If Looks Could Kill (50 page)

"She came to judge you," Sandy insisted, shaking Chris like a rag doll. Bringing the knife so close Chris could see her own blood on it. "She came right there, close, bending down to your bed like a mother tucking in a child, when you were still so quiet, and she told you. She told you... she told you and I listened, and I knew..."

Chris tried to shake her head, even her own culpability easier to bear than this. "No, no, she wouldn't... not even she..."

"God's righteous judgment, child... that you should bear the stain of your awful sin, that your profane whelp should die, that you bear the responsibility... your sin... your judgment... your sin..." She clutched tighter, hands like steel, eyes wild, tear-filled, sorry and triumphant. "It's what you wanted," Sandy whispered in her own voice. "What you wanted... because you couldn't live with what she did..."

Chris made one more try for her throat, the world beginning to pulsate in her ears. "No," she begged, suddenly not sure. Suddenly terrified that she would die in this reeking, echoing darkness with her own mother's voice in her ears and her ghost's face the only one she could see. "Please..."

The knife lifted this time. Sandy whirled Chris around, grabbed her by the chin, lifted her head. Chris fought. She kicked and bucked and clawed. Struggled to get at the gun she'd hidden away, the one she'd thought she wouldn't need. The one she couldn't reach.

"Can't have that kind of scandal... good... church... members..."

Chris lifted her hands to deflect the knife. She sobbed out in desperation. She struggled against a woman who had the strength of ten. And she lost.

She heard the howl. She thought it was Sandy's. She closed her eyes. Waited the heartbeat for the cold slice of the knife. She felt Sandy jerk upright. She heard the knife descend. Felt its touch, and then, suddenly a thudding impact.

Mac.

Chris heard something snap. She heard Sandy's shrill howl of anguish at the interference. She heard the feral cry from Mac when he made contact with the woman.

The three of them slammed into the wall together. They spun away and landed on the floor. Chris saw a tumbled image of faces, heard the stunned grunts of contact. Desperately fought for air and balance and action.

Mac was ahead of her. Even as his gun clattered against the comer, he threw himself at Sandy, shoving her to the floor beneath him. His shirt soaked in blood, his face half recognized, he snarled and struggled and wrestled with the madwoman who still had the knife.

"Get it," he rasped, atop a bucking, screaming Sandy.

Chris scrambled to her feet, her chest screeching in protest. She dove for the outstretched arm and slammed it into the concrete. Sandy bucked them both off.

"Vengeance is mine!" her cry echoed from the tight walls. Her body bolted upright. Her knife hand aimed right for Chris's face.

Chris finally got hold of her own gun just as Mac tackled Sandy at the knees. "Goddamn it, stay down," he commanded, shoving his head right into her solar plexus.

Sandy grunted, went down, lost the knife. Struggled to get up. Chris scrambled across the floor for either weapon. Came up with them both. Stuffed them into the pockets of her coat.

Mac ducked his head to keep his face away from those terrible claws. Sandy was trying to scratch his eyes out. She was trying to rip his throat out with her bare hands.

"I have... have to... save her!"

"Not today," he panted. "Chris, get help."

"But Mac..."

"Get it!"

Chris struggled to her feet and then slid in a puddle of something. She tried to run for the door and only managed a disorganized little limp. It seemed so far away. She was having such trouble keeping it in focus suddenly, keeping her body in motion.

Behind her Sandy howled again, a high, fearsome wail of panic and fury, and Mac began to murmur to her, trying to calm her, trying to get control. Chris reached the door and pushed it all the way open. She saw the blood on her hand, all down her arm, but it didn't register. She ran for the radio.

It was too late for courtesy. "John!" she screamed into the mike. "The jail! Help!"

And then she slid again, the pool of liquid on the floor somehow following her.

Her sense of time must have been funny, because it seemed that no sooner had she screamed than the door blew open. Bodies poured through, all of them in uniforms, bristling with guns, mouths open in a dull roar of aggression.

"Help him," she begged, not understanding why she was on her knees. "He's back there..."

Tom. Right behind all those uniforms. Anxious and harried and in a hurry.

"Mac's... Mac's hurt..." she told him, spinning, struggling to even stay on her knees.

"So are you," he said, and suddenly she was looking up at the ceiling. Then she wasn't looking at anything, because the room and the noise and the terror eased away into blackness.

* * *

Mac thought his head was going to explode. His chest hurt. His arms hurt. He couldn't see anything at all from one eye, which was probably the only thing preventing double vision.

He wasn't going to make it. He heard the thunder of footsteps out in that office and still knew it would be too late. His strength was vanishing. He was conscious by a thread, and the woman screaming and battling him was as strong as five people.

It didn't matter, though. He'd gotten Chris out of there. He'd made up at least a little for getting blind-sided.

"Get some light in here!" John barked, slamming the door open on his way through. He cursed when he slid on something and righted himself against the wall. Mac couldn't afford to pull his attention away long enough to notice. "Mac?"

Lawson made another stab for his eyes. Mac was slowing down so badly that he damn near let her. And then there was a herd of men in the room. Shotguns being racked, pistols pulled. Mac felt the hands take her from him. Felt more hands pull him back and up and away. Heard the reverberating screech of the woman he'd known as Elise Lawson, now fighting off five men. Saw the sudden explosion of light into the room and blinked blearily.

"Jesus Christ!" John gasped, taking over for one of the sets of hands that held Mac up. "Somebody get the doc in here!"

"The doc's busy where he is!" Mac heard. And then he saw the blood. Everywhere, splattering the whitewashed walls like an exploded balloon. Pooling on the floor, seeping through his pants legs and along the sleeves of his shirt. An explosion of blood.

"Then get the paramedics!" John demanded, and Mac could see the fear in his sergeant's eyes. "Mac, man, lie down. You're..."

Mac knew perfectly well what he was. Suddenly it didn't matter. He had to get out and find out just what Tom Clarkson had meant. He had to follow the trail of blood that led out into the office.

"Lie down!" John insisted.

Mac threw off the hands and stumbled for the front. He slid on the blood and grabbed onto the wall right next to Chris's handprint. He didn't even feel the hands still on him as he tripped up into the office.

Chris was sprawled out on the floor right by the console. The brand new linoleum beneath her was stained, the stain spreading. Tom had the coat open, had the vest open, had his fingers in a hold in her neck.

"Oh, God..."

Hands red and glistening, Tom spared him a look. "Shit!" he snapped, "will somebody make that stupid son of a bitch lie down? And get the fuckin' paramedics in here!"

"You want Heilerman's on standby?" one of the men asked as somebody caught Mac on the way to the floor.

"No," Tom retorted, his hands full of silver clamps and his best shirt full of blood. "I don't fucking want Heilerman's. I want these people to make it!"

Mac closed his eyes for just a minute, fought a wave of nausea, battled back the darkness that threatened to overtake him. He ended up wedged against the wall, much as he had back in that black, cold little cell. This time, though, the lights were on.

The knife was being lifted from the floor by one of the sheriffs men and the bad guy was under about half a ton of law enforcement.

"She gonna be all right?" he managed to ask, blinking to stay in focus.

Tom didn't bother to look up. "Since I happen to be one of the few country doctors who interned at Cook County Hospital, I'd say yes. Knifings are my specialty." He did look up then. "And you're next."

Mac didn't have to look down to see. He could feel the fire of deep cuts. He tasted the blood on his tongue and smelled the sickly sweet, coppery bouquet of it. As familiar to a Chicago cop as car exhaust and the lake.

"You need any help?"

Tom's reaction was instantaneous. "From a
cop?"
Then he looked up and must have seen the expression in Mac's eyes. He backed right down with a smile that made Mac think of Sue. "It'll be all right," was all he'd say, sounding just like a parent.

Mac sat like a lump and didn't know how to ask for more.

He almost hadn't made it in time. Crumpled in that black, black corner, he'd been a mass of pulpy protoplasm without so much as a coherent thought. A mass of pain and nausea and confusion that only managed to move when he realized that it was Chris's voice out there come to save him. Chris who was about to offer herself up.

He almost hadn't hauled himself together in time to save her. And if that had happened, he might just as well have crawled right back into that little corner and let the lights go out again.

Thirty police in half a dozen different uniforms milled around the room. Outside the copters thumped in syncopation, and a couple of tungsten lights flashed on. There were questions waiting. There was publicity and outrage and salacious curiosity to be salved. But for right now Mac was content to lie half-sprawled against the wall and watch Tom work his magic.

"She told me to wait," John protested, his young face crinkling into concern as he crouched in front of Mac. "That she was going to get her out of the jail."

"She tried," Mac allowed, thinking how much more pleasant it would all be if he could just pass out, too. Then he caught sight of a beefy figure in the crowd. "JayCee?"

"Yeah, Chief."

"You're fired." Everybody stopped dead in their tracks. Mac decided that he didn't have to explain. He didn't have the energy to, anyway. From the back room, the howling echoed on like a bad scene from a John Carpenter movie. "So, what do you think, Tom? Fifty of Thorazine?"

Tom grunted unhappily. "That'd be an hors d'oeuvre in there. We're talking well into three figures. That's if I don't just lose my temper completely and use a baseball bat. By the way, there are two guns here. Didn't either of you think to use one of them?"

Now was not the time to go into details. "It all happened kind of quick."

At the door, the sea parted, and the paramedic crew slid their gurney through. And stopped, obviously not sure who to head for first.

"Over here," Tom snapped, then offered Mac one more assessing look. "Is this it?" he demanded, his eyes no longer flip at all. "Is it over now?"

Mac felt the mists gather. He realized that the voices outside were no more than buzzes, and that the lights had begun to fade. He smiled. "Almost," he said, thinking of what he'd heard in there. "Almost."

And then he refused to answer any more questions at all.

Epilogue

She went to Dinah's memorial service after all. Pale and unsteady and wearing a turtleneck dress with long sleeves to hide all the fresh stitches, Chris sat between Trey and Sue, while the magazines took shot after shot of America's latest news item. The remembrances were irreverent, the emotions heartfelt, the surprise revelations ignored. Just another chapter in the hottest story to hit news, entertainment, and literature in a decade. Before, Chris wouldn't have had the nerve to show up. Now she simply ignored the attending commotion and paid her respects to her old friend and mentor. And then, with Sue still hovering over her like a suspicious nanny, she got on the plane and came home to Pyrite.

It was supposed to be late spring. Unfortunately in Missouri there is no such season. The temperatures had a firm hold on the nineties and the flowers fared well only in the shade. The hills were thick with foliage, the helicopters busy looking for new stands of marijuana, and Truman High was gearing up for the prom. Life went on.