PAH-rum-pum-pum-pum
Louie was right behind me, bags hanging off him everywhere. I said, “Stay down here.”
He said, “Hell with that.”
“I don’t know what’s up there.”
“Me, neither,” he said. “We’re a perfect team.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to my presents.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, if you put it that way.”
“Meet you in the food court in a few minutes. If I’m not there in twenty, go find a uniformed security guy and tell him you saw someone break through the ribbon and go up to the second floor of the department store.”
“I can handle that.” He licked his lips, shifted his weight from foot to foot a couple of times, clearly conflicted. “If you’re sure.”
“I am. See you soon.”
He trudged off, glancing back once, and when I was sure he wasn’t going to reverse direction and come after me, I turned back to the escalator.
The big ribbon, which had been cut from thick red paper, had torn unevenly as Mini-me rushed through it. A hubbub of voices drew my attention back down the aisle where the glass had hit the floor, where a few helpful people were very carefully picking up the pieces. Eyes were beginning to turn my way. I pointed up the escalator to remind them that someone else had caused the damage and started to climb, experiencing the uncoordinated feeling I always have when every step is a different height; motionless escalators are real ankle-breakers. Before I fell flat on my face, I paused and looked up at my destination.
It wasn’t a welcoming prospect. It was so dark up there that even halfway up the escalator I still couldn’t see the ceiling. Only the light filtering up from the bazaar area seemed to thin the darkness.
I took a quick look around the bazaar below, just orienting myself. The deserted department store was at the north end of the mall, a space that was more or less rectangular, wider from east to west than it was from north to south. The north wall was curved, paralleling the structure’s curving exterior. The ceiling down here was about fourteen, sixteen feet from the floor, and I saw no reason to think the dimensions of the space would be any different in the floors above; the mall was pretty much an architectural layer cake with all the layers the same thickness.
Okay, so it wasn’t much information, but it was more than I’d had a moment ago.
I felt eyes on me and turned to see Louie, almost all the way to Kim’s Kollectables, looking back at me as though for the last time. I gave him a grin that was high on muscle and low on cheer, and continued up the stairs, keeping an eye on their height.
The noise from below dropped away as I emerged slowly into the huge, dark space of the second floor. There was just enough light coming from below to see it hadn’t been cleared to the walls the way the bazaar had. There were barriers to both sound and vision: carpeting, barren counters, glass display cases, shelving units, half-walls, all the architectural tricks designers use to break up a big space into a bunch of smaller retail neighborhoods, the “departments,” each designed to entice and slow the seeker of some specific type of product. Each area limited the shopper’s close-up sightlines to that single kind of merchandise without any distractions, while the occasional, strategically placed gap offered hints of vistas to come. All those surfaces would also absorb sound.
It was, in other words, a nightmare, either to search or to survive, assuming that something potentially dangerous was waiting for me. I could dither around in the dark, banging into things, while Mini-me waited quietly, either looking to dodge me forever or hunched behind something, holding his breath, his gun, and his garrote or straight razor, while I stumbled within reach.
It was that kind of a space, a space that suggested garrotes. If Victor Hugo were alive, he would have immediately begun writing The Phantom of the Abandoned Department Store.
To make things even grimmer, the one thing they hadn’t turned off on this floor was the speaker system, which probably had a single set of controls for all three levels, so I was alone in a very dark, very irregularly shaped space jammed from wall to wall with spider holes, points of ambush, and Mini-me, and I was being force-fed “The Little Drummer Boy.”
So why was I doing this again?
Because Herbie had taught me—and he’d been right, as I’d learned the hard way over the years—that when you turn and bite a real Type A to reclaim some space for yourself, which was what I’d done on the phone to Vlad the previous evening, their reaction is to keep pushing back into that space, mapping your resistance and planting tiny flags until they can reclaim it all, and if they do, the credibility of your threats is gone forever. They’ll never again believe you’re truly dangerous, all the way up to the actual moment when one of you has to kill the other.
I’d told Vlad I wouldn’t be followed. And now he was having me followed again. I could either handle this now or start looking under the bed every night, since eventually someone would succeed in trailing me to the Wedgwood.
Where Ronnie was. Hiding from Christmas.
Gabriel’s had been a big department store. It was hard to get a sense of the size up here, with the space all fragmented, but I retroactively estimated the first floor, where the bazaar was, at about 30,000 square feet. If I assumed that this floor was the same size and the footage on the third level was smaller, as it generally is, then this place had once claimed 85,000 or so square feet. And more than half of it was dark.
PAH-rum-pum-pum-pum.
I had to try to listen past the music, to be aware of any sound that wasn’t “The Little Drummer Boy,” while I moved quietly to my right, away from the diffusion of light around the escalator. I could see the ceiling now, maybe fifteen feet high, so I could also see the underside of the escalator directly above me, rising toward the third floor. Nothing would be simpler, I thought, than for him to get up here and double back behind the escalator, and then follow me after I got off. So I kept shifting to my left, away from the light, until I felt like it wouldn’t be so easy to see/shoot/knife/brain/strangle me, and then I slowly revolved 180 degrees to make sure he wasn’t directly behind me.
If he was, I couldn’t see him. There were hip-high glass counters to my left, and the air was scented with the kind of fragrance molecules that Stinky’s family sold. This had probably been the makeup and perfume area. Walking on the balls of my feet and breathing silently in the way Herbie had taught me, lips open and tongue touching the roof of the mouth, I trailed my fingertips over the edge of the dusty countertop to my left, using it as a guide to keep me on a straight path, and moved parallel to the escalator, which was on my right now, half-expecting to see him scurry off into the gloom.
But he wasn’t there. And when I’d gotten all the way to the bottom of the escalator leading to the third floor and looked up, I learned that I didn’t actually know what dark meant. The motionless steel stairway more or less vanished about two-thirds of the way up, and I had to put my hands over my eyes and count to ten to widen my pupils all the way before I could even make out the deeper blackness where the ceiling of the second floor had been cut away to create the space for the escalator.
With a kind of decisiveness I rarely demonstrate, I resolved that I would not be searching the third floor.
And far ahead of me and to my left, something moved.
He’d bumped something or other and it had gone over. Nothing big. A wastebasket, possibly. It was unlikely that there would be a wastebasket in the aisles, so he was behind a counter somewhere, probably moving bent over. That meant he thought I might spot him out in the open, and that meant that he saw in the dark a lot better than I did.
PAH-rum-pum-pum-pum.
The noises had come from my left, I reminded myself. So he was moving in the direction of the rest of the mall.
Maybe, I thought, the doors leading into the mall’s second level were only locked from the outside. Maybe they opened from the inside, maybe it was possible to get out through them, just shove them open. I stood there, motionless, not breathing, pushing “The Little Drummer Boy” out of my ears and hoping to hear a door open, to see a slice of light sweep across the store so I could make a beeline for it and chase him out there in the light.
Sure. Absolutely. And even as I stood there, Santa was wrapping my personal presents up at the snowy North Pole. Writing my name on all the tags, making up for the Christmases after my father left us.
Angling away to the left of the escalator, I found a long, straight counter to guide me and began to move forward. It was pretty dark where I was, but where the escalator surfaced from the bazaar there was a sort of loose, formless cloud of light, and while part of me welcomed it, I also knew that I was going to have to move in front of it and that I’d be visible from probably 75 percent of the floor when I did.
My foot crunched on something, as loud in my ear as someone eating popcorn. I stopped.
The kid kept singing about his damn drum. Who the hell bangs a drum around a newborn baby?
The wad beneath my foot was a crumpled piece of paper.
I had no way of knowing whether he’d heard the paper crackle, but he didn’t seem to be on the move, either toward me or away from me, unless he moved more quietly than the last of the Mohicans. I had my eyes trained to the left of where it seemed to me he’d kicked the wastebasket, holding completely still and trying to find in my peripheral vision any mottling of the darkness that might represent movement. Nothing.
“The Little Drummer Boy” is the longest song in the world.
The counter beneath my fingers ended. I stepped left, sliding my shoes over the department store carpeting, into an aisle that would take me away from the bloom of light at the top of the escalator. I was happy with how silently I was moving, so I picked up my pace, stopping every eight or ten steps to listen. When I came to the next intersection of aisles I turned right so I’d once again be moving across the store with the escalator behind me.
A sudden solidifying of the darkness in front of me immediately took on the form I least wanted to see, and it was only inches away: a human silhouette. Instantaneous recognition of the human form is instinctive and complex, which is why camouflage is usually a pattern of colored patches to draw attention away from the outline. In the absence of such distraction, however, someone whose nerves are sufficiently keyed up can not only separate the human form from all other shapes by sheer instinct, but can even identify many characteristic poses. In the half-instant between seeing that dark outline only a foot or two from me, and almost registering the pose, I screamed.
It was a loud, panicked, embarrassingly shrill scream that was choked off quickly as I realized that the form had its hands on its hips.
In the standard threat ranking of human positions, hands on hips comes in very low, probably just a notch or two above kneeling with the palms pressed together in prayer. But I was still in instinct mode, and the heel of my hand shot out at throat level and destroyed the voice box of the figure in front of me before the shape registered as female.
My hand hit something hard and she went down as stiffly as a tree and, uhhh, clattered on the carpet. Whatever I’d hit, it hadn’t yielded like a voice box or any other kind of living tissue. In fact, my hand stung.
A flare of light from somewhere to my right and a thput, and something sang past my head and shattered several sheets of glass in rapid sequence, probably passing through two or three display cases. Before the noise had stopped, I was down on my hands and knees on the carpet, inches from my victim. The nude display mannequin’s hands were still on her hips, jaunty even in decapitation, and her bald head had rolled about ten feet.
I crawled quickly behind a counter as the reverberation in my ears gradually died away. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened my mouth as widely as I could, shook my head, relaxed the muscles of my face, and put one hundred percent of my conscious energy into listening.
And heard PAH-rum-pum-pum-pum.
Fuck it, I thought, self-preservation overcome, as it occasionally is, by pure, incandescent fury. I grabbed two heavy objects that were on the floor beside me—judging from their shapes and weights, a hand mirror and a stapler—stood, screamed as loudly as I could, threw the things at the cases near me, and was off and running in the opposite direction, to the accompaniment of a short composition for breaking glass and two more pistol shots, which triggered more breaking glass, but the glass had broken well behind me. Figuring he was even deafer than I was for the moment, I scooped up the mannequin’s head and tucked it under my arm like a football, then zigzagged between aisles, bent low, in the general direction of the two muzzle flashes. I stopped, dropped to my knees, and breathed with my mouth very wide to keep my gasps inaudible.
The little sod with his drum had finally canned it, a blessing that was immediately eradicated by some bright sleigh bells and the news that Santa Claus was coming to town.
I was far enough from the relatively light area around the escalator that I couldn’t really see much of anything. I counted to twenty, stood, and threw the mannequin’s head as far as I could, along a line that would put it close to the place where the gun had been fired, and waited.
I was reminded by the singers to check my list twice, and the message seemed almost cosmically appropriate. After what felt like an immensely elastic moment, I heard the mannequin’s head hit something that toppled and clattered—maybe another mannequin—in a rewardingly distracting way. I backed rapidly away from the spot where I’d been standing, going through an opening between two counters, until the bare back of my neck hit what felt like the world’s biggest, thickest spiderweb.
I froze, then reflexively jumped forward. Given a choice between facing either a Russian lunatic with a gun or a four-pound spider, I’ll take the lunatic every time. I also seem to have said, “Gaaahhhh” or something, because he snapped off another shot, and this time the bullet nearly gave me a dueling scar: I could feel its heat on my left cheek. The guy may have dressed like Fred Astaire’s understudy, but he could shoot. I scurried backward and sideways behind the counters again and felt the web hit the back of my shirt and not break, and a part of me relaxed. While there are Amazonian spiders that build webs strong enough to catch birds, they have so far been kind enough to remain in the region of the Amazon, and it seemed unlikely that I’d find them lurking in a bird-free abandoned department store in a relatively northern latitude. I grabbed the web and found it fringed with something soft, which was why it had felt so spidery. A garland. A Christmas garland. I remembered Bonnie saying that Gabriel’s had closed right after Christmas the previous year.
Something over where he was fell to the carpet, not terrifically loudly, but loudly enough to triple my pulse rate.
With nothing else at hand, I took the garland in both hands and gave it a tug. Pretty strong. Probably not strong enough, although I had a vision, about half a second long, of tying Mini-me hand and foot in a glittering Christmas garland and driving a stake of holly through his heart, Ebenezer Scrooge-fashion. Instead, listening for any other sound of movement, I followed it hand over hand until I came to the point where one end was fastened to the wall, and pulled it free. I folded into sections about two feet long as I tracked it to the other end, quite a distance away. Call it fifteen feet, but the thing had hung in a graceful drape, so it was actually twenty-four, twenty-five feet long. I pulled the other end free and tested the garland’s strength folded into four equal segments. It was unyielding.
So.
So what?
He chose that moment to move.
There was a thump, followed by a grunt loud enough to be heard over the endless and somehow ominous news of Santa’s arrival, so he’d probably jumped down from something reasonably high, perhaps one of those two- or three-foot pedestals that had supported chic mannequins with one or both hands on their hips. The grunt had come from in front of me, maybe thirty-five, forty feet away, and to the right. Then he tripped on something, not much of a trip, not a nice, useful pratfall or anything, but a big enough trip to be audible, and his surprised gasp gave me the information I needed. He was moving to my left.
One of the things Herbie always said came to mind: When you’re in a hurry, slow down. Check the environment: The lane that ran between the glass display counters was about five feet wide, and as far as I could tell, it stretched absolutely straight from the back of the store all the way to the doors that opened out into the mall, now behind me. I was in between him and the way out of here. I wanted to get out of here. Wouldn’t he?
I dropped to my knees behind the counter and began a little frantically to feel my way around. The glass cabinets had sliding doors, also glass, allowing the salespeople to get at the merchandise without giving the customers equal access, thus delivering them from temptation. I slid the door open, and it moved noiselessly.
The lane separating this line of counters from the next one was the route he would probably take as the most direct path to the doors to the mall.
Maybe I could make him take it.
With the garland folded into thirds, it was a little more than seven feet long. Just enough. Maybe.
He shouted, “Hey.” So he wasn’t afraid of drawing fire. He’d figured I hadn’t packed a gun to go Christmas shopping.
Moving as fast as I could, I slipped out of my shoes and wound an end of the triple-thick garland around one of them, tied a knot, and put the shoe on the lowest shelf of the counter, maybe eight inches above the carpet. I pulled the sliding door closed and tugged on the garland to jam the shoe up against the glass I tugged again, and the toe of the shoe pushed its way out. Working very deliberately, because if I hurried I knew I’d panic, I repositioned the shoe, slid the door closed, and tugged again. There was a tiny creak of complaint, but it was firm.
With the garland in my right hand and my other shoe in my left, I did the Chuck Berry duck walk across the lane between the counters, staying as low as I could. Once behind the counter, I tied the garland around the other shoe and put the shoe on the lowest shelf of that counter, but the garland drooped to the floor so I wrapped it two more times around the shoe and felt it go tight. Sweat ran down into my eyes, stinging them. I slid the door closed with the shoe inside, right against the glass. The garland was taut enough to strum.
I needed the goddamn mannequin.
Using the counters for guidance, I scurried to the place where I’d beheaded her, picked her up, tucked her under one arm, and toted her as fast as I could back to Booby Trap Lane. Then I took off my long-sleeved shirt, draped it over the mannequin, grabbed a long, long breath, and then yelled, “Ow!” loudly enough to waken the lightly sleeping dead, pulled my cell phone out of my pocket, and hauled the mannequin at a dead run down the lane toward the door, banging against everything I could. Another shot, wider this time, and then I made an Uhhhhhhh sound, let the mannequin fall, and went down with a grunt as I flicked on the flashlight on my cell phone and pitched it ahead of me. I abandoned the shirt-clad model prone on the carpet and scrabbled on hands and knees back behind the counters.
From where I was, it looked pretty good: I’d tossed the phone so it landed flat, bulb on the upper side, beaming directly up, like a lighthouse for spaceships, and between it and me, silhouetted against the cell phone’s pillar of light, was the mannequin, supine, with my shirt over it.
I heard nothing. I realized I was holding my breath.
He either thought he’d hit me or he didn’t. There wasn’t anything more I could do.
I almost jumped out of my skin as my cell phone rang. And rang.
It seemed to be the cue he needed, because I heard him immediately, racketing toward me down the aisle, and just as he entered the circle of light emitted by my ringing phone, his foot hit the tripled garland. It was as though he’d been scythed at the ankles: his feet stopped but his body kept moving until his center of gravity was so far off the vertical that he simply slammed onto his face with an explosion of breath that must have left him hollow.
And I went straight up and over the counter and landed on his back with my knees.
He made a strange grating sound, the last few cubic inches of air being forced over his vocal cords, and then he did the thing I should have expected him to do. He inadvertently fired the gun in his right hand, a black, nasty, silenced automatic that I instantly recognized as a Glock 42.
The display case beside me exploded in a cloud of slivered glass, some of which was driven into my bare arms and the right side of my face. I went for the gun but instead brought my palm down on a large shard of glass that was tilted upward from where it rested against his forearm, and the cut made me instinctively yank my hand back. At the same moment, he flexed his knees and brought his heels up into the center of my back.
I saw little flares. Silhouetted against my cell phone light, his arm came up and his hand swiveled around, and then I was rolling away as the gun went off, sending a shell through the space I’d been occupying a second before, and he rose up onto his knees, lots of little cuts bleeding from the right side of his face. He parted his lips to give me a complete view of his front teeth, pointed the gun at me, and pulled the trigger.
But the slide had locked back on the final shot in the magazine. He glared at it, a man betrayed, and swung his left leg out to snap a fast circular kick at the right side of my face, knocking me cockeyed into the aisle. Then he was up and running, and in only a few seconds he was banging through the doors and into the light and life of Edgerton Mall.
My phone stopped ringing. I worked my way to my hands and knees, my head seeming to expand and contract with every heartbeat, and as I crawled to the phone, I heard something that sounded like a kitten mewing, a tiny, high, windy sound, ephemeral as a finger squeaking on clean glass, that stopped as the carol on the speakers ended. But then the sound came back, and this time it tapered into a transparent, barely audible cough and a long, loose sigh that raised the hair on my arms. I’d heard that sound once before, and there was no mistaking it.
Someone had just died.
As I tried to fix in my mind the direction from which the sound had come, an unaccompanied choir burst forth with:
We wish you a merry Christmas
We wish you a merry Christmas
The mewing sound had been close, or I wouldn’t have heard it at all. And I was almost certain it had come from behind me, on the right. I turned around, so it was now on my left.
Immediately to my left was the pair of glass counters I’d used to anchor one end of the trip line.
We wish you a merry Christmas
And a happy new year.
I stepped behind the counter again. Holding the phone in front of me for light, I slowly paced the distance between the counter and the wall. The phone vibrated in my hand and started to ring again. Six or seven feet ahead, the counter took a ninety-degree turn to the left, where the cash registers would have been. The light was dancing a bit more than the vibration would have caused it to, which was how I knew that my hands were shaking.
Good tidings we bring
To you and your kin
The wall behind the counter was practically papered with Christmas decorations: bows, cards, bright paper wreaths, cutouts of poinsettias, and photos of groups of the women who had worked here, all of them wearing soft-looking reindeer antlers, two with the bright red nose that Rudolph brought on the scene. For people who were about to have their jobs yanked out from under them, they looked pretty happy.
At the corner. A shoe.
With a foot in it.
Good tidings for Christmas
And a happy new year.
As I neared the corner, more of the body came into view. I saw bare legs, a hemline that seemed to be seasonal colors—red and green—and then a hand, the fingers curved restfully inward. Something glittered, pooled in the open palm. Tinsel. The strands hung down from the sleeve. I put the light on her face, but I already knew it was Bonnie. Bonnie of Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac, Bonnie of the hot spiced wine. Bonnie, who would have been happier in the world of Mr. Pickwick.
I rejected the call, which was from Louie, and dialed Wally. When he answered, I said, “Get a guard and come to the second floor of Gabriel’s. Now.”