Buddy was still chatting, fooling with something beyond my scope of vision, but I no longer listened. All I had left was my ability to concentrate, and to spend what time I had left paying attention to Buddy seemed a waste. At first, though, I didn’t actually know what to think about. The case came to mind, the irony of it ending this way, questions about how they would deal with my death. I wondered if Ron would be made lieutenant, and if Willy Kunkle would bother trying to get back on the force without me goading him.
Gail eventually pushed all that aside, as she often did in real life. I found myself regretting how little time I’d given her this past week, and how I’d allowed the tensions of the investigation to come between us, if only temporarily. I remembered holding her close just recently, having patched up those differences, and the warmth of her voice on the phone a mere twenty minutes ago.
Buddy thrust his face before my own, cutting off my view of the skylight. “Hi, Joe. You haven’t been paying attention. I invented a new toy, something to help me in my work.” He dangled a thin nylon strap in front of me, on which two empty wooden sewing spools had been taped, about an inch and a half apart.
“See, when I killed Charlie, it was hard work; it took a long time and ended up being painful-for me, that is. My thumbs hurt for a couple of days. So this is my new experiment.” He disappeared and I could hear him moving behind me. The strap, held horizontally, reappeared before my eyes, the spools side by side, in the middle.
“It goes around the neck, each spool over an artery, so that when I pull it tight, you can still breathe, but the blood gets shut off. It’s no wear and tear on me, ’cause I just work a tourniquet stick from the back. Whatcha think? Neat, huh?”
I felt his hands around my neck, adjusting the strap, fitting each spool into the depression on either side of my trachea.
“Of course, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to using my thumbs, but let’s give it-”
Silence fell like a cleaver. The strap went slack. I couldn’t move my head, but I shifted my eyes from the skylight and scanned what little I could see of the darkness beyond. Behind me, I could hear Buddy quietly pulling the hammer back on his gun. Whatever had caught his attention was quiet now.
He moved as gently as a cat, sliding into my field of vision from the right, his gun in his hand, gliding down the two steps from the platform to the one catwalk I could see in my frozen state, the same one we’d traveled from the air shaft.
My heart beat faster, the hopeful memory of the trail of blood drops springing back to mind. Gail must have done something, called someone. And told them what? That I’d hung up on her and wouldn’t answer when she called back? She had done something, I was utterly convinced. She had set salvation into motion. I knew, just as Buddy obviously knew, that that one sound, whatever it had been, had come like a knock on a door. It had to be answered, or the door would be kicked in.
Buddy vanished into the gloom and I tried willing myself to see further, surprised to find I could actually squint a little. I remembered then what Hillstrom’s toxicologist had told me, that curare only lasted a few minutes, and that without booster injections, its effects wore off quickly. The simple act of squinting gave me hope I was on the upswing. If Buddy could be taken out, I’d survive, even without medical intervention.
But this was no textbook assault by a police SWAT team. In fact, it might be no more than an animal scratching at some rotten wood. If that were true, Buddy would satisfy his curiosity, retracing our steps to the air shaft, perhaps checking out parts of the maze of catwalks he knew more intimately than anyone, and then he’d return to conclude his little fantasy.
There was a sudden, blinding, conical stab of light. I saw Buddy arrested in midstep, like a tightrope artist at the circus trapped by a spotlight in the gloom above the audience. There was a double explosion accompanying two long, fiery, swordlike muzzle flashes, one from Buddy’s gun, the other from the darkness beyond the source of the light. That light, obviously a flashlight, spun out of control, landed with a thud on the catwalk, rolled over the edge, and in a final end-over-end sparkle, vanished into the soft, absorbing insulation below.
There was a long moment of silence, punctured only by the rasping of my own breathing. Then I heard movement, slow, cumbersome, no longer stealthy. I kept my eyes on the distant end of the catwalk, as intent on it as a gambler on the flip of a coin. A shadow moved there, too vague to decipher, a man using the one handrail for balance, lurching, fighting for control, half dragging himself along, the glow from the skylight still too weak to pick out his emerging features.
Finally, almost mercifully, the dim light picked up Buddy’s twisted face, his eyes screwed tight in pain, one hand clutched across a blood-soaked chest, the other still awkwardly holding the.45 as it slid uncertainly along the handrail. I let out a sigh, the suspense over, my fate at his hands looking unchanged for all the damage he'd sustained. He may have been mortally wounded, but he wasn’t going to let that thwart his final ambition.
Buddy paused some fifteen feet away, his body swaying, his breathing a ragged string of gurgles. He tried once to let go of the railing, failed, tried again, and half succeeded, holding his gun hand only a foot away from the cable, testing his balance. Satisfied, he finally looked up at me, his eyes glistening with a malevolence I wouldn’t have thought possible in another human being.
The hand with the gun slowly rose and leveled out, the black eye of the barrel seeking my motionless forehead. But the white-orange blast, when it came, came from behind, and it threw Buddy up like a leaf caught by the wind and tossed him lightly into the air. Spread-eagled, he landed with a crash on the skylight, his weight taking the entire pane of glass with him to the floor below, where it blew apart with a crystalline shattering. The cool air from the hallway beneath washed up and surrounded me like the after-splash from someone leaping into a pool.
Ron Klesczewski appeared out of the darkness, his stiff leg making him look like some peg-legged sailor of old. His face was both quizzical and lined with pain. There was a crimson gash on his forehead but no blood to speak of-“a scratch,” as they say.
I looked back through the skylight opening. Buddy’s corpse lay as a child’s in sleep, half curled up on itself, its fetal memories still strong. Near his face, like a prized possession almost cupped in one hand, was the dead sparrow.
In the quiet, soothed by the cool air pushing by me, I closed my eyes for a moment, once again aware of my own breathing and heartbeat. I felt a drop trickle down my cheek and fall away soundlessly, but whether sweat or a tear I didn’t know.