Malevolent (25 page)

Patty bolted for the back hallway just as the gun spit fire and roared sound. Smoke and flash. A chunk got taken out of the wall beside her, throwing tile shrapnel into the air and into one eye. Patty stumbled like a drunk as she moved past the refrigerator which erupted in more sound and fury as she passed, a wedge of its door instantly gone. Her ears rang, her sight flattened as she made as much use as possible of her one good eye. She raced down the hall, bouncing off walls left and right, until she found her way, almost by blind luck, into her bedroom doorway. She slammed the door behind her.

With energy unknown, Patty grabbed her dressing table and dragged it across the floor to the bedroom door. She was sobbing, moaning, praying prayers she didn’t even realize she knew.

She heard a knock on the door.

She clamped a hand over her mouth to hold back everything that wanted to escape. She was trying to keep her eyeball from moving in its socket because it felt like glass grinding into the lens. Tears of pain and panic and dust irritation spilled down her face.

“You were warned,” rasped the woman on the other side of the door. “Now let me in.”

The scratching at the wood was actually more damaging to Patty’s shattered nerves than the voice. She backed away from the door, drew near a window and gauged the distance to the asphalt driveway two floors below. Too far, she reluctantly admitted, but she could use it to garner a little attention.

Patty picked up her dressing table chair and hurled it at the open window.

If it were a movie, the window frame would have exploded and the chair would have sailed out amid a noisy shower of glass. The way it played out, though, the chair didn’t more than crack the glass pane at the top of the frame. One leg punctured the wire screen, causing the chair to hang awkwardly from the sill.

The scratching sound ended and a fist crashed through one of the vertical panels on the bedroom door.

“Stand by your fucking man,”
a voice screamed.

Patty whirled as Melinda Dillon’s hand, lacerated by hundreds of wood splinters, pushed against the dressing table barricade. The hand gripped it and twisted her dressing table back and forth to loosen it from under the doorknob.

The door moved.

Walk, Patty told herself. Just like in a fire drill at school. Mustn’t run and twist an ankle like those silly bimbos in the slasher flicks. She opened her closet door and told herself,
Yep, this is about right. Trap yourself in the closet, first place she’ll look when she breaks through.

She pulled the door shut behind her and groped blindly at the clothing hanging in her way. Her cheek felt warm from the tears trickling down her face. At least she hoped it was tears.

She heard wood squealing from outside her dark prison and knew her bedroom door was being shoved open, the barrier worked free. The psycho bitch would see the cracked window first, figure out that she hadn’t made her way out that way, and look under the bed next. About all she’d have left after that would be the closet.

Meaning that Patty had maybe thirty seconds to save herself if she worked quickly and quietly.

She groped through layers of hung clothing, machete-slashing her way to the back walls. She fell to her knees, her hands pressed against that wall like she was trying to move it.

She’d been too loud. The closet door handle turned sooner than expected.

Patty’s hands scrabbled harder at the wall as the door squeaked open behind her to admit enough outside light to reveal the outline of the small panel door in front of her. She yanked its tiny knob and felt the door trying to pull free. But it had been a long time since anyone had used it, and it was nearly sealed by summer humidity. Nevertheless, on the third yank, it yielded.

“Get out here, you bitch,” Melinda Dillon screamed as Patty wormed through the small opening.

She slammed the Alice-in-Wonderland door behind her and crawled up the half dozen steps that took her into the pitch-dark attic. She remembered it to be high in the middle and sloped on two sides.

Still on all fours, Patty moved toward what she imagined to be the attic’s center. She scrunched up her nose against the scents of cedar and dust and dried-up mouse droppings. Her nose tickled and she pictured herself sneezing in the dark just as the psycho-bitch cop came up looking for her. Her head banged painfully against something, a hard angled ceiling, momentarily putting her sneeze instinct on hold.

The darkness would have been more helpful if she knew much more about the space than the pursuer who’d soon be joining her. But Patty had only been up here once before, Tim coaxing her one night with a flashlight, like a kid on a camping trip.

Patty moved forward—what she hoped was forward—until she no longer banged her head when she stood straight. She groped for the lightbulb that should be dangling from a chain at the very center if she remembered the room’s layout.

She rapped two knuckles so hard against it that she thought she might have shattered the bulb. She didn’t, but the contact got the bulb swinging so hard and high on its chain that Patty’s flailing hand lost contact with it again. She glared at the black void above her with her one good eye, convinced that she should be able to at least detect motion, but she couldn’t.

She could still hear soft rustling sounds downstairs, hangers squealing on metal rods as the woman cop shoved them aside.

There. The lightbulb hit her hand in one of its weakened return arcs and Patty clenched it. She worked her fingers up its length until they found the on-off switch.

She got, for her efforts, a dull yellow glare, a smear of light that managed to create more shadows than it dispelled. But it was
something
. It told Patty that there was a three-wheeled grocery cart up there with her. The sort of thing that some past tenant without means of transportation had taken from a supermarket and never returned. Instead, sealing it in this attic tomb with her.

Of greater importance was the shuttered window at the room’s opposite end from its staircase and Alice-in-Wonderland door. With one hand clamped over her injured eye and limping from causes unknown, Patty crept to the window and jerked the flimsy shutter aside, letting in light, air and a cascade of dead flies. The sash was up, held in place by one of those sticks paint stores give away for stirring paint.

Her fingers found one of many holes in the tattered screen and went to work on it, enlarging it so that her hand, then her arm, then half her upper body fit through.

The small panel door at the foot of the stairs screeched against its jamb, making Patty work faster. The door
slammed
against the wall as the bitch tried prying it free.

Patty snaked the top half of her body out the ragged opening and looked down. Far down. She drew herself back into the attic, dizzy from the view. What was she doing? She’d wisely reconsidered dropping from her bedroom window minutes ago, but now she’d very nearly launched herself from a spot another twelve feet higher. Facing that same landing zone of relentless asphalt.

She eased her head out once more and studied the face of the building for footholds. Found none. But if she dangled from her fingertips on the sill before letting go, it would put her another five and a half feet closer to the ground. She swung one leg over the sill and winced as it snagged on the mauled screen. She was still in her skirt from work and the screen tore effortlessly through her panty hose. White scratch tracks formed on her flesh and turned pink before breaking open and releasing thin smears of blood. Nothing like the smear that would become of her body once the asphalt drive stopped her fall. Maybe she’d merely smash a couple ankles, better than getting riddled with bullets if she stuck around.

With one leg jutting out the open window, Patty calmed her harsh breathing and made herself listen for what she really didn’t want to hear. The squeal of the obstinate little door against its tight jamb had ended moments before, and now she could feel a slight draft as fresh air made its way up the staircase from the closet.

The Alice-in-Wonderland door was open. Where was psycho-cop?

Waiting for me to jump, Patty realized with a burst of insight. She wants to make it look like suicide. Which made no sense at all, with all of the bullet holes and destruction down there, but the suspicions wouldn’t go away—Melinda Dillon didn’t want to come up after her. She wanted Patty to jump.

She heard sounds at the foot of the stairs. Harsh breathing. Someone shifting quietly. Waiting.

Patty looked longingly at the neat row of backyards seen clearly from up so high. Four or five lots to her right, kids played basketball under a naked rim. A high school girl was getting a backyard bikini tan in another. None of them looked up at her. She could scream, she supposed, but what would that accomplish? Could be fifteen, twenty minutes before anyone decided the crazy woman might need help. Couple hours after that before the police actually arrived. She’d be dead by then.

Patty blinked. Tore her gaze from the outside world, so far away, and refocused on her immediate threat, at the bottom of that staircase.

Reluctantly, she climbed back in and stepped away from the window. She softly closed the shutters and tiptoed to the middle of the attic room. She took brief hold of the lightbulb, but it was hot to the touch. She followed its thin chain with her eyes. It was so long that someone had looped it once around a hook fastened to the ceiling to take up enough slack that it wouldn’t dangle too low. Rising on her toes, Patty grabbed the chain and whipped it free of the hook. Now she was in possession of a pendulum that hung just a couple feet from the dusty floor.

She cradled the bulb tenderly under one arm, took hold of the three-wheeled grocery cart with the other and pulled both objects with her toward the attic’s darkest recess.

Too loud! The rusty cart groaned, its wheel-free leg gouging the floor. Patty winced as she lifted the cart as high off the ground as she could manage, stopping only upon reaching her hideaway corner. She hunched with the lightbulb held hanging on its chain and the grocery cart beside her.

Now came the hard part. Turning off the light switch.

In total darkness now, she could hear squirrels prancing across the roof, boards creaking with age and psycho-bitch shuffling impatiently in the closet below. Patty waited, her lacerated eyeball grinding excruciatingly every time she blinked.

Then one sound stood out. One she’d been both awaiting and dreading. Melinda Dillon was coming. Patty held her breath. A steady stream ran down her face, a trickle of salt tears and ruined eyeball.

A weak wash of light came up the stairs along with the sociopathic detective. Patty could dimly make out the light chain, its path from the ceiling to the lightbulb which she grasped. She knew that the woman coming after her had only to follow the chain’s trail from ceiling to corner to find her.

She should have counted treads. She knew there were six steps altogether, but she hadn’t thought to count the cautious footsteps as they came toward her.

Then the need for counting was over as a form took shape in the darkness, a roving patch of void that was bigger and darker than the void surrounding it. This darkness froze at the head of the stairs.

Patty shook so hard she could hear the light chain jingling all the way up to its mounting on the ceiling. And now she could hear the growing excitement and anticipation in Melinda Dillon’s breathing, and knew the murderous cop wouldn’t remain statue-still much longer. At the same time, Patty became aware of her own breathing pattern—shallow, harsh, too loud.

The shadow stirred. Patty knew she’d been found in the dark. She hadn’t another second to waste, but what followed—what absolutely
had
to follow—was the most terrifying aspect of the entire reckless plan. Without doing
this
part, Patty didn’t have a chance.

She had to be sure of her target.

Gripping the lightbulb so tightly in one sweaty hand that it might shatter and dash all hope, she felt again for the on-off switch. Found it. Twisted it to the on position. Yes, it was indeed Melinda Dillon standing there at the top of the stairs, circling the room with her gun hand in search of the source of that yellow smear of light that had looked so intense after the blinding dark.

Patty pulled the bulb back, ignoring its searing heat on her hands, aimed it and released. It swung like a pendulum, the raftered walls dancing with light and shadow as the bulb swooped low, nearly to the timbered floor, then took off again at the midpoint of its arc and raced for the head of the stairs.

Raced, more accurately, for the head
at
the stairs.

Patty moved sideways and dropped to a catcher’s position behind her cart.

Her sudden motion, like that of the swinging bulb, caught the psycho bitch’s attention. Her eyes, hand and gun zeroed in on Patty behind the shopping cart. The bullet zinged past her even before Patty became aware of the short, deafening bark of trigger-pull, or smelled the acrid scent of gunpowder as the smoke and displaced dust filled the room. The bullet chewed up cedar behind her at almost the same time the lightbulb shattered against Melinda Dillon’s forehead.

The look on the bitch’s face—priceless. More befuddlement than pain or fear at having a lightbulb popped on her skull.
This shouldn’t be happening
, the look said. She backed away.