Someone was at the door. Ariel heard the knob being worked.
“Ariel!” It was Berke. “We’re on! Let’s go!”
He released her.
“Ariel?” The knob was turned back and forth. “You okay?”
Ariel got up on her knees, facing the door. She tried to scream, tried as hard as she could. The sound came out as a muffled moan, and then he was down on the floor with her, one arm snaking around her throat from behind and his face buried in her hair. He was breathing raggedly into her ear. As he breathed, the pressure of his arm steadily tightened.
“Open up!” said Berke.
Ariel felt pressure building in her head. Felt it begin to push her eyes out of their sockets. His arm was crushing her windpipe.
The doorknob rattled once more, back and forth.
And then Berke was gone.
Outside in the hall, Berke was about to go back and get John. She thought Ariel must be sick, and what were they going to do?
Then she saw a camera tripod leaning against the wall next to the door. It was a pitiful thing. One leg of it was wrapped with duct tape. On the floor beside it was a black camera bag. She unzipped it. The video camera was in there. It was a nice one, it said ten-point-six megapixels on the side. Who would leave something like this sitting around? With a light meter in there, and a battery pack, extra lenses, filters, the works. Ripe for the stealing.
She knew tech people swore by it and used it in all sorts of situations, but, she wondered, who really needed to carry around four fucking rolls of duct tape?
In the bathroom, behind the locked door, he was choking Ariel to death.
She tried to fight him. She tried to twist, to arch her back, to thrash him off, to strike with a backwards blow of her head. But he had her, and he breathed in her ear as he was killing her, and his free hand was working on himself, fast fast fast, and he started to make the noise that men make when they have mistaken possession for love and pornography for sex, a high keening whimper and to the world an announcement of, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna cum, oh yeah I’m gonna—”
The bathroom door blew off its hinges.
Berke hurtled through, shoulder-first.
The light that streamed in fell upon the swollen-eyed face of DJ Talk It Up, his lips wet with saliva and his hair sticking up in spikes stiffened with product. He was wearing a dark brown hoodie, the jacket twisted on his torso and the hood lying down across his shoulder. Tonight he had left his rings at home, because he’d wanted to dress down.
Berke saw the duct tape over Ariel’s mouth, saw the terror in her eyes and the guy’s arm squeezing her throat. She saw blood streaming from both of Ariel’s nostrils, making a mess of her pretty lavender-colored blouse with the puffy sleeves that Berke herself would never have been caught dead in.
Berke thought she was going to have to kill him. She was ready.
He shuddered, came to himself and his current predicament with a jolt, and he let Ariel go. He pushed her aside and sprang up, like a stocky panther searching for escape. The zipper of his jeans was open. Before Berke could think to shout for help, DJ Talk It Up charged her and swung a fist at her face, but Berke saw it coming and warded it off with one arm while the other punched five into the fool’s bulbous nose.
She gave it all she had, and she had one hell of a lot to give.
His nose exploded like a blood balloon. But that didn’t stop him, he was enraged and desperate and so he kept flailing at her, grabbing at her hair, her breasts, trying to claw her eyes out.
Fucker fights like a girl, Berke thought just before she drove a knee right up into his balls.
Maybe that did hurt him, from the way he whined, but he was running on nerves and adrenaline and he was not going to be stopped by a bagful of smashed nuts. His face might have gone ghost-white, but he still wanted out. He clawed his way past Berke and through the door, tearing himself out of his jacket as Berke grabbed hold of the hood, and then in his flagging white T-shirt stained with tonight’s Hungry Man dinner he started to limp to the left but there were still people who’d gotten backstage passes from Twenty Million Miles To Earth in the corridor, jamming things up, and now they were gaping at him and Berke was shouting, “Stop him! Stop him!”
So DJ Talk It Up turned to the right and tried to get past the handcart that nearly tripped him up and took a bite from one of his ankles as he passed. Two more ball-dragging staggers in search of a way out and suddenly from a door in front of him stepped the Detroit dude.
“Stop him, John!” Berke shouted, holding a dark brown hoodie with nobody in it.
Maybe Detroit couldn’t always beat Philly’s ass. It had been a general statement.
Tonight, though, it was pretty much true.
Nomad got three punches in before DJ Talk It Up realized he was being pounded. They weren’t just ordinary back-behind-the-bar or parking lot disagreement shots; they had some meaning behind them, some muscle, and they were well-placed to make DJ Talk It Up understand he was on his way to the hospital. Another trio of punches, fast fast fast, and DJ was speechless and also toothless in front.
Nomad gave him one to the throat, not as hard as he’d given Quince Massey in front of the Olive Garden that day years ago, but one that would be remembered.
Then the DJ was on his knees. His face was not so much a face as a model for an abstract painting. Nomad stood over the Study In Scarlet With Nose On Forehead. Terry looked out from the door at his back, his eyes wide behind his specs, and he determined to stay right where he was, out of harm’s way.
There was a frozen moment, as happens in the aftermath of sudden violence.
“John! Terry! Help me!” Berke called, and the way her voice trembled pierced Nomad’s heart.
He looked along the corridor. Berke was supporting someone he could not possibly recognize. They were walking slowly, painfully, toward him, and the crew and techs and people with backstage passes and even members of Twenty Million Miles To Earth were around them trying to help.
Nomad saw the duct tape across her mouth, wound around her head and caught in her tangled hair. He saw the blood. He saw her rubbing her wrists, and how a long silver ribbon of tape hung down from one of them. He saw how the lavender-colored blouse with the puffy sleeves had been ruined. One of her favorites, he knew. She lowered her face when she saw him looking, as if in shame to let herself be seen like this.
“Oh, Jesus!” Terry cried out, and he rushed past Nomad to go to Ariel.
< >
Somebody flashed a camera.
Nomad would have torn that person’s eyeballs from their skull and made them examine their own asshole, but he didn’t have to. One of the stage crew darted in and grabbed the camera. There was a protest and two Cobra Club guys suddenly were taking out the garbage.
Nomad looked again at Ariel, being supported by Berke as Terry worked to get the tape off her mouth and out of her hair. The people around them were stunned into silence. When the tape came off, Ariel took a step forward and then she bent over and vomited on the floor. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Berke said, rubbing her back. Ariel had to lean against the wall, and somebody offered a towel to hold against her bloody face.
Beyond the door that led to the stage, the audience began to chant for The Five.
Nomad stared down at DJ Talk It Up.
The rage came up in him. It sizzled through his veins like life’s blood. Maybe for him, it was. He decided he would end it now.