IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THE CRAZY PERSON came out of nowhere and the waking nightmare started, Bernie Riggowitz was thinking about the three Ls—life, loss, and love.
Life is finding people you love and then losing them, sometimes after sixty years, sometimes after a few months or even a week, all the loss meant to keep you humble and remind you that your life is likewise stamped with an expiration date, so that you’ll use your days to the best of your ability, in the service of what is good. Bernie understood the grand strategy of life’s design, and he didn’t presume to think that he knew better how it should have been done, but—shit, shit, shit!—he was fed up with all the losing of people.
Bernie in the Tiffin Allegro cockpit, behind the wheel, was too nervous to do anything other than stare out at the grounds of the RV park, hoping to absorb some of the tranquillity from the sun, the majestic palm trees, the glimmering water in the pool.
It didn’t work. He anxiously checked his wristwatch every five or six minutes, thinking an hour had gone by.
Only three times in his life had he come to love someone in mere hours or less. Miriam had always said that she fell in love with him at first sight, and he said he did, too, but the truth was that he needed maybe an hour to fall in love with her, but then he fell all the way and hard. He fell in love with Nasia, his only child, in less than half a minute after his first look at her. What kind of monster didn’t love his own baby with every fiber of his being? He’d needed maybe two hours to fall in love with Jane, who’d called herself Alice at the time. His love for Miriam involved heart and mind and body, but his love for Jane was a heart-and-mind thing. In truth, if he’d been thirty-one instead of eighty-one, and if he’d never met Miriam, this would have been a heart-mind-body thing, but he didn’t have it in him to be a dirty old man.
If Jane died, Bernie’s life of optimism was going to end as a life of despair. And if she lost her boychik, Bernie was damn well after all going to assume that he knew better how the world and life should have been designed.
He checked his watch yet again, having expected to hear from Jane by now, certain that two hours had passed, that something had gone wrong. But she and Luther had set out from the RV park only a little more than an hour earlier.
That was when the crazy person appeared on the deck surrounding the big pool and began to pitch the lounge chairs into the water.
16
JANE PIVOTED TOWARD THE THREAT, but the naked woman was too close, coming in as low and fast as a striking snake unraveling from its coils, so damn fast, already past the pistol. The knife slashed right to left across Jane’s abdomen, slicing open her T-shirt as if the fabric were gossamer, making a zipperlike sound as it scored the SafeGuard vest underneath. The body armor featured fine chainmail to protect against edge weapons, plus an underlying Kevlar layer that provided ballistic protection.
The vest didn’t fail. Would never fail. But it was only a vest, leaving points of vulnerability—face, throat, hands. The attacker had ferocious energy, feral quickness, uncanny strength. Even as the knife sliced across the armor, she body-slammed Jane, driving her back into a wall. A hard shock to the spine. A moment when darkness encroached at the edges of vision. A transient right-side weakness. Jane’s right hand opened involuntarily, and the Heckler fell with a soft thump on the carpet.
Full-body contact now, hand-to-hand, a death struggle. Jane seized the other’s right wrist in her left hand as the woman raised the knife to stab.
Her foul breath a thick tide, the stink of sour sweat and urine and blood steaming off her, the woman didn’t cycle through a panoply of tortured expressions, as had the man before her. Her face seemed forged of iron, every bone beneath the skin and every muscle in that rigid countenance fired into hard angles of fury and hate. In her eyes an icy void attested to a mind pitiless and purged of empathy. She growled low in her throat and hissed and spat, but said not a word, not one obscenity or curse, as though in her depravity she wasn’t human any longer, but an animal, a predator at least as vicious as any in nature.
She clutched Jane’s throat, trying to choke her, but that hand was slick with blood from a wound in the palm, and the woman didn’t have full strength in it.
Martial arts had their uses, but they seldom worked on the street the way they did in a dojo. When you were pinned against a wall by a zombified psychopath who pressed closer in her frenzy, trying to bite your face, judo and karate were strictly action-movie choreography. You needed to resort to plain techniques, plain old everyday brutality, plain-Jane stuff.
Caused by the shock of impact, Jane’s brief right-side weakness passed. With her left hand, she continued to stiff-arm the insistent attacker’s raised knife. With her right, she now clutched the wrist of the hand at her throat and used her thumb to apply crippling pressure on the radial nerve, maintaining eye contact because animals could sometimes be intimidated by an unrelenting stare. She planted her right foot flat against the wall, tensed the calf and thigh, and drove her knee hard between her assailant’s spread legs, did it again, and a third time. A woman wouldn’t be incapacitated by such a blow, as a man might be, but the vulva was richly endowed with nerves; the pain should make her relent or even drop the knife.
Didn’t happen. In her killing fury, the woman was beyond pain, an engine of destruction fueled and armored by epinephrine.
They were deep in the extreme cage fight of which Jane had warned Bernie, mean and dirty, no rules, no compassion, a contest that allowed only one survivor. As the pinched radial nerve failed the tendons and muscles that it served, the attacker suffered wrist-drop, her grip strength gone. Jane punched her assailant’s throat, hoping to tear the cartilage around the larynx. The woman’s head snapped back. Jane punched again, harder than before. A third punch, aimed higher, broke the nose. She clawed at an eye. Gagging, gasping, the attacker dropped the knife, stumbled backward. Jane stooped and grabbed the pistol from the carpet and rose and fired once point-blank. She would have fired again, but that was when the blast came and the house rocked on its foundation and part of the front wall collapsed into the living room.
17
THE TUBULAR-FRAME NYLON-WEBBING lounge chairs floating in the sun-sparkled pool, bobbing and yawing, turning in circles, knocking together, as if invisible sunbathers were frolicking together in some water game …
On the farther side of the pool from Bernie Riggowitz, the raging person wasn’t only tossing lounge chairs into the swimming pool. He was also overturning tables with their big center-fixed red umbrellas and kicking over the other chairs.
At first it didn’t occur to Bernie, watching from the cockpit of the motor home, that the man might be homicidal, only that he must have a grudge against the RV park management or maybe a crazy hatred of outdoor furniture. And surely he must be very drunk. At the moment there were no vacationers in the pool or on the deck around it, no one whom the shikker might attack.
Then Holden Hammersmith, patriarch of the clan that operated Hammersmith Family RV Park, the man who registered Albert Rudolph Neary and took his cash and escorted the Tiffin Allegro to its current campground space, hurried into view from the direction of the park office and convenience store. He was accompanied by his sixteen-year-old son, Sammy, who had assisted Bernie, alias Rudy, with the electrical hookup. Holden was about six feet one, maybe 220 pounds. A neck that could never be encompassed by the collar of an off-the-rack shirt. Shoulders like the Hulk. Popeye forearms. The boy was still growing, a few inches shorter than his dad, forty pounds lighter.