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“Shut up!”
Holly slides along the wall to the left just as Emily fires again. There’s no spark this time; the slug goes through one of the squares and makes a penny-sized hole in the concrete where Holly was standing a second before. The gun wavers in Emily’s hand and Holly thinks, She’s a lefty, and that’s the arm she broke. She’s shooting with her dumb hand.
“And asks for a mai-tai. Are you with me so far? This is pretty good, at least I think so. The bartender goes to make it and the woman hears a voice say ‘Congratulations, Holly! You deserve—’?”
Emily starts forward, wanting to get close, but catches a foot in Roddy’s bathrobe and falls again. One knee comes down on the late professor’s butt. The other knee lands on the concrete. Her body twists at the waist, she cries out in pain, and the gun goes off. This bullet goes into the back of Roddy’s head. Not that he feels it.
Stay down, Holly thinks. Stay down. STAY DOWN!
But Emily rises, although the pain makes her scream and she can’t manage to get fully upright. Holly doesn’t think she looks like a witch anymore; now she looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her eyes are bulging. There are white curds at the corners of her mouth and Holly doesn’t want to consider what the woman may have eaten, telling herself she needed the strength, before coming back down to end Holly with her mentor’s gun. Which she now raises.
“Come on,” Holly says. “Show me what you can do.”
She slides to the left along the wall, ducking at the same time, feeling as fragile as one of her mother’s china figurines. This time she’s a little late and Emily is a little lucky. Holly feels a burning streak across her right arm above the elbow. Holly also knows her Shakespeare and thinks of Hamlet: a hit, a very palpable hit. But only a graze. It doesn’t hurt much, at least not yet.
“So this voice says ‘Congratulations, Holly! You deserve every fracking cent of that money.’ But when she looks around, no one is there. Then she hears a voice on the other side say—”
“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!”
Just before Emily fires again, Holly drops to her knees. She hears the hzzzz of the bullet passing just over her head, close enough to part her hair. For all she knows it did part her hair.
“Sorry, Professor,” Holly says, getting up. “Pistols are only good at close range.” She can feel blood soaking the sleeve of her shirt. It’s warm, and warmth is good. Warmth is life. “And you’re shooting with the wrong hand, too. Let’s end this. I’ll make it easy for you. Just let me finish my joke.”
She walks to the front of the cell and pushes her face into one of the squares. Bars press against her cheeks and the bars are cold. “So this other voice says, ‘You’re looking especially pretty tonight, Holly.’ But when she looks, still no one there! The bartender comes back with the drink, and—”
Emily lurches forward. She presses the short barrel of Bill’s pistol against Holly’s forehead and pulls the trigger. There’s a dry click as the hammer falls on the chamber Holly has left empty, as Bill taught her… because revolvers, unlike the Glock that was his service weapon, have no safeties.
There is just long enough for Emily to register surprise before Holly shoots her hands through the bars, seizes Emily’s head, and twists it to the left with all her strength. Holly heard a snap when the old woman’s arm broke. What she hears this time is a muffled crack. Emily’s knees buckle. Her head slides out of Holly’s grip as she goes down, leaving Holly with nothing but a few gray hairs in her left hand. They feel nasty, like cobwebs, and she wipes them away on her shirt. She hears herself breathing in great gasps, and the world tries to swim away from her. She can’t let that happen, so she slaps herself across the face. Blood flies from her wounded arm. Droplets spatter on the bars of the cage.
Emily has ended up in a kind of squat, legs beneath her but twisted in opposite directions from the knees down, her face resting against the cage. One of the bars has pulled her nose up into a pig’s snout. Like her legs, her open eyes appear to be staring in different directions. Holly drops to her knees, raises the feeding-flap, and gets the gun. It’s empty but can still be useful. If Emily is still alive (Holly doubts it), if she moves at all, Holly intends to beat her fracking head in.
There is no movement. Holly counts aloud to sixty. Still on her knees, she reaches through one of the lower squares and presses her fingers into the side of Emily’s neck. The boneless way the woman’s head rolls over onto her shoulder tells Holly all she needs to know (what she knew already), but she keeps her fingers there for another sixty count. She feels nothing. Not even a few final erratic beats of a dying heart.
Holly gets up, still breathing in those great gasps, but she can’t keep her feet. She sits down heavily on the futon. She’s alive. She can’t believe it. She does believe it. The pain in her ribs convinces her. The burn in her arm convinces her. And her thirst convinces her. She feels that she could drink all five of the Great Lakes dry.
They are both dead. She cut the throat of one, broke the neck of the other. And here she sits in a cage no one knows about. Someone will come eventually, but how long before that happens? And how long can a human being go without water? She doesn’t know. She can’t even remember the last time she had a drink.
She slides up the sleeve of her shirt, hissing with pain as the cloth passes over the wound. She sees it was a little more than a graze, after all. The skin is split two inches above her right elbow, and she can look into the meat of her arm. The bone isn’t visible, and she supposes that’s good, but the wound is bleeding freely. She knows blood-loss will also contribute to her thirst, which is raging now and will soon be… what? What’s beyond raging? She can’t think of the word any more than she can think of how many days a person can go without water.
I killed them both from inside this cage. That should go in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Holly works her way out of her shirt. It’s a slow operation, and painful, but she finally manages. She ties it around the gunshot wound—another slow operation—and knots it with her teeth. Then she leans back against the concrete wall and begins to wait.
“A new millionaire walks into a bar,” she croaks, “and orders a mai-tai. While the bartender is making it, she hears someone say, ‘You deserve that money, Holly. Every fracking cent.’ She looks and there’s nobody there. Then she hears a voice on her other side say, ‘You killed them both from inside the cage, you’re in the Guinness Book of World Records, way to go, you’re a star.’?”
Has Emily moved? Surely not. Surely her imagination. Holly knows she should shut up, talking will only make her thirstier, but she needs to finish the fracking joke, even if her only audience is a couple of dead old people.
“The bartender comes back and she says, ‘I keep hearing voices saying these nice things, what’s up with that?’ And the bartender says… he says…”
She passes out.
22
While Holly is losing consciousness (and just before the punchline, too), Barbara is at home, in the office that’s now Jerome’s. She’s looking at the MapQuest printout with the red dots on it marking the various disappearances. Which now includes the one she herself made to mark Jorge Castro, who went missing in the fall of 2012. Barbara put that dot on Ridge Road across from Olivia’s house. Did I tell you I saw him shortly before he disappeared? Olivia said that. Running. He always ran at night, to the park and back again. Even in the rain, and it was raining that night. And something else: I certainly never saw him again.
Barbara traces a route from the Bell campus down Ridge Road to the park. To the playground in the park. What if it was there? There’s a parking lot, and if there was a van, like the one in the security footage of Bonnie in the store…
Something nibbles at her. Something about the van? About Ridge Road? Both? She doesn’t know, although she’s sure Dutch Spyglass would.
