Sylvie's Cowboy (15 page)

She retreated into the laundry room, where it
was even darker. Almost no light from the living room lamps reached
as far as the laundry room doorway.

She heard Dan coming closer, walking slowly,
looking into the other rooms off the hallway as he stalked her. His
shoes creaked softly.

Dan’s eyes flicked back and forth, and his
ears strained to catch a sound, some sign of Sylvie. “Yes, I think
I’ll be content as a rich widower living abroad. And frankly, Sil,
you seem to have grown too fond of the ‘grassroots’ lifestyle,
anyway. I’d have gotten bored with you very soon, I’m afraid.”

Inside the laundry room, Sylvie’s eyes
adjusted to the darkness. She made out a shape in the far corner.
The circuit breaker box. She moved toward it, careful not to rattle
the bag of clothespins hanging on the lingerie rack mounted across
that corner.

Dan’s shadow fell across the doorway of the
laundry room just as Sylvie’s hand reached out and flipped a
circuit breaker switch. Snap. Utter darkness from the living room.
Snap, snap, snap, snap, the other rooms, just for good measure.

Dan stumbled and cursed somewhere nearby.
Sylvie pressed herself to the wall, barely breathing, only
listening. Listening.

She heard Dan’s footsteps in the hallway.
Light switches went click-click, then click-click again, as he
tried to find one that worked. She knew none of them would. She
heard his breathing rasp angrily, like a bull about to charge.

If Sylvie had peered around the doorway of
the laundry room and down the hallway, she would have seen Dan’s
shape, visible against the city lights coming through the living
room’s wall of windows. He held his gun in one hand, and with the
other he worked at his shoelaces while balancing against the wall.
One shoe hit the floor with an ominous thud.

Sylvie gasped at the noise and quickly
covered her mouth. The second thud told her the other shoe had
fallen. She wouldn’t be able to hear him coming any more.

She lowered herself silently to the laundry
room floor and crawled behind the washer and dryer, flinching at
the dust and filth and gooey detergent residue she must wriggle
through.

Sylvie did not know that Dan was creeping
systematically around the walls of the small butler’s pantry across
the hall from the laundry room. He found a flashlight and tried it.
The batteries were old, the light dim, but it was something. He
used it to finish searching the butler’s pantry, then he moved
across the hall into the laundry room.

Sylvie was scrunched behind the washer,
inching carefully toward the door, when she was stopped by a
flashlight beam passing over the washer and dryer on its way to the
far wall. Holding her breath and trembling in terror, she watched
the light play over each corner and cranny as Dan moved into the
room.

He was standing on the opposite side of the
washer from Sylvie when a mouse crawled out from under the washer
and skittered across Sylvie’s dust-covered hands. Sylvie stuffed
her hand into her mouth, dust and all, and fought to keep from
shrieking. Daring to breathe, she tried to slow her heart rate and
respiration. She had to regain her composure if she was going to
save herself and Walt.

Dan began creeping toward the far wall of the
laundry room. Sylvie edged around the washer toward the hallway
door. She was watching Dan’s progress so intently, she didn’t see
the substantial spider web and its pancake-size brown spider until
she turned her head toward the doorway and—at the same instant Dan
identified the circuit breaker box.

Dan’s sudden “Ah-hah!” providentially covered
up Sylvie’s gasp of terror as she slapped the spider away and ran
out into the hallway. At the same time, Dan was reaching for the
breaker box.

Sylvie ran into the kitchen just as the
living room lamps snapped back on.

Back in the laundry room, Dan was snapping
his way through the circuit breakers, reactivating all the light
switches in the apartment.

She looked desperately around the dark
kitchen. Perhaps she could make the re-established electrical power
work in her favor. She turned on every switch in sight, on the
stove, on the radio, on the oven timer—knocking over a roll of
paper towels in the process.

She reached into the dark refrigerator and
grabbed the carton of eggs, stuffed them into the microwave oven,
and turned it on.

Just then, the kitchen electricity snapped
on.

Sylvie ran for the living room.

In the laundry room, Dan reacted to a sudden
burst of noise and light from the kitchen. Country music blared
from the kitchen radio at top volume.

Dan ran from the laundry room to the kitchen,
but he found no Sylvie there. He threw his flashlight at the radio,
knocking it off the counter and silencing it with a crash.

Dan backed out of the kitchen into the
hallway and started toward the living room.

At the other end of the kitchen, Sylvie’s
hand snaked around the corner of the cabinets to grab a
wall-mounted fire extinguisher and take it out of sight.

Walt struggled toward consciousness on the
living room floor. Barely able to focus, he made out Dan’s shape
stalking the hallway, gun in hand. Walt attempted to roll close
enough to the end table to retrieve his knife from the fruit bowl.
He failed. In the attempt, he knocked over the water-filled ice
bucket and its bottle of champagne.

The resounding noise of the falling metal
bucket caused Dan to spin automatically in the direction of the
sound. He stumbled over his own briefcase.

Thinking this was the hardest thing he had
ever done, Walt gritted his teeth against the vicious pain and made
a desperate grab for the knife. His hand was on the hilt, but
before he could pull the blade free of the apple that held it, his
jaw exploded into lightning bolts of new pain. Dan had kicked
Walt’s head as hard as he could. Blessed oblivion claimed Walt
instantaneously. If Dan had been wearing shoes, Walt would be
dead.

As Walt’s mindless bulk crumpled to the
floor, the weight of his falling arm drove the hunting knife all
the way through the apple and knocked the fruit basket askew. The
knife sat, firmly wedged, blade up, in the tilted fruit basked on
the end table. Beneath the table, a lake of champagne, broken
glass, and ice water formed around the overturned silver
bucket.

Dan might have made sure of Walt’s mortality
right then, but he reacted to a sudden noise from the kitchen. He
smiled. She must be in there. He started to step over Walt’s body,
but looking at the locked door, a thought occurred to him. He
stooped, rifled Walt’s pockets and took his keys.

In the kitchen, Sylvie crept from her hiding
place near the foyer and set the fire extinguisher down like a
roadblock just inside the doorway at one end of the galley kitchen.
She turned back toward the foyer and, edging around that end of the
kitchen—while Dan left Walt’s body and skulked toward the opposite
end of the kitchen—she managed to slip into the living room.

She hunkered, hidden, behind the sofa, and
eased a hand over the back of it to retrieve her purse. She hoped
Dan was too far away to detect her small sounds as she clambered
through the miscellany of her purse, all the while mouthing, “Keys,
keys, keys!”

She found nothing even resembling a key, and
nothing that looked useful against a homicidal sociopath. Her eyes
fell on Clarice’s broken curling iron, and she began to think.

Unaware that Sylvie was slithering out the
opposite end of the kitchen, Dan leapt from the hall into the
kitchen doorway, gun leveled. He saw no one. Deciding to keeping
looking down the hall, he backed out of the kitchen and slunk once
more toward the laundry room. He spared a glance toward the living
room and saw no one there but the prostrate Walt.

As Dan prowled away from her down the
hallway, Sylvie was shoving the broken curling iron under the sofa
and out the other side, into the puddle of ice water beneath the
coffee table. She worried that Walt was too close to her trap—she
feared she might kill him. If her trap worked. If he wasn’t already
dead.

Unacceptable!
She shoved morbid
thoughts aside in favor of a proactive approach. As quickly and
quietly as possible, she crawled from behind the sofa and dragged
Walt by the arms, one desperate centimeter at a time, away from the
pool of water.

In the hallway, Dan approached the laundry
room door. A faint rustling sound met his ear. Silently, he edged
close to the door and leaned to peer into the dark laundry room.
Then ... a movement! He fired! Dan swung into the room to finish
the job—on Sylvie’s mouse.

The sound of Dan’s gunshot sent Sylvie
skittering back to her hiding place behind the sofa. The lamp at
the end of the sofa cast a dangerous light, and she yanked the plug
from the wall.

The room went dark. From the hallway, Dan
fired a shot toward the living room. The lamp shattered. Broken
glass and ceramics clattered down around Sylvie’s ears, but she
made no sound.

Dan started up the hallway, in the direction
of the sofa. As he neared the darkened kitchen the toaster popped
up with a loud clang. Dan jerked toward the sound.

The paper towels that had fallen against the
stovetop began to smolder.

In the microwave, a dozen eggs exploded with
horrific bangs. Dan fired a shot toward the kitchen.

The paper towels ignited. The smoke detector
bellowed. Disoriented and distracted, Dan moved toward the
kitchen.

In the living room, Sylvie rose from behind
the sofa and tossed a throw pillow across the room to hit the
refuse chute at the foyer end of the kitchen.

The chute’s metal door rattled and clanked.
Dan ran toward the sound and tripped over the fire extinguisher on
the floor. Cursing the object, he nonetheless had the presence of
mind to pick it up and use it to put out the flaming towels on the
stovetop. Then he turned the extinguisher on the blaring smoke
alarm and froze it into silence.

While Dan was in the kitchen, putting out
fires in his stocking feet, Sylvie was plugging in the broken
curling iron in the living room. Then, carefully avoiding the icy
puddle on the floor, she knelt beside Walt and searched his pockets
for keys. No luck.

Then she remembered his ankle holster. She
looked in the wrong pant leg first, but she soon found Walt’s gun
and ghosted toward the kitchen with it.

Dan was putting out the last of the fire. He
had laid his pistol on the counter in order to wield the
extinguisher with both hands. Sylvie silently appropriated his
weapon.

When the smoke detector finally ceased its
piercing wail, the next sound Dan heard was his gun clanging down
the refuse chute, where it would fall thirty floors to the basement
dumpster.

Dan turned toward the sound and found Sylvie
pointing Walt’s gun at him. “You don’t approve of killing, Sylvie,”
he reminded her with confidence.

“No, but I’d kill a dangerous animal if I had
to.”

She backed Dan into the living room, where
she forced him to sit on the sofa. Between Sylvie and Dan were the
coffee table, fruit basket, ice-water puddle, and Walt’s
unconscious, bleeding body. Sylvie kept the gun trained on Dan as
best she could while, again, she felt in Walt’s pockets.

Smiling, Dan held up the key to the front
door. “Looking for this?”

Sylvie stood and faced him with grim
determination. “Give it to me, Danny. I don’t want to hurt you, I
don’t care about the money, I don’t care where you go or what you
do. I just want to call an ambulance, okay.”

He scoffed. “Do you seriously expect me to
believe that Sylvie Pace, the Princess of Worth Avenue, no longer
thinks that having money is important?”

“It’s important, I can’t deny that,” she
said, “but it’s not as important as other things. Things you don’t
even know about, Danny. Things you’ll never have, no matter how
rich you think you are. Give me the keys.”

He pretended to go along, throwing the keys
to her, but he threw them short. She would have to take her eyes
off him and grope on the shadowy floor to get them.

She glanced away, and Dan lunged for her. He
stepped in the puddle and sharply reacted to the electric shock
that whacked him from the defective curling iron. Sylvie watched in
horror as he reeled and fell—onto the knife protruding up from the
coffee table. Then all was still.

Stunned, Sylvie stared for several seconds at
the gruesome tableau before her, outlined by the city light from
the wall of windows. She swallowed a sob, shook herself, and
scanned the floor nearby. A glint of silver flashed in the meager
light, and she snatched up the key.

Praying that Walt was still alive, she ran
for the door, let herself out into the building’s corridor, and
raced to find a telephone and help.

Sylvie parked Walt’s red truck at the end of
the hospital parking lot near a small, blue lake dotted with black
and white Muscovy ducks. She appeared calm and assured when she
emerged from the truck dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, old cowboy
boots, and a floppy well-worn Stetson. She carried a handful of
wild flowers and a tote bag bulging with paperbacks.

She was a different woman than she had been
four weeks ago. She wore no makeup these days, and her hair curled
naturally about her shoulders. People often said she seemed to get
prettier every day.

Sylvie’s priorities had changed irrevocably
the night she sat in a helicopter and held Walt’s limp hand all the
way to the hospital. Death had ridden with them, hovering closer
and closer, but was cheated of its prey by a narrow margin.

She had experienced the loss of her money,
her cars, her home, and her supposed friends, but that was nothing.
All those losses were mere inconveniences. She needed only one
thing to live, thrive, and be happy—and she had felt Death’s bony
fingers trying to take him away from her. Only then had she
experienced true despair.