"Is it him?" Peter heard from behind his shoulder.
He spun about and saw Francis standing stock-still, a few feet back. The younger man's eyes were wide with fear and tension, a stray slice of light from a distant barred and closed window making his face seem even younger than he was.
"I don't know," Peter said. "I can't tell."
"The door…"
"It's locked," he replied. "It's not supposed to be, but it is."
Francis took a deep breath. He was absolutely certain of one thing.
"It's him," he said with determination that surprised him.
Webs of pain constricted her every thought and motion. She was battling to remain alert, understanding that her life depended upon it, but she was uncertain how. One of her eyes was already swelling shut, and she thought her jaw was broken. She tried to crawl away from the sound of the Angel's voice, but he slammed her with his foot again, and then abruptly dropped down on top of her, straddling her, pinning her to the floor. She groaned again, and then she was aware that he had something in his hand. When he pressed it up against her cheek, she knew what it was. A knife, much as the one that he had used to slice through her beauty so many years earlier.
He whispered, but it had the force of a drill sergeant's command: "Don't move. Don't die too quickly, Lucy Jones. Not after all this time."
She stayed rigid with fear.
He lifted himself up, casually walked back to the desk, and in two swift, vicious motions, cut the telephone line and the intercom.
"Now," he said, turning back toward her, "A little conversation before the inevitable takes place."
She pushed herself back, and didn't respond.
He dropped back down on top of her, once again pinning her with his knees, holding her in place. "Do you have any idea how close I've been to you, on so many occasions I've lost count. Do you know that I've been at your side every step you've taken, day after day, week after week, adding all those seconds into minutes and letting the years come and go, and always been right there, so near I could have reached out and taken hold of you any time, so close I could smell your scent, hear your breathing? I have never left your side, Lucy Jones, not since the night we first met."
He pushed his face down next to hers.
"You have done well," the Angel said. "You learned every lesson you could in law school. Including the one that I taught you."
The Angel looked down at her, his own face a mask of anger. "There's just time for one more final bit of education," he said. He placed the knife blade up against her throat.
Francis stepped forward, staring hard at Peter. "It's him," he repeated. "He's here now."
Peter looked back at the small window in the door. "We haven't heard a signal. The Moses brothers should be here…"
But he took one more look at the mixture of fear and insistence that Francis wore on his face, and he turned and threw his shoulder against the locked door, grunting hard with exertion. Then he pulled back and slammed himself into the unyielding metal again, only to drop back with a solid, meaningless thud. Peter could feel panic lurking around within him, suddenly aware that in a place where time seemed almost irrelevant, seconds now mattered.
He stepped back and kicked hard at the door. "Francis," he said loudly, "we've got to get out there."
But Francis was already tugging hard at the metal frame of his bunk, trying to pull one of the stanchions free. It took less than an instant for Peter to recognize what the younger man was trying to do, and he jumped to Francis's side, to help rip free some piece of iron that might serve as a makeshift crowbar, so that they could attack the door. Peter had an unusual thought penetrate all the mingled fears and doubts about what was taking place right in front of him, but beyond his reach, that the sensation he felt right then was probably the same as a man trapped within a burning building felt as he faced the wall of flame that threatened to devour him. Peter grunted hard with exertion.
On the floor of the nursing station, Lucy fought desperately to keep her wits about her. In the hours, days, and months after she'd been assaulted so many years earlier, there had been an inevitable replaying in her mind of what ifs and if I'd onlys. Now she was trying to gather all those memories, feelings of guilt and recriminations, internal fears and horrors back to her to sort through them and find the one that truly might help, for this moment was the same as that one was. Only this time, she knew more than youth, innocence, and beauty were about to be taken from her. She screamed at herself, thrusting her imagination past the pain and despair, to find a way to fight back.
She was facing the Angel all alone in a world surrounded by people, as isolated and abandoned as if they were on some deserted island or deep in some dark forest. Help was a flight of stairs away. Help was down the hallway, behind a locked door. Help was everywhere. Help was nowhere.
Death was a man with a knife pinning her to the floor. He had all the power; she understood that an electricity born of planning, obsession, anticipation of this moment must have been coursing through the Angel. Years of compulsion and desire, just to reach that single moment. She knew, in a way that went beyond anything she had learned in any law school class, that she had to use his triumph against him, and so, instead of saying Stop! or Please! or even Why? she spit out between swollen lips, and loosened teeth a statement of complete fiction and arrogance. "We knew it was you all along…"
He hesitated. Then he pushed the flat of the knife up against her cheek. "You lie," the Angel hissed. But he did not cut her. Not yet, and Lucy understood she had purchased herself a few seconds. Not a chance to live, but a moment that had made the Angel hesitate.
The noise of Peter and Francis savagely ripping at the bed frame, trying to pry loose a strip of metal, finally began to rouse the patients in the dormitory room from their unsteady sleep. Like ghosts rising out of a graveyard on All Hallow's Eve, one after the other, the men of the housing unit stirred themselves to wake, fighting off the deep seduction of their daily sedatives, scrambling, struggling, blinking their eyes open to the novelty of Peter's increasing panic, as he fought against the metal with every muscle he could gather.
"What's happening, C-Bird?"
Francis heard the question and lifted his head in the direction of the sound. It was Napoleon. As Francis paused, at first unsure precisely how to respond, he watched as the men of the Amherst Building slowly lurched from their bunks, joining together in a haphazard, misshapen knot behind Napoleon, staring out through the darkness at Francis and Peter, whose frantic efforts were making some modest headway. He had almost managed to free a single three-foot section of the frame and he grunted as he twisted and pried at the reluctant metal.
"It's the Angel," Francis said. "He's outside."
Voices started to murmur, a mixture of surprise and fear. A couple of the men cowered back, shrinking from the thought that Short Blond's killer might be close by.