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DRIVER WATCHED HIS words shred through the woman named Angelica. Fast, sharp, like a starting-gun crack. She flinched and her cheeks flushed red. Like Georgette had all those years ago, this woman was still trying to invalidate that growing sense of unease. Angelica swiped at her dark curls briskly, laughed, seemed to want to turn in place; but she was blocked from the front door by his body. Driver waited for a response. She bumbled over it, her eyes anywhere but on his.
“Ah, well, I don’t think we really need to—”
“I want to see your room,” Driver said again, his tone even.
“Well,” Angelica said, “I suppose you could see what the-the-the permanent residents’ accommodation standards a-are like. Um…” She was suddenly walking off down the hall enthusiastically. Driver guessed she had a phone in the room, and that she hoped to grab it and hold it politely by her side, a signal to him that she could dial for assistance at any moment. That shewasn’t, in fact, completely alone. The phone was her weapon. But his weapon, his body, trumped it easily enough. He had thirty pounds or more on her. It was time to stop playing games, do away with the politeness, the ridiculous idea that she could keep hold of the phone and call someone and help would arrive in time to save her.
He followed her into the room, arriving a second after her, and pushed the door shut, sealing them in. She reached for the phone on the dresser, but he plucked it from her fingers and tossed it into the bed.
“You don’t need that,” he said.
He loved these moments. Those tremulous seconds before the violence, when both she and he knew what was coming. When he held off on the threats, held off on the pain, refused to show her what he could do until she acknowledged it by trying to escape. Maybe he just wanted her to see how good his disguise was. How he walked about the world like this, quiet and calm. But once again, he couldn’t get the smile right. And the eyes. She kept glancing at his eyes, and every time she did her terror seemed to intensify. He backed her up against the dresser and she banged into it with her hip but didn’t dare yelp.
“Open the drawer,” he said.
“What?”
“The top drawer,” he said. They were the same words he’d spoken to Georgette. He was there again in that apartment all those years ago, where he’d been hired to fix the drywall, feeling the weird urge for the first time, following it without even knowing what it was going to lead to yet. The young killer finally emerging from his shell. “Pull it open.”
Angelica shrunk into herself a little, brushed at her hair again.
“We don’t need to do this,” she said.
“But we’re going to,” he said.
“Please, just,” she said and straightened to her full height. “I’m going to go now. I’m going to leave.”
“No, you’re not.”
She was starting to tremble. He didn’t budge. Neither did she.
“Open the drawer, Angelica.”
She turned and did what he asked. He knew what she was thinking. She was hoping that he was just some creep who wanted to look at her underwear, and when she complied, he’d go away. Soon she’d be hoping he was just some creep who wanted to watch her undress. Then she’d hope he was just some creep who wanted to feel her up. She’d hope and hope her way through the ordeal, until she was hoping he’d let her live. Norman stood by the end of the bed, folded his arms, and felt the delicious heat intensifying in his chest and crotch as she shivered, head to toe, waiting for her next instruction.
“Pull a pair of panties out,” he said.
She did.
“Hold them up for me,” he said.
She did.
“Pass them here.”
He put his hand out, and so did she, but as they came together Driver’s brain was seized by a sudden movement at the corner of his eye and a barked command. His body moved automatically, pivoting, the palm still out, as the man in the doorway stepped into the room and said “Catch.”
Driver caught the object in a reflex movement. His fingers curled around it, securing it tightly for the fragment of a second necessary for the man to tug back on the thin piece of string attached to the ring inserted in the object’s neck. Driver watched the pin pop out of the hand grenade as though in slow motion. He was left staring at the device, his grip keeping the lever depressed, the explosive seeming to scream silently with deadly potential as it sat waiting to be allowed to blow them all to pieces.
“What…” Driver’s lips moved involuntarily. “What the—”
The tall, long-faced man in the doorway wound the string with the ring on it back up into his palm. Angelica was still shivering by the dresser, seemingly as shocked by the appearance of the man as Driver was.
“You said you were alone,” Driver said to Angelica. They were dumb words falling out of his mouth, the cataclysmic flipping of power relations in the room having rendered him momentarily senseless.
“I thought I was,” Angelica replied. “I… you must be Neddy Ives.”
“I am,” the man in the doorway said.
