She ran into him without slowing, almost knocking him over.
He holstered his revolver and then put his arms around her. She was trembling like an electric wire with too much current running through it. Alan suspected he was trembling pretty badly himself, and he had come close to wetting his pants. She was hysterical, blind with panic, and that was probably a blessing: he didn't think she had the slightest idea how close she had come to taking a round.
"What's going on in there, Sheila?" he asked. "Tell me quick."
His ears were ringing so badly from the gunshot and the succeeding echo that he could almost swear he heard a telephone somewhere.
22
Henry Beaufort felt like a snowman melting in the sun. His legs were giving way beneath him. He crumpled slowly into a kneeling position with the ringing, unanswered phone still tolling in his ear.
His head swam with the mingled stench of booze and burning fur.
Another hot smell was mingling with these now. He suspected it was Hugh Priest.
He was vaguely aware that this wasn't working and he ought to dial another number for help, but he didn't think he could. He was beyond wringing another number out of the telephone-this was it. So he knelt behind the bar in a growing pool of his own blood, listening to the chimney-hoot of air from the hole in his chest, clinging desperately to consciousness. The Tiger didn't open for an hour yet, Billy was dead, and if no one answered this telephone soon, he would also be dead when the first customers came trickling in for their various happy-hour potations.
"Please," Henry whispered in a. screamy, breathless voice.
"Please answer the phone, someone please answer this f**king phone."
23
Sheila Brigham began to regain some control, and Alan got the most important thing out of her right away: she had decommissioned Hugh with the butt of the shotgun. No one was going to try to shoot them when they went through the door.
He hoped.
"Come on," he said to Norris, "let's go."
"Alan... When she came out... I thought.
"I know what you thought, but no harm was done. Forget it, Norris. John's inside. Come on."
They went to the door and stood on either side of it. Alan looked at Norris. "Go in low," he said.
Norris nodded his head.
Alan grabbed the doorknob, jerked the door open, and lunged inside. Norris went in under him in a crouch.
John had managed to find his feet and stagger most of the way to the door. Alan and Norris hit him like the front line of the old Pittsburgh Steelers and John suffered a final painful indignity: he was knocked flat by his colleagues and sent skidding across the tiled floor like one of the weights in a barroom bowling game. He struck the far wall with a thud and let out a scream of pain which was both surprised and somehow weary.
"Jesus, that's john!" Norris cried. "What a French fire-drill!"
"Help me with him," Alan said.
They hurried across the room to John, who was slowly sitting up on his own. His face was a mask of blood. His nose was canted severely to the left. His upper lip was swelling like an overinflated innertube. As Alan and Norris reached him, he cupped one hand under his mouth and spat a tooth into it.
"He'th cray the," John said in a mushy, dazed voice. "Theela hit him with the thotgun. I think thee killed him."
"John, are you all right?" Norris asked.
"I'm a f**kin meth," John said. He leaned forward and vomited extravagantly between his own spread legs to prove it.
Alan looked around. He was vaguely aware that it wasn't just his ears; a telephone really was ringing. But the phone wasn't the important thing now. He saw Hugh lying face-down by the rear wall and went over. He dropped his ear against the back of Hugh's shirt, listening for a heartbeat. All he could hear at first was the ringing in his ears. The goddam telephones were ringing on every desk, it sounded like.
"Answer that f**king thing or take it off the hook!" Alan snapped at Norris.
Norris went to the closest phone-it happened to be on his own desk-punched the button that was flashing, and picked it up.
"Don't bother us now," he said. "We have an emergency situation here. You'll have to call back later." He dropped it back into its cradle without waiting for a response.
24
Henry Beaufort took the telephone-the heavy, heavy telephoneaway from his ear and looked at it with dimming, unbelieving eyes. "What did you say?" he whispered. Suddenly he could no longer hold the telephone receiver; it was just too damned heavy. He dropped it on the floor, slowly collapsed onto his side, and lay there panting.
25
As far as Alan could tell, Hugh was all finished. He grabbed him by the shoulders, rolled him over... and it wasn't Hugh at all.
The face was too completely covered with blood, brains, and bits of bone for him to be able to tell who it was, but it surely wasn't Hugh Priest.
"What in the f**k is going on here?" he said in a low, amazed voice.