Archie takes Gretchen’s face lightly in his hands. His voice cracks with despair. “We need to talk,” he says. “I can’t keep doing this.”
She moves his knees apart and eases down between them, back onto the floor in front of him. He doesn’t stop her. They have done this before. But it still mesmerizes him. He can’t believe his luck, to be wanted by a woman like her.
She unbuttons and unzips his pants and her face disappears in a tangle of blond hair as she lowers her head to his lap.
The rain stops. Archie leans his head back and closes his eyes.
C H A P T E R 41
Someone had turned the lights out. When she’d fled into the hallway she had been met with a wall of inky black. Susan had never experienced darkness like that. She froze for a second, unsure of what to do. Then she ran to her left, tracing her hand along the concrete wall. It was cool to the touch and pitted where pieces of concrete had crumbled off over the years. She concentrated on that. It kept her from being enveloped by the darkness.
In all that black, noise overwhelmed her. Pipes knocking.Water gurgling. The slap of her boots on the concrete. She could hear her heart beat and her face throb. She had never breathed so loud in her entire life. Every sound was someone coming up behind her, someone ready to lay a hand on her shoulder, drive her head back, and slice open her throat.
She heard her little voice in her head. The voice sounded a lot like Archie’s.
Just keep moving.
Don’t panic.
Get out. Call for help.
Her phone was in her purse back in the boiler room, along with her mace. But Archie had put his phone in her glove box.
Susan closed her eyes and concentrated on her hand moving along the wall. There was a comfort to the dark canvas of her eyelids. Her darkness.Her control. She forced herself to clear her senses, to ignore the building’s noises and the beating of her heart, and to remember only the route they’d taken to get there—the route that, if reversed, would get her out.
She felt some pipes she remembered passing. She was close. Then her hand brushed against something. She stopped and ran both hands along the wall. Then she found it—a lever-style doorknob. The stairwell. She turned the knob, pushed the door in with her shoulder, slipped through, and pulled it closed behind her.
The quality of the dark was different. Susan could make out the shape of her body, the angle of the stairs, and at the top of the stairs, another door. This door was not entirely airtight, and through the broken seals of its perimeter shone ribbons of bright, milky, marvelous light. There were lights on. There were lights on in the hall upstairs.
She ran up the stairs, into the fluorescent-lit expanse of lacquered coffee tables, cabinets, and geisha screens. She didn’t stop. She kept running. Out the door, and into the night and down the dead-quiet middle of the street, and all the way to the car.
It was only then that she realized she didn’t have her keys.
She was locked out. And she couldn’t help but think that fate was punishing her for buying that fucking Beauty Killer key chain.
She rested her head against the top of the Saab, and fought back tears.
He’s counting on you.
She did a story on a car thief once. He’d stolen two hundred cars by the time he was sixteen. She stood up and started walking
around the car, searching for something that would help her get inside.
To break into a car you need a rubber doorstop, a wire hanger, and a rubber band. You straighten the hanger, and bend a ninety-degree angle about a half-inch from one end. Wrap the rubber band around the tip. Jam the doorstop into the gap where the car door meets the body, so you have room to slide the wire in. If the doorstop doesn’t seem to work—jam a smaller plastic wedge in first, and then the doorstop. Insert the wire and use the rubber tip to hit the unlock button inside the door.
You learned a lot writing features for a newspaper.
Most of it was useless.
Susan picked up a piece of an angle-parking curb that had broken off and hurled it through her car’s passenger-side window.
The window shattered, sending beads of auto glass all over the inside of the car. Susan reached in, unlocked the car, opened the glove box, and got out the phone that Jack Reynolds had given Archie.
She called 911.
And she called Henry.
This time she didn’t call the paper.
C H A P T E R 42
Susan sank down low in the driver’s seat of her car, and waited, like Henry had told her to. She had cleared most of the glass off her seat, and shaken a few stray pieces off the front of her shirt. It was dark under the bridge. Susan wished she’d parked near a streetlight. The car shook as trucks passed overhead. She was almost grateful for the wailing of approaching sirens. It turns out that when you call 911 for help in the middle of the night they get anxious and go all Hill Street Blues.