Instead he turns his back on her and puts several feet of distance between them.
She closes her eyes, grits her teeth, tries once more to turn anger into a trigger event. She won’t crush his face. Just his phone, and then hopefully, by proxy, some of his massive crusader’s ego. But it doesn’t work. Anger’s not enough. Rage is not enough. She needs stark terror.
Should she attack him right now? Make him fight back in a way that will trigger her? But is that worth the risk? If he does go through with this call, she can just deny everything and make Luke look like the crazy one. A betrayal, sure, but isn’t that what he’s doing to her right now?
And then the light changes and the traffic starts streaming past the library, and she sees a giant refrigerator truck with the cheerful logo of some produce company on its side round the distant corner. The driver accelerates when he sees a green light waiting for him a half block ahead.
“Hey, Phil, is Mona on duty?” Luke says into the phone.
Charlotte walks to the edge of the curb.
“Tell her it’s urgent. Is she on her cell? . . . How far? . . . No, I mean how long has it been going to voice mail?”
The truck approaches, engine bellowing, huffing exhaust.
This time it will work. Because this time it’s not a car being driven by a loved one who’s practically family. This time it’s a truck driven by a stranger. A huge truck. And maybe the driver’s late for a delivery or a pickup or a hot date or who knows what else; what she knows is he’s sitting about seven or eight feet off the ground and won’t see her if she steps in front of him at just the right moment.
The truck’s only a few yards away now. And as she studies that grill, visualizes herself stepping in front of it, she feels the tingling in her hands, the slowly accelerating drumbeat of bone music. The onset of terror.
Maybe she’ll need to break a bone. Maybe the truck will have to tear into her before the Zypraxon in her system blooms. But surely an attack from a giant, moving wall of metal will be perceived the same way an attack from a rageful human would.
Why would the terror be any different, any less effective? And maybe she’ll find out what kind of miracles Zypraxon can work on a freshly broken femur.
“Tell her I need to talk to her right away,” Luke says. “She needs to call me on my—”
“Luke!”
He spins, looks her in the eye.
“Watch this!”
She steps off the curb and thrusts one arm out in front of her.
Luke’s terrified shouts and the truck’s squealing brakes deafen her.
Despite her best efforts to keep them open, she screws her eyes shut. She’s rocked back on her heels as if from a sudden, strong wind and in the same moment it feels as if her arm has exploded into flame. Then she tilts forward onto the balls of her feet again, and her lips kiss the steel grill.
The truck didn’t stop just in time.
She stopped the truck just in time. With one arm.
When she opens her eyes again, she’s dwarfed by the truck’s grill, and her arm’s buried deep inside it, in a fresh gash that looks custom designed just for her. The pain, in its Zypraxon-muffled form, ricochets up her forearm, sings through her shoulder, then arcs across her upper back before it leaves behind a dull, throbbing ache she’d normally associate with lifting something heavy. The entire process feels as if the pain searched for a place in her body where it could perform its expected, agonizing work, but it kept getting denied entry, so it decided to give up and evaporate altogether.
The truck shudders, as if its very carriage is coming to terms with the miraculous strength that just brought it to a halt, a force that was not just sudden and powerful enough to stop it but impossibly precise.
Slowly, she removes her arm from the hole.
She’s bleeding from a dozen different scratches. The bruising is fierce and terrible. In her fist, she holds on to a chunk of metal from the grill. She passes it to her left hand, then twiddles all of the fingers on her right. They work perfectly. No additional spike of pain shoots up her arm. Nothing’s broken. The skin’s a mess, but the bones are intact.
With her left hand, she slowly crushes the chunk of metal and lets it drop to the concrete.
Then, a few feet away, Luke makes a sound like a bird that doesn’t know if it’s dawn, dusk, or feeding time. She’s never seen someone who literally looked as if he were about to jump out of his skin before, but that’s how Luke looks. He’s in a half crouch, his arms spread on either side of him, as if preparing to dive through the air to knock her out of the truck’s path. He’s frozen in midcrouch, his mouth agape and his eyes wide. Without meaning to, he tossed his phone. It lies on the pavement a few feet away.
The driver’s screams come to a sudden, choked halt when he sees her. Reflexively, she hides her not-injured-enough arm against her chest and covers it with the other. “I’m OK,” she cries. “I’m OK.”
Just as the truck driver drops from his cab to the sidewalk, she hops up onto the pavement as if the entire event were nothing more than a brief stumble. At the sight of this, the driver lets out a moan so full of relief it sounds almost sexual. He clasps one hand to his chest, forcing breath back into his lungs.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s not your fault. You totally stopped in time. I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry. Thank you. We were just . . . my husband and I, we were fighting, you see, and I got distracted because he was being such a huge dick.”
The driver stares at her in a daze, whispering words under his breath, too quietly for her to make them out, but she’s willing to bet every other one is profane. Hands braced on his knees, he bends forward, mouth agape. His baseball cap falls to the sidewalk, revealing his sweat-soaked rat’s nest of wiry black hair.
She bends down and picks up Luke’s cell phone, slides it into her pocket with a sliver of the force she’d normally use for such a task.
Luke hasn’t moved, but his heaving chest makes it clear he’s still breathing. She’s about to wrap one arm around his waist before she realizes it’s the bruised and bleeding one, the one that should be broken, if not torn from her body entirely, and isn’t. She goes to wrap her good arm around his waist and remembers that if she pulls too hard she might detach his torso from his hips.
“Thank you, sir,” she tells the driver.
The driver just stares after her. Still bent over in a crouch. “Thank you,” she says. “I owe you my life. Honey, we should go. We’ll be late to get the baby.”
“What fucking baby?” Luke whispers.
“Now, sweetheart,” she hisses.
He takes a step, then another and another. He lags behind, his expression making him look like he’s the one who just stopped a speeding truck with one arm. He’s swallowing over and over again, sucking in half breaths through his nostrils, staring dead ahead as if he’s being marched toward the gallows. But they’re making decent enough time. Within a minute or two, they round the corner, putting the still stunned driver out of sight.
“You OK?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” he croaks; then he stumbles a few steps to his right, grabs a public trash can by the rim, and empties the contents of his stomach into it.
III
26
The woman he might kill next is doing a lousy job of stretching her quads. She’s bracing herself against the cargo door of her RAV4 with one hand, but her form’s still off. And when she pulls back on the ankle of her bent left leg with her other hand, her hips wobble and she bites her lower lip.