“I won’t do this,” I said, backing away.
“Then just stand there and let her hack you to bits.”
The woman was still approaching, something predatory in her eyes, a detached gleam that hinted she was going to try something.
Holy shit.
It must have hit her at the same moment it hit me, because we both stopped in our tracks and our mouths fell open.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“I’m wondering the same thing.”
Her voiced sealed it for me. Pure Manhattan.
“Cynthia Mathis?” I asked. “Andrew Z. Thomas’s literary agent?” I recognized her face from the photo on her blog.
“Yeah, who are you?”
“We spoke on the phone several days ago. I’m Jack Daniels.”
Her eyes widened.
“Not quite as pretty in person,” she said.
As if she were the one to talk. Her blog photo was at least twenty years out of date.
“I’m not exactly made up. And well…” I patted my belly. “A little bit pregnant at the moment.”
“He’s listening to us right now,” Cynthia said.
I nodded, noticing that she also wore an earpiece.
Tear trails carved down through the makeup on her face like ancient riverbeds. If she’d been hysterical before, which I imagined she had, she seemed to have steeled herself for something. There was a hardness to her that went far beyond negotiating book deals. I wondered how long he’d left her chained to the top of this tower to prepare herself to kill. Hours? A day? She looked soaking wet and cold as hell.
Her eyes cut to the knife, then back to me.
“I’m just going to be straight with you, darling…may I call you Jack?”
“Sure.”
She stood ten feet away, shifting her weight back and forth between the balls of her feet like she was readying herself to receive a tennis serve.
“He’s going to kill me, Jack. Unless I kill you.”
“How?”
She touched something around her neck which I had overlooked. A collar—a smaller version of the one I’d seen on the bear.
“I’ve been up here for a long time waiting, playing it through in my mind. He didn’t tell me it was you coming, but you know what?”
“What, Cynthia?”
“It doesn’t matter, darling.”
“Why’s that?”
She edged forward, the chain scraping on the grate behind her. “I’m a year from retirement. I have grandkids, Jack. A husband. We were going to the south of France for the summer. I’m not going to die here. It’s you or it’s me. And it won’t be me.”
“Listen to me, Cynthia.”
“What?”
“We can find another way.”
“What way?”
“I don’t know, I just—”
“He’s in my head right now,” the woman said. “He’s urging me to do it. He’s saying he’ll kill me if you’re still here in sixty seconds.”
“Give me the knife. We can’t let him—”
“Jack, he’s going to kill me in less than a minute.”
She was psyching herself up for this—I could see it in her eyes.
“Cynthia…”
Luther in my ear: “Get ready, Jack. She’s gonna make a run at it. I would’ve armed you, but I didn’t think it’d even approach a fair fight, considering your training and her advanced age. This is one tough broad, though. A shark when she has to be. Watch yourself.”
Mathis came a step closer, holding the knife in both hands like it was a sword. And the blade was damn near long enough to qualify as one.
“I’ll help you get out of the chain,” I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew Luther would kill her if I did. Her, or someone I loved.
“What do you want out of this, Luther?” I asked as the older woman moved in.
“I want to see you kill her.”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
“Then she’ll kill you. She’ll kill your child.”
As if on cue, my baby began to fidget. I reached down, felt her pushing outward, a little bump—her foot—through my windbreaker.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Cynthia said.
But she didn’t sound sorry.
Cynthia dashed forward—three quick steps, with one hand on the railing, the other grasping the giant knife.
Wasn’t exactly a shock, but I could tell Mathis had never held a blade before.
This was a good thing for me, because when it came to surviving a knife attack empty-handed, there was no foolproof system.
The best option was to run, if you could. Next would be to get something between you and the blade.
I couldn’t do either, which left two choices. Immobilize the knife hand, or strike.
Working against me was my pregnancy and exhaustion, and worse, that I wasn’t facing some puny switchblade. If Mathis got lucky, this folder could conceivably take a limb off.
She closed the five feet between us faster than I expected, stood sideways with her left shoulder facing me, and lunged, the big blade coming straight toward my stomach.
I staggered back, breathless, more than a little stunned at how close the tip came to my bulging belly.
“You better take this seriously,” Luther said.
I’d barely recovered before Mathis came at me again, this time with a wild, downward slash. With the darkness quickly falling, I didn’t trust my eyes to judge the distance, so I scrambled back as the tip slashed inches before my eyes.
Mathis seemed to be getting more comfortable in her role as attacker.
As she righted herself, an idea came to me—I might not even have to touch her.
I turned and ran as fast as my chubby legs could carry me, shoes threatening to slide on the wet metal grate.
Mathis pursued, her footsteps pounding the catwalk behind me, but my fleeing had taken her off guard, and I had a couple steps’ head start on her.
I came around the other side of the water tank and spotted exactly what I’d hoped to find—the bolt attached to the chain, which hooked to the collar around Mathis’s neck. I squatted down, fighting a bout of dizziness, eyes burning with sweat, as she stormed toward me, slashing like a swashbuckler.
I grabbed the chain and wrapped it around my forearm as she drew within five feet.
It was the only time in months I could remember being thankful for gaining all this weight.
I jerked the chain as hard as I could just as Mathis swung the blade.
Her head went back, shoes coming straight off the catwalk, and her shoulders slammed flush and hard against the metal grate, the breath bursting out of her lungs.
I hurried over and bent down for a hard, immobilizing palm-heel strike to the face, but I froze with my right arm cocked back.
The Espada lay beside Mathis on the catwalk, its blade blood-darkened.
Cynthia clutched her right side with both hands, groaning, like she was trying to hold something in. A steady stream of blood like a faucet not quite shut off trickled through the metal grate and fell in a shower of raindrops toward the concrete slab below.
Even in the low light I could see the blood was bright red.
An artery.
I dropped to my knees. Her eyes were wide. Not with pain, but with surprise.
“I don’t want to die.”
I lowered my hands to her side and said, “Here, let me.” When I applied the pressure, I could feel the blood pulsing between my fingers. Lots of it. She’d cut herself badly. I pushed harder and she cried out.
“She’s injured, Luther.”
“I know. Do you have any idea how much all of these wireless cameras cost me?”
“I don’t give a shit about your cameras. She needs medical attention right now.”
“How does it feel to kill her, Jack?”
“It was an accident. And she’s not dead yet.”
“But you’re the one that did this.”
“No, Luther. You’re the one that did this. Help her. Please.”
“See her knife? Toss it over the side of the tower.”
I complied.
“Now step away from her,” Luther ordered.
“She’ll bleed to death.”