Into The Inferno Part 39

He considered just long enough to give me a glimmer of hope that maybe he wasn't going to kill us. It didn't last long. "Okay. That's fair. I killed her. I poured gas around your living room. I thought you were inside. I thought it was over right there."

That he was willing to admit culpability in the burning of my home meant he thought we weren't going to tell anybody. That we were as good as dead already. I said, "Three years ago you flew to Tennessee pretending to help while you were pulling strings in the background to make sure n.o.body learned anything. You did the same thing in North Bend."

"I can't deny there was some strange stuff happening in Chattanooga." He laughed.

"And who called the fire investigators and told them I set up the explosion? And last night, my house? Somebody you know?"

"Mrs. DiMaggio insisted on doing that herself. She used to be in summer stock. Loves playing a part. Practically begged me for it."

I was sparring. Wasting time. Holding out for a miracle.

Any minute now he would shoot us, wrap us in a big plastic tarp, and drag our bodies downstairs to dispose of.

We might stall him for five minutes, but in the end he was going to shoot us.

Running wouldn't work-he would easily line me up in his sights before I reached the end of the corridor. And Stephanie didn't have a chance standing along the far wall of DiMaggio's office under the Paul Klee. For her, running was not even an option.

I'd been facing my own demise all week, and now that it was here, panic gripped me in a way it hadn't during the past seven days. I laughed aloud. I was destined to turn into a vegetable tomorrow, and here I was panicking over the thought of getting shot. I guess I was really panicking over the thought of Stephanie getting shot. My life was already over-Donovan would be doing me a favor-but Stephanie was being robbed of the next fifty years. I had an ugly vision of Morgan and my daughters waiting in the hotel room for days before contacting the authorities.

"As long as this is all settled and you're not going to change your mind," I said, "maybe you could clear up a few things."

"Like what?" You could tell he didn't mind the stalling-the more delay the better. He was still trying to work himself up to this.

"I don't understand why you dragged Max Caputo into this," I said.

"Who? Caputo?"

"Remember the trailer on Edgewick Road?"

"Oh, him. I followed the fire engine the day before. After you packed him off to the hospital, I did some reconnoitering and decided his property was ideal for what we had in mind."

"You mean for wiping out the whole department."

"Well, yeah. Anybody who might have been exposed in the truck accident."

"So you killed Max and filled the place up with ammonium nitrate?"

"I didn't kill him."

"Who did?"

"I'm a.s.suming it was the explosion. I left him in a closet."

"I don't understand any of this," Stephanie said. "Why were you s.h.i.+pping D number fifty-six without precautions? Especially after that first accident in Tennessee. Why take another chance?"

"The odds were one in a million that anything would happen. Maybe one in ten million."

"That clearly wasn't true," I said. "You'd already had an accident right here in the plant. Another one in Tennessee. Who knows what else that you won't tell me about? It's got to be easier to take precautions than it is to run around murdering people."

"We took precautions."

"Putting it in Bibles?"

"That and having our own driver handling it. The mistake was hers. Your sister's the one who screwed up."

"Like h.e.l.l she did," Stephanie said. "You even tell her what was in there? Did you bother to tell her how lethal it was? She didn't know anything about it. I've got her journal. She never mentioned it."

"You're still s.h.i.+pping it in Bibles, aren't you?" I said.

"It was a fluke. That accident. It'll never happen again."

"You're a piece of work, you know that?" I s.h.i.+fted in the doorway, more to see what he would do than to make an escape.

"You're the ones who don't get it. This is what always astonishes me about people in your position. If you could see this from my point of view, you'd realize if it was you with the gun you'd do the same thing I'm doing. It's just how it is."

"You're really so blind you think that?"

"Abso-f.u.c.king-lutely."

"Jesus Christ. You need a psychiatrist."

"Why did you kill Achara?" Stephanie asked.

Donovan tensed and then relaxed, as if once again deciding it didn't matter what we knew. I had the feeling he was happy to brag about it, to tell someone, anyone. It must be tough to pull off a nice murder and not be able to tell anyone. His tone grew gruffer, like a preacher working himself up to a bout of cussing. "b.i.t.c.h needed killing."

He laughed, but it rang false. He was trying his best to be The Great Evildoer, but somewhere deep down he knew it was wrong and twisted, and he wasn't proud of himself-even though he was trying to convince himself he was. I don't think villainy came naturally to him, although self-deception certainly did.

"She made the wrong choice. It was as simple as that." He clearly regretted killing Achara. He stared at the floor between us, and his voice grew softer. "What happened after she made that choice, well, that was out of my hands."

"Please let us go," Stephanie said.

"Sorry. Letting you go is not an option."

"Sure it is," I said, moving toward the telephone on the desk. "I'll call the police. We'll turn ourselves in."

Donovan stepped forward and centered the pistol on my chest. We were fifteen feet apart now.

Stephanie was at the outer edge of his peripheral vision. I took another step toward the gun.

"Just stay where you are," he said.

Donovan wanted to kill us both in a civilized manner, but I was determined not to make it easy for him. He killed me, he was going to remember it. He'd already made the transformation, and now I was, too, reverting to the primordial, moving backward through evolution, returning to a time before civility, a time when men brained each other with rocks.

A man as large as Scott Donovan didn't spend his spare time lifting weights and practicing karate because he felt he was in control. He was compensating. I had no idea what he was compensating for, but it was for something something. And a man compensating as hard as he was didn't take goading well.

So I called him a tub-o'-lard.

Okay, I know, but I was under a lot of pressure, and I couldn't think of anything else. Besides, it seemed to actually work. The natural pink in his cheeks began turning bright red.

"If you think calling me names is going to get you anywhere . . ."

"Jesus. You'd fall into a barrel of t.i.ts and come out sucking your thumb. I bet your karate works great against a mattress tied to a post."

"You don't think I could take you?"

"Not if I had one arm tied behind my back."

Donovan sneered and tucked his pistol into the waistband behind his back. This was too good. He began rolling his shoulders, flicking his arms back and forth like a swimmer on the starting block, warming up. You were about to kill someone with your bare hands, there was no point in pulling a muscle.

Stephanie crept along the far wall toward the corner. "Don't do it, Jim."

Donovan and I locked eyes, mimicking the prefight ritual of a couple of over-the-hill club fighters. I tried to look mean. He did, too. It must have been hilarious.

Before he could make a move, I turned and sprinted out the door.

You can imagine his surprise.

60. A MINOR SCUFFLE; OR,.

THE DAY I LOST SOME OF MY MOST VERY FAVORITE TEEFFS.

"You crazy f.u.c.k!" Donovan shouted. "Come back here."

Too late. I was around the corner. In the corridor. Moving fast.

And then . . .

Bullets began tearing through the wall. He hadn't bothered to chase me, was shooting through the wall at where he guessed I might be. A stream of bullets.

Fragments of wallboard whizzed behind me in staccato ruptures, lead chasing me up the corridor like a zipper. Though each missile was closer than the last, by some miracle none of the slugs nicked me.

Instead of continuing down the corridor, I ducked through DiMaggio's shower room. When I opened the door that led from the bathroom back into DiMaggio's office, Stephanie and Donovan were in the doorway I'd just exited.

I stepped back into the office in time to see him hit her with an elbow. She went down hard but managed to slip her arms around one of his ankles, anything to hamper him.

Neither noticed me.

I ran across the room and launched myself through the air, striking Donovan across his midsection, using shoulders and fists and all the momentum I could generate.

The collision propelled us both away from Stephanie and against the wall in the corridor, where we crumpled into a heap.

I weighed a hundred ninety-seven pounds-or I had at the beginning of the week-yet hitting Donovan had been like b.u.t.ting my head into the bole of a two-hundred-year-old tree.

While he was still trying to get up, I struck him at the base of the nose with my palm. The blow tilted his head backward and yielded a spurt of blood. He c.o.c.ked his head back and gave me a h.e.l.lish look. His gla.s.ses were askew, the frame broken.

"Out of here, Stephanie!" I said. "Get out! Now!"

Before I could step away, Donovan swung his heavy leg around in an arc and knocked me off my feet.

Ian Hjorth, who studied martial arts, had once brought in a video that showed a karate expert killing a steer with a single blow to the head. Donovan's hands looked capable of that, thick and heavy and callused. I'd learned a couple of tricks from watching Hjorth's videos; one was that if you could help it, you didn't want to get into a fight with someone who'd trained for street fighting. I certainly didn't want my elbows, wrists, or fingers broken backward, my eyeb.a.l.l.s gouged out, my ears ripped off. I didn't want my lungs collapsed. I didn't want anybody inserting his fingers into my nostrils, yet I had a feeling I was headed for some or all of it.

Before I could regain my feet, Donovan clubbed me across the side of my skull. It felt like I'd been hit with a four-by-four chunk of lumber.

The blow lifted me off the ground; it also silenced the ringing that had been in both ears all day, silenced my left ear completely, so that I was now hearing in mono.

"Run, Jim!" Stephanie called out, a note of hopelessness in her voice.

"You run," I said, the words coming to my ears with a weird little echo as if from inside a jar. "Get the h.e.l.l out." run," I said, the words coming to my ears with a weird little echo as if from inside a jar. "Get the h.e.l.l out."

Donovan and I were on our feet now, squaring off. Somewhere along the line he'd lost the gun, though the room still reeked of gun smoke.

It took fifteen seconds to figure out what he was waiting for. Then it occurred to me. He was waiting for me to regain my senses. He wanted me alert and aware. He wanted me to feel each blow.

I was three or four inches taller than Donovan, yet he outweighed me by a muscular forty pounds. On his side he had bulk, power, strength, cunning, years of training, and a desire to inflict maximum damage; on mine I had reach, leverage, and a willingness to suffer. He was a black belt in karate; I had walked away from any schoolyard challenge reciting: " 'Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' " In other words, I was accustomed to being laughed at but not to fighting.

Extending his fists, he spoke softly. "Now you're going to hurt."

I didn't even see the blow. It knocked me into DiMaggio's office, where I staggered, tripped, did a backward somersault, and got to my knees and then to my feet in one motion.

I stood up in time to take a blow to the face.

Inside the office, Stephanie was cowering behind the door, a hypodermic syringe clutched in her hand.

Taking short, quick steps, Donovan stepped forward and hit me in the face again, hard. There was no telling how I kept my feet under me. I was seeing stars now. Lots of them.

My jaw and mouth were numb and felt watery.

Something hit the floor at my feet. At first I didn't want to look down because I was afraid it was one of my teeth. When I did look down, I found I was wrong.

It was two two of my teeth. of my teeth.

More loose teeth were floating around in my mouth.

When he threw his next punch, I ducked and his fist connected with the top of my skull. I wanted to drop to the floor and scream in pain, but by sheer force of will I kept my feet under me, swaying in place like a drunk.

"s.h.i.+t!" he said, cradling his fist with his free hand. He threw another punch with his uninjured hand, but I stepped back and he missed. He missed another punch, this also with his undamaged hand. Maybe he wasn't going to kill me after all.

Then something hit me in the mouth.

I landed heavily on my right side, rolled, managed to get to my hands and knees. After choking for a few seconds, I coughed up an object that had been lodged in my throat.

A molar.

The left side of my face was swollen and tight. My jaw was broken.

I recalled once reading about a man in a bear attack who'd been besieged by the same feeling of disbelief that was now gripping me. In his wildest dreams he'd never imagined himself getting eaten by a bear. In my wildest dreams I'd never imagined getting beaten to death by a chemist.