The Face of Fear (22 page)

 
He wished Billy could be here for the kill. He felt that Billy was half of him, fifty percent of his flesh and blood and mind. Without Billy, he wasn’t fully alive at moments like this. Without Billy, he could experience only a part of the thrill, half of the excitement.

On his way to the elevator, Bollinger thought about Billy, mostly about the first few nights they had known each other.

They had met on a Friday and spent nine hours in a private all-night club on Forty-fourth Street. They had left well after dawn, and they were amazed at how the time had flown. The bar was a favorite hangout for .city detectives and was always busy
_;
however, it seemed to Bollinger that he and Billy had been the only people in the place, all alone in their corner booth.

From the start they weren’t awkward with each other. He felt as if they were twin brothers, as if they shared that mythical oneness of twins in addition to years of daily contact. They talked rapidly, eagerly. No chitchat or gossip. Conversation. Honest-to-God conversation. It was an exchange of ideas and sentiments that Bollinger had never enjoyed with anyone else. Nothing was taboo. Politics. Religion. Poetry. Sex. Self-appraisal. They found a phenomenal number of things about which they held the same unorthodox opinions. After nine hours, they knew each other better than either of them had ever known another human being.

The following night they met at the bar, talked, drank, picked up a good-looking whore and took her to Billy’s apartment. The three of them had gone to bed together, but not in a bisexual sense. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the two of them had gone to bed with her, for although they performed, sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously, a wide variety of sex acts with and upon her, Billy did not touch Bollinger, nor did Bollinger touch Billy.

That night, sex was more dynamic, exhilarating, frenzied, manic, and ultimately more exhausting than Bollinger had ever imagined it could be. Billy certainly didn’t look like a stud. Far from it. But he was precisely that, insatiable. He delighted in withholding his orgasm for hours, for he knew that the longer he denied himself, the more shattering the climax when it finally came. A sensualist, he preferred to refuse immediate satisfaction in favor of a far greater series of sensations later on. Bollinger realized from the moment he climbed into the bed that he was being tested. Rated. Billy was watching. He found it difficult to match the pace set by the older man, but he did. Even the girl complained of being worn out, used up.

He vividly recalled the position in which he’d been when he’d climaxed, because afterward he suspected that Billy had maneuvered him into it. The girl was on hands and knees in the center of the bed. Billy knelt in front of her. Bollinger knelt behind, stroking her dog-fashion. He faced Billy across her back
_;
later, he knew that Billy had wanted to finish while confronting him.

He watched himself moving in and out of the girl, then looked up and saw Billy staring at him. Staring intently. Eyes wide, electric. Eyes that weren’t entirely sane. Although he was frightened by it, he returned the stare—and was plunged into an hallucinogenic experience. He imagined he was rising out of his body, felt as if he were floating toward Billy. And as he floated, he shrank until he was so small he could tumble into those eyes. Knowing that it was an illusion in no way detracted from the impact of it
_;
he could have sworn that he actually was sinking into Billy’s eyes, sinking down, down....

His climax was considerably more than a biological function
_;
it joined him to the whore on a physical level, but it also tied him to Billy on a much higher plane. He spurted deep into her vagina, and precisely at that moment Billy spilled seed into her mouth. In the throes of an intense orgasm, Bollinger had the odd notion that he and Billy had grown incredibly inside of the girl, had swelled and lengthened until they were touching at the center of her. Then he went one step further, lost all awareness of the woman
_;
so far as he was concerned, he and Billy were the only people in the room. In his mind he saw them standing with the tips of their organs pressed together, ejaculating into each other’s penis. The image was powerful but strangely asexual. There was certainly nothing
homosexual
about it. Absolutely nothing. He wasn’t queer. He had no doubt about that. None at all. The imaginary act that preoccupied him was similar to the ritual by which members of certain American Indian tribes had once become blood brothers. The Indians cut their hands and pressed the cuts together
_;
because they believed that the blood flowed from the body of one into that of the other, they felt that they would be part of each other forever. Bollinger’s bizarre vision was like the Indians’ blood-brother ceremony. It was an oath, a most sacred bond.

And he knew that a metamorphosis had taken place; henceforth, they were not two men but one.

Now, feeling incomplete without Billy beside him, he reached the elevator cab and switched it on.

 
Connie clambered through the window, onto the thirty-eighth-floor setback.

Graham quickly tied the free end of the hundred-foot main line to her harness.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Not quite.”

His hands were getting numb. His fingertips stung, and his knuckles ached as if they were arthritic.

He tied carabiners to both ends of one of the five-foot pieces of rope he had cut. He snapped both carabiners to a metal ring on her harness. The rope between them looped all the way to her knees.

He clipped the hammer to the accessory strap on the waist belt of her harness.

“What’s all this for?” she asked.

“The next setback is five stories down. Looks about half as wide as this one. I’ll lower you the same way I got you here. I’ll be anchored to the window post.” He tugged on his own five-foot tether. “But we don’t have time to rig a seventy-five-foot safety line for you. You’ll have to go on just a single rope.”

She chewed her lower lip, nodded.

“As soon as you reach that ledge,” Graham said, “look for a narrow, horizontal masonry seam between blocks of granite. The narrower the better. But don’t waste too much time comparing cracks. Use the hammer to pound in a piton.”

“This short rope you just hooked onto me: is that to be my safety line when I get down there?”

“Yes. Unclip one end of it from your harness and snap the carabiner to the piton. Make sure the sleeve is screwed over the gate.”

“Sleeve?”

He showed her what he meant. “As soon as you’ve got the sleeve in place, untie yourself from the main line so that I can reel it up and use it.”

She gave him his gloves.

He put them on. “One more thing. I’ll be letting the rope out much faster than I did the first time. Don’t panic. Just hold on, relax, and keep your eyes open for the ledge coming up under you.”

“All right.”

“Any questions?”

“No.”

She sat on the edge of the setback, dangled her legs over the gulf.

He picked up the rope, flexed his cold hands several times to be certain he had a firm grip. A meager trace of warmth had begun to seep into his fingers. He spread his feet, took a deep breath, and said, “Go!”

She slid off the ledge, into empty space.

Pain pulsated through his arms and shoulders as her full weight suddenly dragged on him. Gritting his teeth, he payed out the rope as fast as he dared.

In the thirty-eighth-floor corridor, Frank Bollinger had some difficulty deciding which business lay directly under Harris’s office. Finally, he settled on two possibilities: Boswell Patent Brokerage and Dentonwick Mail Order Sales.

Both doors were locked.

He pumped three bullets into the lock on the Dentonwick office. Pushed open the door. Fired twice into the darkness. Leaped inside, crouched, fumbled for the wall switch, turned on the overhead lights.

The first of the three rooms was deserted. He proceeded cautiously to search the other two.

 
The tension went out of the line.

Connie had reached the ledge five stories below.

Nevertheless, he kept his hands on the rope and was prepared to belay her again if she slipped and fell before she had anchored her safety tether.

He heard two muffled shots.

The fact that he could hear them at all above the howling wind meant that they were frighteningly close.

But what was Bollinger shooting at?

The office behind Graham remained dark
_;
but suddenly, lights came on beyond the windows of the office next door.

Bollinger was too damned close.

Is this where it happens? he wondered. Is this where I get the bullet in the back?

Sooner than he had expected, the signal came on the line: two sharp tugs.

He reeled in the rope, wondering if he had as much as a minute left before Bollinger found the correct office, the broken window—and him.

If he was going to reach that ledge five stories below before Bollinger had a chance to kill him, he would have to rappel much faster than he had done the first time.

Once more, the rope passed over regularly spaced windows. He would have to be careful not to put his feet through one of them. Because he’d have to take big steps rather than little ones, and because he’d have to descend farther on each arc and take less time to calculate his movements, avoiding the glass would be far more difficult than it had been from the fortieth to the thirty-eighth floor.

His prospects rekindled his terror. Perhaps it was fortunate that he needed to hurry. If he’d had time to delay, the fear might have grown strong enough to immobilize him again.

 
Harris and the woman were not in the offices of Dentonwick Mail Order Sales.

Bollinger returned to the corridor. He fired two shots into the door of the Boswell Patent Brokerage suite.

36

Boswell Patent Brokerage occupied three small rooms, all of them shabbily furnished—and all of them deserted.

At the broken window, Bollinger leaned out, looked both ways along the snow-swept six-foot-wide setback. They weren’t there either.

Reluctantly, he brushed the shards of glass out of his way and crawled through the window.

The storm wind raced over him, pummeled him, stood his hair on end, dashed snowflakes in his face and shoved them down his shirt, under his collar, where they melted on his back. Shivering, he regretted having taken off his overcoat.

Wishing he had handholds of some sort, he stretched out on his belly. The stone was so cold that he felt as if he had lain down bare-chested on a block of ice.

He peered over the edge. Graham Harris was only ten feet below, swinging away from the building on a thin rope, slipping down the line as he followed his arc, swinging back to the building: rappelling.

He reached down, gripped the piton. It was so cold that his fingers almost froze to it. He tried to twist it loose but discovered it was well planted.

Even in the pale, almost nonexistent light, he could see that there was a gate in the snap link that was fixed to the piton. He fingered it, tried to open it, but couldn’t figure out how it worked.

Although he was right on top of Harris, Bollinger knew he could not get off an accurate shot. The cold and the wind had brought tears to his eyes, blurring his vision. The light was poor. And the man was moving too fast to make a good target.

Instead, he put down the Walther PPK, rolled onto his side, and quickly extracted a knife from his trousers pocket. He flicked it open. It was the same razor-sharp knife with which he had murdered so many women. And now, if he could cut the rappelling line before Harris got down to the ledge, he would have claimed his first male victim with it. Reaching to the piton, he began to saw through the loop of the knot that was suspended from the jiggling carabiner.

The wind struck the side of the building, rose along the stone, buffeted his face.

He was breathing through his mouth. The air was so cold that it made his throat ache.

Completely unaware of Bollinger, Harris pushed away from the building once more. Swung out, swung back, descended six or eight feet in the process. Pushed out again.

The carabiner was moving on the piton, making it difficult for Bollinger to keep the blade at precisely the same cutting point on the rope.

Harris was rappelling fast, rapidly approaching the ledge where Connie waited for him. In a few seconds he would be safely off the rope.

Finally, after Harris had taken several more steps along the face of the highrise, Bollinger’s knife severed the nylon rope
_;
and the line snapped free of the carabiner.

 
 
As Graham swooped toward the building, his feet in front of him, intending to take brief possession of a narrow window ledge, he felt the rope go slack.

He knew what had happened.

His thoughts accelerated. Long before the rope had fallen around his shoulders, before his forward momentum was depleted, even as his feet touched the stone, he had considered his situation and decided on a course of action.

The ledge was two inches deep. Just the tips of his boots fit on it. It wasn’t large enough to support him.

Taking advantage of his momentum, he flung himself toward the window and pushed in that direction with his toes—up and in, with all of his strength—the instant he made contact with the window ledge. His shoulder hit one of the tall panes. Glass shattered.

He had hoped to thrust an arm through the glass, then throw it around the center post. If he could do that, he might hold on long enough to open the window and drag himself inside.

However, even as the glass broke, he lost his toehold on the icy two-inch-wide sill. His boots skidded backward, sank through empty air.

He slid down the stonework. He pawed desperately at the window as he went.