All right, you bastard, I thought. I veered off the road and cut into the trees, and I had glimpses of him dodging and weaving with more agility than he had shown before. Maybe he had gotten a second wind — but there was a smoke-and-fire pain in my lungs and my chest felt as though it were being squeezed in a vise. I would not be able to keep on like this much longer. If I was going to get him at all, it would have to be now, right now.
The eucalyptus were beginning to thin out and between their trunks the black rows of grape vines were visible ahead. He saw that too, cut sharply to his left and came out into the open, down onto the clotted black earth between two rows of vines. Running downslope on that surface was even harder than running up the gravel road; he stumbled, lurched sideways, and fell jarringly to his hands and knees. He struggled up immediately — but the fall had cost him the last of his advantage.
I had him then. I had him good.
I threw myself forward with my arms outstretched and hit him in the small of the back with the fleshy joining of my upper chest and upper right arm. The air went out of him explosively, like a balloon bursting, and my momentum knocked him sprawling into one of the vines and carried me down on top of him. A vine branch splintered and caught me a scraping blow across the temple, showered me with juice from a burst cluster of grapes. None of that did any damage but it made me lose the grip I had on the guy’s clothing. He kicked out from under me and tried to pull away, making little mewling gasps the way somebody does when he’s had the wind knocked out of him.
I twisted around and got another grip on his jacket. He lashed out in a frenzy, all arms and legs and hard edges of bone; I had to keep my head tucked in against my chest to protect it from the blows. But I seemed to have more weight and more strength and I managed to pull myself over him again, smothering his movements, and then cuffed him a couples of times awkwardly with my free hand.
Only then I became aware of his body beneath mine on the loose earth, squirming, and there was something about the touch of him that was not quite what it ought to be. I reared back, straddling him now, holding him down with the one hand while the other one cocked back on reflex. And got a look at the white face and a pair of wild glaring eyes. And realized with astonishment and another sudden rush of confusion just what it was that was wrong.
It was not a man I had under me, it was an outraged woman.
I stared down at her, shock-frozen, and she used that moment to lunge upward with her head and shoulders and sink her teeth into the flesh below my collarbone. I let out a yell, pushed at her head and wrenched it aside; skin came tearing loose with her teeth, there was more stinging pain and the wetness of blood. She kept on struggling frantically, dangerously, and I had no choice except to force her back down again and hold her pinned until I could get my breathing and my thoughts under control.
“You son of a bitch,” she said. It came out in thick stuttering pants. “If you try to rape me I’ll be the last woman you ever do it to.”
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
She was not the one who had clubbed me back in the cellar, not the one I had been chasing; he had been a man, all right, I was sure of that. He must have stayed on the road, gone down into the hollow on the other side of the hill. Long vanished by now. The woman was somewhere under forty, slender and muscular and small-breasted, and her hair was cut very close to her head in one of those mannish styles; she was also wearing a dark shirt and jacket, dark trousers. All of which, along with the black night, explained why I had mistaken her for the guy.
But what the hell had she been doing up in those trees?
She was still struggling, still glaring up at me. There did not seem to be much fear in her; just fury and determination. She called me a couple of things, still fighting for breath, and told me what she would do to me if I tried to rape her. Hardboiled language, and all of it razor-edged.
“Listen,” I said, “listen, I’m not trying to rape you.”
Her mouth worked and she let go with a blob of spit that splattered across my cheek.
“Goddamn it, I tell you I’m not trying to rape you.” I was having trouble drawing enough air, just as she was; my lungs burned malignantly. “I was chasing somebody else, a man, I thought you were him in the dark.”
I had to say it again before she finally stopped thrashing around. She lay there tensed and wary, breasts heaving, hating me with her eyes. “Why were you chasing somebody out here? Who the hell are you?”
“A friend of Alex Cappellani’s,” I said. “I drove out to the winery to see him and this guy came out of the cellar office and tried to brain me with a wine bottle. So I went after him.”
“What guy?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get a look at him. He shut off the light in the office when he heard me coming.”
“None of that makes any sense.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Look, I’ll let go of you, let you up, if you don’t try to mix it up anymore.”
“That depends on what you try.”
“A little more conversation, that’s all.”
“Then let me up.”
I released one of her arms and she did not move. So I let go of the other one and slid back off her and made it up painfully onto my feet. My legs felt weak now, and I seemed to have half a dozen pulsing aches all over my body; the place where she had bit me stung like fury. I wiped her spittle off my cheek, stepped back and over to one of the vines and rested my weight on a grape stake there.
The woman got up slowly, not taking her eyes off me. She brushed the dirt off her clothing in an angry way, put a hand up and ran fingertips across her jaw where I cuffed her. “You play pretty damned rough, don’t you,” she said.
“I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“I’ve been treated worse.” She slapped again at the front of her jacket and the blue jeans she was wearing. “You said you were a friend of Alex’s. What’s your name?”
I told her.
“I never heard that name before.”
“I only met Alex a few days ago.” My respiration was just about back to normal, but the constriction in my chest had not lessened any yet. The damned cough started up again, thin and dry.
She stood there watching me, speculatively now, not saying anything.
When the coughing quit I said, “What about you? Do you live here?”
“No, I don’t live here.” She hesitated then, but only for a moment; most of the anger seemed to have gone out of her. “I work for the Cappellanis, in their San Francisco office. I’ve been staying up here as their guest since last night.”
“Why were you in those trees?”
“Because the guest quarters are over on the other side of the hill and I was walking over to the main house. On the road. Somebody came running up from the other side, and as soon as he saw me he veered off into the trees. I thought that was pretty odd so I went in there a little ways to try to see who it was. Then I heard you, and you heard me and came after me, and I reacted stupidly and ran. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
“You didn’t get a look at the guy?”
“It was too dark. Look, you said he shut off the light in the cellar office and then came out and hit you with a wine bottle. Why would anybody do a crazy thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Unless he’s a thief and he panicked. Or—”
I stopped abruptly, because for the first time since I had been attacked I was beginning to think logically instead of emotionally — and I was remembering all at once that scraping sound I had heard, the sound of something heavy being dragged across the stone floor.