His footsteps crossed above our heads. He couldn’t have seen the broken back door yet.
The gun. I had to find the gun. I dropped to my knees to search the floor.
She tensed, her breathing coming in shorter, staccato bursts. She’d heard at last; she knew those footsteps. Her kidnapper had come back. I stood up and put my arm around her.
He stopped, above our heads, and in one sick instant I knew why. A cold draft of March air from the shattered back-door window had hit him.
“Son of a bitch,” he shouted. His footsteps thundered toward the back of the house.
I took a last fast look. The gun was nowhere.
He pounded down the stairs.
Amanda screamed.
I grabbed the wire cutters off the cot and ran out of the tiny room. I caught him just as he stepped onto the concrete floor. He had a gun in his hand, but I’d surprised him. He was holding it low, down by his hip. I stabbed the tip of the cutters into the hard bone above his left eye. He howled, flailing at me, and fell to the floor. Something clattered out of his hand. His gun.
I kicked at it, sent it skittering across the cement. Shrieking like nothing human, Robinson got up to his knees and crawled after it, a blinded wild beast. Blood pulsed from the ripped skin above his eye, down onto the floor.
I caught up to him and kicked at his head. His elbows gave way and his forehead crashed down on the cement. He lay on his belly, howling, struggling to wrap both forearms around his head. I kicked at his ribs until he lowered his arms, and then I kicked at his ears and his cheeks until he quit howling and his arms fell lifeless alongside his body.
I grabbed Amanda’s hand and dragged her past the lifeless man.
He moved. I turned to look. He’d pushed himself up to his knees, but he could not see through the bloody pulp that was his face. I tugged her up the stairs, opened the back door, and pushed her out into the cold.
“No!” he screamed from down below, and the gun fired. He’d found his gun; he’d find the stairs.
I reached down, picked up one of the red plastic jugs, and twisted off its black cap. Robinson had staggered into view at the base of the stairs, howling like nothing human. A shot rang out; something thudded on the wall behind me. He was firing blind. Surely he could not see.
I sloshed some of the foul liquid down the stairs and then threw the whole jug down at him as he moved his gun hand to shoot again.
He screamed as he heard me strike the match. “Noooo!” he wailed.
He fired again, but the bullet ricocheted off something in the basement.
The flame burned tiny at the tip of my fingers. I touched it to the others, and the whole packet flared. I threw it down the stairs. It landed on a wood step halfway down. For a moment it sputtered, benign. Then it found the rest of the little river of gasoline and it roared into full life, hurtling flames down into the basement. He screamed.
I kicked the other, closed jug down the stairs and ran from the hell I’d unleashed.
Forty-eight
The dawn had warmed the day enough to change the snow to freezing drizzle. Twice we nearly fell as I led Amanda around the garage to the Jeep. She moved stiff-legged, her teeth chattering, her eyes wide, oblivious to the frigid rain.
I eased her onto the passenger’s seat and was about to wrap her in my coat when a house door slammed behind me. I had a horrible image of Robinson on fire, coming after us. There was no time to duck back to look, no time to cover her with my coat. I slammed her door, turned to run to the driver’s side, and fell flat on the ice. I grabbed at the tail lamp, got up, and pulled myself around to the driver’s side.
A shot sounded nearby. I started the Jeep but must have pressed the pedal down too hard. The wheels spun, bit, and sent us skidding across the fresh ice to crash into a garbage drum, killing the engine.
I twisted the key, certain Robinson was but a few feet away, in flames, aiming. The engine sputtered and quit. I twisted the key again. This time the motor caught and roared into life. I let out the clutch and pointed us toward the center of the alley. We half slid, half wobbled down the alley and onto the cross street.
Four-wheel drive is nice, but nothing’s nice on ice. The street was worse than a skating rink. Every time I tried to nudge us beyond ten miles an hour, the wheels broke loose and I’d start to slide. I could only crawl, one long block at a time.
Behind me, high headlamps followed, the right size for a big SUV like Robinson’s Escalade.
Thompson Avenue, that main drag, was littered with wrecked cars. The ice storm had come too suddenly for the town’s salt truck, and early-morning drivers, passing through to jobs well away from Rivertown, were crashing everywhere, slamming catawampus into curbs and other cars inching down the street.
Yet through it all, the high headlamps stayed a hundred yards behind, almost invisible in the freezing crystal rain.
I chanced a look at Amanda. She sat stoically on the seat beside me, staring straight ahead, still wheezing deeply, desperate in her dark place to store more oxygen before someone came again with wire ties and silver tape.
I crawled west along Thompson Avenue, thinking vaguely of a hospital a few miles down the road.
I’d left my cell phone on the dash. I switched it on and called Wendell. I owed him that, and I needed help. He answered on the first ring.
“I got her, Wendell,” I heard myself shout. “I got her.”
“She’s safe?” he yelled.
“Safe, but traumatized. Your man tailed Robinson back to his house?”
“Yes, but Robinson left again, almost right away. I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Robinson’s behind me. Call your man. See if he can get between us and Robinson.”
“Let me talk to my daughter!”
I put the phone on speaker and laid it on the dash. “She’s in shock,” I yelled. “Call your man, get Robinson off my tail.”
We came to the north-south street I wanted. I took my foot off the gas and slid more than drove into a southbound turn. Halfway through, the Jeep shuddered and broke loose on the ice. Horns began blaring as we started to skid into the oncoming lanes.
I fed the Jeep more gas and found traction enough to push us into the correct lane. Amanda’s breathing began to slow, though she was nowhere nearby.
“Where the hell are you going?” Wendell shouted from the tinny phone speaker. “Robinson just turned south behind you.”
“She’s in deep shock. I’m taking her to DuPage General.”
“Bring her to me!”
“She’s not communicating. The hospital’s just a few miles ahead.”
“Damn it, Elstrom, she won’t be protected there,” he yelled. “Bring her to Lake Shore Drive.”
Her condo building was heavy with security, and Wendell could make it even heavier… but it was so many miles east.
“Is your man behind Robinson?”
“Right on his tail, but he’s driving a little crackerbox Honda, slipping all over the road. Robinson’s got a big SUV.”
I slowed. The big headlamps behind me did not.
I turned the wheel gently to the left. It was enough. The Jeep teetered and broke into a slide, but this one I’d anticipated. I turned the wheel a little more, pressed gently on the accelerator, and spun us just enough to head back north.
I watched the rearview. No headlamps were turning behind us.
“We’re good, Wendell,” I shouted at the phone. “I don’t think he followed.”
“I’m not hearing from my man,” he said.
We drove north, then east, dodging crashed cars or other cars poking gingerly along, like us. I watched my rearview incessantly for the high headlamps, but the lights behind us were ever changing, not constant. I could only hope Robinson had slid into a ditch.
Amanda sat robotlike, staring straight ahead, but her breathing had slowed to normal.
Thirty minutes later, we crawled up onto the Eisenhower Expressway and headed toward Chicago. Wendell was an incessant chatter from the phone on the dash. Sometimes I yelled something back; mostly I ignored him. Amanda said nothing at all.