It was hard going. Aldridge watched, unable to drag himself away, as the ski stick was hammered fraction by fraction into the body at the bottom of the freezer. Halfway through she had to change position, alter her angle a little; she gripped the stick with both hands and stirred it around, as if seeking the route of least resistance through bones and sinew.
Aldridge was sickened. Go in and stop her, he was thinking.
But he was also fascinated.
Twenty minutes or more must have gone by, twenty minutes of calm, patient work as the carpenter's corpse was efficiently spitted. Finally the waitress hopped down, went around to the other side, and thrust her arm in deep as if feeling for something; and then, apparently satisfied, she went over to the control box beside the door and pressed the button to lower the winch.
She used the nylon rope again, attaching one end to the wrist loop on the stick and the other to the winch's hook. Then, returning to the control box, she started the raising.
Slowly, Amis sat up.
His face was almost black. The ski stick had entered his chest just below the breastbone, and had taken a lot of his shirt through with it. There was no blood. He sat like a doll, newly baptised, water running from his hair; the fibreglass shaft was bent almost double, trembling with the strain of holding him up, and it seemed likely to break if the body should be raised any further.
But the waitress appeared to have planned for this. Stopping the winch before he could rise any more, she moved around behind the body with a second loop of the nylon line. Although he couldn't see exactly what she was doing, Aldridge could make a guess; he reckoned that she was throwing the loop over the protruding spike of the stick to centre his weight under the hook. This done, she returned to the winch control and continued the operation.
No rigor, it would seem. Amis came out hunched into the shape of the freezer's interior, but then he slowly began to unfold as if the dead matter was too dull and stupid to give anything better than a delayed reaction to the change in circumstance. He looked as if he'd been that way for some time. He was shoeless.
The waitress walked around him, sizing him up as he swung slightly in the breeze outside the open doors. The water still ran from his sodden clothes and skin, splashing down into the freezer from his dangling form.
A neat arrangement. The waitress seemed to be taking time out to appreciate her own work.
Which finally gave Aldridge the break that he needed to pull himself away. How long had he wasted, transfixed by the scene? Too long. He stepped back from the window and, walking as quietly as he could, headed for his car. He could make the arrest any time now, no problem; Aldridge stood about five-eleven, weighed around a hundred and seventy pounds, worked out with weights on rare occasions, could still swim a mile, and had once run a decent half marathon. The waitress was considerably smaller, and probably little more than half his weight. But he'd made his decision; he was going to wait and watch some more, and use the waiting time to get a head start on calling in some backup.
Because if she took the body down to the lake, and started to fake up yet another of those 'accidents'… well, he wouldn't just be grabbing her for Amis.
He'd be taking her for all of them.
The Venetz sisters' Renault stood before him, waiting for its gruesome load. He made a wide circle around it, and glanced back to be sure that he wasn't being followed.
Help would take something close to an hour to get to him. There would have to be CID, forensic, scenes of crime, press officers, the works. The valley would be like one big circus for a while, and the aftermath would probably never be forgotten.
He unlatched the door of the Metro.
"I owe you an apology," the waitress said.
THIRTY-EIGHT
He spun around. She was behind him, still a few yards away, but she must have been moving so silently that she could have been on him before he'd known it.
She said, "I think I made a mess of your radio."
He didn't need to look. The car hadn't been locked, and the radio was easy enough to reach. She must have done it all that time before, and she must have known that he was there and watching as she'd staked Amis and hung him up to dry. Waiting for him to betray himself, waiting for him to make a move. He couldn't even imagine how anyone could be so cool.
"Why?" he said. "Why have you done this?"
But she only shrugged. "We were a long way from the lake," she said, as if that would explain everything. "I'd planned to move him later, but… you got here ahead of me."
He was looking her over. She'd probably claw and scratch and struggle like a wild thing, but his size and strength would count for more as long as he was prepared to use them ruthlessly. Amis might have done the same, but he couldn't have been prepared.
"Miss Peterson, isn't it?" he said, trying to reassure her as he looked for a way to come in at his best angle, but she didn't reply. "It's all over, all right? Now let me help you."
She smiled in a way that he didn't understand.
"I've had your kind of help before," she said.
"Come on," he said, putting a cautious hand out to take her arm. "Get in the car with me. It's the best thing you can do."
She looked into his eyes.
It was as if a screen of humanity had dropped away behind her own, a screen that had been no more than paper thin. Aldridge was looking into twin pits that bored all the way down into Hades itself. The river of fear ran through him, and it ran cold. There was no question any more about what had happened or how, no bewilderment to be felt because now he saw. Nothing about her had changed, and everything was different. A hole had been punched in the fabric of reality, and a demon had stepped through.
A demon that wore a young woman's skin; but no less of a demon for that.
"You don't know who I am," she said. "You've no conception of what I am."
"We'll find out," he said, taking her arm.
But her arm wasn't there.
Something hit him hard from behind, and he started to go down. His mind was out of step, unable to register what was happening. Something blurred before him and his head snapped around to the side, and then he hit the ground. He struggled to rise. She grabbed the back of his shirt in two handfuls and shook him like a rug, beating the breath out of him in two great shockwaves.
He lay there, numbed and dazed and dizzy and dismayed, and realised that she'd done all of this in a matter of maybe a couple of seconds. It was as if he'd been hit by a car.
She was lifting his feet.
She was dragging him toward the cafeteria.
He scrabbled for purchase with his hands on the new tarmac, and felt his fingernails tear. She had a grip like a blacksmith. He tried to raise himself and kick his legs free; she flicked him like a rope, and his head cracked hard against the floor.
He saw lights. They were like popping flashbulbs.
And he let himself go limp.
He wouldn't underestimate her twice. She was whip-fast and totally ruthless, like the maddest of mad dogs. Size wasn't the issue here and neither was strength, although she had plenty of that. He had some unofficial mace in the car, a little handbag-sized spray that he'd picked up somewhere and never had a use for. He wished that it was in his hand right now. He could zap her and then, while she was blinded and struggling, maybe he could get one wrist cuffed to an ankle.
They were almost at the cafeteria again. She dropped his legs, and walked over to open the doors.
He waited until he could hear the sound of the hinge, playing dead right up until that moment.