation deserves. Unfortunately, I have to get out of here. So, regrettably, I’m going to have to make this quick.”
Rebecca screamed as Portia grabbed a handful of her hair. He viciously snapped her head backward, exposing her neck, the she felt the sharp kiss of the blade as he placed it against her throat.
“What a shame I can’t spend more time with you.” He sounded truly upset.
The smell of smoke became abruptly stronger in her nostrils and she felt the pressure of the knife against her skin disappear as Portia suddenly released her from his grip.
“Well! Well! Well! Looks like we have an audience,” Portia laughed.
Rebecca’s head dropped to the floor, the muscles of her body so weak she could barely move let-alone lift her head from the oh-so-cool floor to look at what had suddenly grabbed her captor’s attention. A white haze of sparkling fog filled her peripheral vision, but as she strained her head on objecting muscles, the haze began to seep away, clearing her vision sufficiently for Rebecca to make out whom the man with the knife was talking too.
Standing in the doorway, her hands braced against the doorjamb, Rebecca saw Adrianna Drake, a look of confusion, surprise, and horror painted across her little-girl face. Adrianna’s mouth was moving but Rebecca could not make out what she was saying because the buzzing that filled her head like static from a mistuned radio station overwhelmed all other sound. She watched the girl’s lips move, her eyes questioning what she was seeing.
“What—”she started to say, but before the Professor could finish Rebecca screamed at her. “Get out. For God’s sake run.”
For a second she thought Adrianna was going to ignore her or maybe she hadn’t heard her, she could barely make out the sound of her own voice over the insect buzzing in her head. But she realized Adrianna must have understood because her look of confusion was replaced now by one of anger and a glint of defiant understanding in those cool blue child’s eyes. Adrianna’s body language changed subtly, and for an instance, she seemed to solidify into some armored warrior-child. Rebecca thought the girl might stand her ground against this terrible man. She didn’t understand what she was facing, of course. How could she?
“Get out… now!” Rebecca screamed again with all her remaining energy. Her head sagged for a second with the exertion of her scream, but when she managed to drag her eyes back to the door once more, the little girl was gone.
Byron Portia pulled Rebecca along behind him like a kid dragging a school bag through the dirt. His powerful hand enmeshed in her hair, lifting her head and upper torso a foot off the polished floor as he strode down the corridor after the fleeing Adrianna.
Her right eye was swollen shut and from an inch long gash across the soft skin of her cheek trickled a slim stream of blood, the result of her collision with the men’s room door. Still she kicked and screamed, shouting the occasional obscenity at him through choking gasps of anger and fear, the pain held back for now by the pumping of her heart and the steady flow of adrenalin through her veins. Her own hands grasped the killer’s thick wrist to try to alleviate the pain; she had already seen a large clump of her hair left behind, torn from her scalp by this man. Rebecca’s shoes had fallen off almost immediately, and now her stocking feet refused to allow her any kind of grip on the highly polished floor, causing her to bump and slide along behind her captor.