Just After Sunset (10 page)

The hood of the slicker was pushed back. His power haircut was finally in disarray—
mild
disarray; it was too short for anything else—and rainwater dripped down the sides of his face and into his eyes. He took in the situation at a glance, seemed to understand everything.
“Oh, you annoying bitch!”
he bellowed, and ran around the counter to grab her.

She stabbed out with the butcher knife. The blade shot between the first and second fingers of his splayed right hand and sawed deep into the flesh at the bottom of the V. Blood poured down. Pickering screamed in pain and surprise—mostly surprise, she thought. Hyenas don’t expect their victims to turn on th—

He reached out with his left hand, grabbed her wrist, twisted it. Something creaked. Or maybe snapped. Either way, pain bolted up her arm, as bright as light. She tried to hold on to the knife, but there was no chance. It went flying all the way across the room, and when he let go of her wrist, her right hand flopped, fingers splayed.

He bored in on her and Em pushed him backward, using both hands and ignoring the fresh scream of pain from her strained wrist. It was instinct only. Her rational mind would have told her that a push wasn’t going to stop this guy, but her rational mind was now cringing in a corner of her head, able to do nothing but hope for the best.

He outweighed her, but her bottom was pressed against the chipped lip of the center island. He went staggering backward with a look of startlement that would have been comical in other circumstances, and came down on either one ice cube or a bunch of them. For a moment he looked like a cartoon character—Road Runner, perhaps—sprinting in place in an effort to stay on his feet. Then he stepped on more ice cubes (she saw them go spinning and glinting across the floor), went down hard, and rapped the back of his head against his newly dented refrigerator.

He held up his bleeding hand and looked at it. Then he looked at her. “You
cut
me,” he said. “You bitch, you dumb bitch, look at this, you
cut
me. Why did you cut me?”

He tried to scramble to his feet, but more ice cubes went zipping out from beneath him and he thumped down again. He pivoted on one knee, meaning to rise that way, and for a moment his back was to her. Em seized the chair’s broken left arm from the center island. Ragged strands of duct tape still dangled from it. Pickering got to his feet and turned toward her. Emily was waiting. She brought the arm down on his forehead using both hands—her right one didn’t want to close, but she made it. Some atavistic, survival-oriented part of her even remembered to choke up on the red maple rod, knowing it would maximize the force, and maximum force was good. It was a chair arm, after all, not a baseball bat.

There was a thump. It wasn’t as loud as the swing door had been when he hit it coming in, but it still sounded loud enough, perhaps because the rain had slackened even more. For a moment nothing else happened, and then blood began to run out of his power haircut and over his forehead. She stared at him, into his eyes. He stared back with dazed incomprehension.

“Don’t,” he said feebly, and reached out one hand to take the chair arm from her.

“Yes,” she said, and swung again, this time from the side: a slicing two-handed blow, her right hand giving up and letting go at the last moment, her left one holding firm. The end of the arm—ragged where it had broken, splinters sticking out—hammered into Pickering’s right temple. This time the blood burst at once as his head snapped to the side, all the way to his left shoulder. Bright drops ran down his cheek and pattered onto the gray tile.

“Stop,” he said thickly, pawing at the air with one hand. He looked like a drowning man begging for rescue.

“No,” she said, and brought the arm down on his head again.

Pickering screamed and staggered away from her in a head-tucked hunch, trying to put the center island between them. He stepped on more ice cubes and skidded, but this time managed to stay upright. Only by luck, she had to believe, since he had to be all but out on his feet.

For a moment she almost let him go, thinking he would run out through the swing door. It was what she would have done. Then her dad spoke up, very calmly, in her head:
“He’s after the knife, sweetie.”

“No,”
she said, snarling it this time. “No, you
won’t
.”

She tried to run around the other side of the island and head him off, but she couldn’t run, not while she was dragging the shattered remains of the chair behind her like a ball and fucking chain—it was still duct-taped to her left knee. It banged against the island, slammed her in the butt, tried to get between her legs and trip her. The chair seemed to be on
his
side, and she was glad she had broken it.

Pickering got to the knife—it was lying against the bottom of the swing door—and fell on it like a football tackle covering a loose ball. He was making a guttural wheezing sound deep in his throat. Em reached him just as he started to turn over. She hammered him with the chair arm again and again, shrieking, aware in some part of her mind that it wasn’t heavy enough and she wasn’t generating anywhere near the amount of force she
wanted
to generate. She could see her right wrist, already puffing up, trying to address the outrage perpetrated on it just as if it expected to survive this day.

Pickering collapsed on the knife and lay still. She backed away a little, gasping for breath, those little white comets once more flying across her field of vision.

Men spoke in her mind. This was not uncommon with her, and not always unwelcome. Sometimes, but not always.

Henry:
“Get that damned knife and put it right between his shoulder blades.”

Rusty:
“No, honey. Don’t go close to him. That’s what he expects. He’s playing possum.”

Henry:
“Or the back of his neck. That’s good, too. His stinking neck.”

Rusty:
“Reaching under him would be like sticking your hand into a hay baler, Emmy. You’ve got two choices. Beat him to death
—”

Henry, sounding reluctant but convinced:
“—or run.”

Well, maybe. And maybe not.

There was a drawer on this side of the island. She yanked it open, hoping for another knife—for
lots
of them: carving knives, filleting knives, steak knives, serrated bread knives. She would settle for a goddam
butter
knife. What she saw was mostly an array of fancy black plastic cooking tools: a pair of spatulas, a ladle, and one of those big serving spoons full of holes. There was some other bric-a-brac, but the most dangerous-looking thing her eye fell on was a potato peeler.

“Listen to me,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, almost guttural. Her throat was dry. “I don’t want to kill you, but I will if you make me. I’ve got a meat fork here. If you try to turn over, I’ll stick it in the back of your neck and keep pushing until it comes out the front.”

Did he believe her? That was one question. She was sure he’d removed all the knives except for the one underneath him on purpose, but could he be sure he’d gotten all the other sharp objects? Most men had no idea what was in the drawers of their kitchens—she knew this from life with Henry, and before Henry from life with father—but Pickering wasn’t most men and this wasn’t most kitchens. She had an idea it was more like an operating theater. Still, given how dazed he was (
was
he dazed?), and how he must surely believe that a lapse of memory could get him killed, she thought the bluff might run. Only there was another question: Was he even hearing her? Or understanding her if he did? A bluff couldn’t work if the person you were trying to bluff didn’t understand the stakes.

But she wasn’t going to stand here debating. That would be the worst thing she could do. She bent over, never taking her eyes from Pickering, and hooked her fingers under the last band of tape still binding her to the chair. The fingers of her right hand wanted even less to work now, but she made them. And her sweat-drenched skin helped. She shoved downward, and the tape started coming free with another ill-tempered ripping sound. She supposed it hurt, it left a bright-red band across her kneecap (for some reason the word
Jupiter
floated randomly through her mind), but she was far past feeling such things. It let go all at once and slid down to her ankle, wrinkled and twisted and sticking to itself. She shook it off her foot and sidled backward, free. Her head was pounding, either from exertion or from where he’d hit her while she was looking at the dead girl in the trunk of his Mercedes.

“Nicole,” she said. “Her name was Nicole.”

Naming the dead girl seemed to bring Em back to herself a little. Now the idea of trying to get the butcher knife out from under him seemed like madness. The part of herself that sometimes talked in her father’s voice was right—just staying in the same room with Pickering was pressing her luck. Which left leaving. Only that.

“I’m going now,” she said. “Do you hear me?”

He didn’t move.

“I’ve got the meat fork. If you come after me, I’ll stab you with it. I’ll…I’ll poke your eyes out. What you want to do is stay right where you are. Have you got that?”

He didn’t move.

Emily backed away from him, then turned and left the kitchen by the door on the other side of the room. She was still holding the bloody chair arm.

–8–

There was a photograph on the wall by the bed.

It was the dining room on the other side. There was a long table with a glass top. Around it were seven red maple chairs. The spot where the eighth belonged was vacant. Of course. As she studied the empty place at the “mother” end of the table, a memory came to her: blood blooming in a tiny seed pearl below her eye as Pickering said,
Okay, good, okay.
He had believed her when she said only Deke could know she might be inside the Pillbox, so he had thrown the little knife—Nicole’s little knife, she had thought then—into the sink.

So there had been a knife to threaten him with all along. Still was. In the sink. But she wasn’t going back in there now. No way.

She crossed the room and went down a hall with five doors, two on each side and one at the end. The first two doors she passed were open, on her left a bathroom and on her right a laundry room. The washing machine was a top loader, its hatch open. A box of Tide stood on the shelf next to it. A bloodstained shirt was lying halfway in and halfway out of the hatch. Nicole’s shirt, Emily was quite sure, although she couldn’t be positive. And if it
was
hers, why had Pickering been planning to wash it? Washing wouldn’t take out the holes. Emily remembered thinking there had been dozens, although that surely wasn’t possible. Was it?

She thought it was, actually: Pickering in a frenzy.

She opened the door beyond the bathroom and saw a guest room. It was nothing but a dark and sterile box starring a king bed so stringently neat, you could no doubt bounce a nickel on the counterpane. And had a maid made up that bed?
Our survey says no,
Em thought.
Our survey says no maid has ever set foot in this house. Only “nieces.”

The door across from the guest room gave way to a study. It was every bit as sterile as the room it faced across the hall. There were two filing cabinets in one corner. There was a big desk with nothing on it but a Dell PC hooded with a transparent plastic dust cover. The floor was plain oak planks. There was no rug. There were no pictures on the wall. The single big window was shuttered, admitting only a few dull spokes of light. Like the guest room, this place looked dim and forgotten.

He has never worked in here,
she thought, and knew it was true. It was stage dressing. The whole house was, including the room from which she had escaped—the room that looked like a kitchen but was actually an operating theater, complete with easy-clean counters and floors.

The door at the end of the hall was closed, and as she approached it, she knew it would be locked. She would be trapped at the end of this corridor if he entered it from the kitchen/dining-room end. Trapped with nowhere to run, and these days running was the only thing she was good at, the only thing she was good
for
.

She hitched up her shorts—they felt like they were floating on her now, with the back seam split open—and grasped the knob. She was so full of her premonition that for a moment she couldn’t believe it when the knob turned in her hand. She pushed the door open and stepped into what had to be Pickering’s bedroom. It was almost as sterile as the guest room, but not quite. For one thing, there were two pillows instead of just one, and the counterpane of the bed (which looked like a twin of the guest-room bed) had been turned back in a neat triangle, ready to admit the owner to the comfort of fresh sheets after a hard day’s work. And there was a carpet on the floor. Just a cheap nylon-pile thing, but wall-to-wall. Henry no doubt would have called it a Carpet Barn special, but it matched the blue walls and made the room look less skeletal than the others. There was also a small desk—it looked like an old school desk—and a plain wooden chair. And although this was pretty small shakes compared to the study setup, with its big (and unfortunately shuttered) window and expensive computer, she had a feeling this desk had been
used.
That Pickering sat there writing longhand, hunched over like a child in a country schoolroom. Writing what she did not like to think.

The window in here was also big. And unlike the windows in the study and the guest room, it wasn’t shuttered. Before Em could look out and see what lay beyond, her attention was drawn to a photograph on the wall by the bed. Not hung and certainly not framed, only tacked there with a pushpin. There were other tiny holes on the wall around it, as if other pictures had been pinned there over the years. This one was a color shot with 4-19-07 printed digitally in the right corner. Taken by an old-fashioned camera rather than a digital one, by the look of the paper, and not by anyone with much flair for photography. On the other hand, perhaps the photographer had been excited. The way hyenas might get excited, she supposed, when sundown comes and there’s fresh prey in the offing. It was blurry, as if taken with a telephoto lens, and the subject wasn’t centered. The subject was a long-legged young woman wearing denim shorts and a cropped top that said BEER O’CLOCK BAR. She had a tray balanced on the fingers of her left hand, like a waitress in a jolly old Norman Rockwell painting. She was laughing. Her hair was blond. Em couldn’t be sure it was Nicole, not from this blurred photo and those few shocked instants when she had been looking down at the dead girl in the trunk of the Mercedes…but she
was
sure. Her heart was sure.