Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  For a moment, I thought Kineally was going to rush me; her eyes took on a red, mad quality and her teeth clamped shut with her suddenly outstretched jaw. But she caught herself and stopped, standing just in front of the pull-down stairs. If I could make a move at the right time, I might be able to push her down the way she came. But if she wasn’t completely immobilized by the fall—killed would be best—she’d be standing between me and freedom, and she’d be injured and furious. Probably not the best plan.

  “That would be the cliché, wouldn’t it?” Kineally shouted. “That’s what you’d write into your novel, isn’t it? That the crazy copy editor, the defender of the English language against abuses that would have been considered signs of a mental deficiency twenty years ago, just snapped one day? You’d write a copy editor who went around killing people in creative, macabre fashions tied to their writing because she couldn’t stand bad punctuation? That character would probably be a frumpy, sexless, middle-aged spinster whose only pleasure was the proper use of sentence structure, wouldn’t she? Well, that’s not me, lady. Not by a long shot.” Great. So now I knew she wasn’t sexless.

  “Then why?” I said in a more normal conversational tone.

  “None of your damn business,” she said. She turned and stomped down the stairs, and before I could rush the opening, she pushed them back up and locked the hatch beneath me.

  “Well, that went well,” I said to myself.

  I sat down. No bathroom breaks without permission? This was truly Purgatory. There had to be a way out. And thinking that none of the other authors, at least one of whom must have been smarter than me, had found it was not encouraging.

  But someone I knew was much smarter than me and would easily see the openings, the opportunities for escape, no matter what my archnemesis downstairs might think. Someone who could assess the situation coolly and calmly, take in all the possibilities in the room and the predicament, and discover the one method of extraction that no one else would possibly see.

  Duffy Madison.

  And since I had created Duffy out of nothing, since he was unquestionably a product of my imagination, it followed that the capacity to get myself out of this particular cage was in my brain, waiting to be unleashed. All I had to do was put Duffy into this attic mentally, see things through his eyes, and the answer would surely be revealed.

  Yes, writers are crazy. But we perform a public service: we think up this wacky shit so you don’t have to.

  I let Duffy take over my head and thought in his voice. It’s something I do to get the character right, and if I could think of this as a fictional situation, I could control it.

  In Olly Olly Oxen Free, I had Duffy locked up as a potential suspect in the kidnapping case he was investigating. (It’s a long story—go buy the book; it’s in paperback.) And I wanted it to be realistic, so I actually got Marty Dugan to lock me up in a municipal holding cell in Pequannock. I looked at it through Duffy’s eyes, thought logically, and noticed everything I wouldn’t have noticed as myself.

  I couldn’t bust myself out of the cell, but I could come up with a scenario in which Duffy managed to fool the officer on duty into thinking he was no longer in the cell so he would come in for a look and Duffy could sneak out. It was partially because of the research and partially through a very sophisticated literary technique we authors refer to as “fudging it.”

  Now I looked around the dark attic with Duffy’s voice in my head. Look for light, it told me. Light means a crack in the armor. It is a pathway to freedom. That seemed logical, so I sat down in the center of the room and looked for shafts of light. There was a dull glow from the window, but it was mostly boarded up and curtained, so that wasn’t much. Getting through the plywood and nails holding it would have been difficult if I’d had tools. There were none, however—not even in that damned huge toolbox. Without any, I was helpless on that front.

  Still, I could see in the room, and there was just the one lamp, and that was in the far corner. No candles. So by rights, I should have seen only the area around the lamp well; everything else should have been in close to total darkness.

  It wasn’t. Where was the light coming from?

  A careful view of the room made that question easy enough to answer: the light was coming from the ceiling. There was no skylight installed (that would have been too easy), but there were areas where light was coming through. This building must have had a remarkably old and battered roof. I lay on the floor and looked straight up. There were several points of light coming through the ceiling, but mostly pinpoints, far too small to be of much use.

  Except one.

  A little to the left of the ceiling’s peak was a light area in the weathered plywood. It wasn’t a hole exactly; it was more in the area of wear. It was like that section, about a square foot, of the ceiling was glowing. That meant there was very little roofing material over it. And that meant it could be punched through pretty easily, allowing access to the roof.

  There were only two problems with that: I had no way to get that high up in the room to punch through, and even if I did, I was horribly afraid of heights. Being out on the roof didn’t seem all that much better than letting Kineally come in here and kill me in a witty literary fashion.

  Come on, Duffy. What else? Examine the drop-down stairs on the hatch. How are they hinged, and how are the stairs attached to the floor? Making it down the stairs would be risky, but a heck of a lot less terrifying than trying to Spider-Man my way up to the ceiling and then walk out onto an obviously unstable roof. Maybe there was something here.

  The stairs were a standard-issue Home Depot kind of contraption. When they were folded up, like now, the stairs were flattened into an accordion-style configuration, but what the Duffy in my mind was telling me to examine was the edges of the board to which they were affixed.

  The metal stairs, folded, were bolted to a heavy particle board material that was probably finished on the underside with drywall to look as much like a regular ceiling as possible. But in order to open down when the stairs were to be unfolded, there were hinges on the edge closest to me, screwed on one side to the particle board assembly and on the other to the floor of the attic.

  So if I could find a way to detach the hinges, at the very least I could keep Kineally from coming upstairs. Best-case scenario had the stairs dropping through the hole in the floor and giving me a somewhat treacherous but possible escape route.

  Problem: I had no screwdriver to remove the hinges. I had, in my estimation, a grand total of nothing.

  One more time, Duffy; you’ve gotta come up with something! In the absence of an escape route, find a way to signal someone outside or get a message to me. He would say that, but he wasn’t offering a concrete possibility.

  There is an electric lamp in that corner. That means there is a power outlet into which the lamp is plugged, no? There was. Good. Find a way to short out the outlet and turn off the lights in the attic. Your eyes will adjust. Kineally’s won’t. Make a great deal of noise, and when she comes upstairs, you will have the advantage.

  Couldn’t I just unplug the lamp for the same effect? Yes, but shorting the outlet opens up the possibility in an old building like this one that the power will fail in other areas as well. That gives you more of an advantage.

  It wasn’t much, but that appeared to be the best Duffy could do. There wasn’t anything lying around the attic that presented itself as a useful electrical disruption tool. I supposed a paper clip or something metal would do well, but of course there was the possibility that I’d electrocute myself and spare Kineally the time and trouble of killing me. Still, the average home’s power supply probably wouldn’t kill me if I stuck some metal into a power outlet. Probably.

  Aw hell, it was worth a shot.

  I went through my pockets. Naturally Kineally had taken my cell phone, but I still had my keys; I guess she figured I couldn’t unlock something and get away, and gouging her eyes out with the key to a Toyota Prius c seemed unlikely an
d difficult. For my purposes, the keys would do, however unpleasantly.

  Without any further messages from my mental Duffy, I was resigned to the unpleasant task ahead. I heaved a heavy sigh and dragged myself over to the sole source of light in the room. I followed the cord from the base of the standing lamp to an outlet about midway in the far wall.

  I took the keys out of my pocket and selected the one from my car, which was the longest, to insert into the socket. If I’d had a paper clip, I could have wrapped it around the prongs of the lamp’s plug and pushed that into the socket. I wasn’t sure if that was a proper way to make the lights go out, but it had worked for Walter Matthau in Hopscotch, and he was playing a really smart CIA agent.

  Now you have to understand, I am seriously squeamish about electricity. So that simple move—pushing the key into the socket—was requiring a lot more determination that I wanted to muster. But the thought of Kineally coming up those stairs again, coupled with the memory of Sunny Maugham in her supply closet, a pen sticking out of her neck, drove me forward.

  I picked up the key again, aimed it at the left hole in the outlet, and took a deep breath. And just as I was about to thrust forward, Duffy’s voice came through once more time: Wait! Put a key in each of the vertical receptacles. That will complete the circuit and cause the breaker to trip, which will help to prevent electrocution. Who knew I had that knowledge buried in my brain?

  For fifteen minutes, I tried to push the two keys—to my car and my post office box—into the socket by getting them close, and then pushing them in using the sole of my shoe, assuming that would provide some insulation, or grounding, or something. But the keys kept falling out before I could move the shoe in place.

  Fighting nausea, I decided the only way to do this was to do it. I took the two keys, one in each hand, positioned them as they had to be, and pushed hard.

  Zap!

  Sparks flew from the receptacles. But oddly, I didn’t feel any current run into my hands. I’m not complaining, believe me, but it surprised me, making me think I’d somehow done this incorrectly.

  Except that the sparks were followed by the lamp going out and a crackling sound that, it seemed to be, was not confined merely to the attic. I could see very little now, but within seconds, my eyes adjusted to the new condition. The tiny pinpricks of light from the ceiling that I’d had to search for before were now much more visible, but I trained myself not to look directly at them. Make sure your pupils dilate. See as well as you can in the dark. It gives you an advantage over your captor, but it won’t last long. Thanks for the reminder, Duffy.

  It also occurred to me that freed of its light-diffusing responsibility, the floor lamp would make a dandy blunt instrument. Which was a good thing to know in this dark room, because I was already picking up sounds of someone on the floor below—and the lock on the ceiling latch being pulled back.

  Kineally was coming.

  Chapter 27

  I had to operate on a few assumptions. First, it was fairly clear that my socket escapade had had some effect in the building’s lower floors, or Kineally would not have known anything was the least bit amiss. So it was possible that things were just as dark below as they were up here. Which meant I wouldn’t have any edge in the seeing-in-the-dark competition that was about to begin.

  You might have mentioned that, Duffy.

  The difference might lie in the idea that she would have a flashlight or something, and that brought the advantage back to me if, upon opening the hatch (as appeared to be happening now) and climbing the stairs, Kineally did not find me in the spot where she would expect to do so. That might give me the second I needed.

  Besides, it was the only thing I could think of.

  I positioned myself, lamp in hands, behind the hatch opening. There was a light coming up from beneath, but it was indeed a flashlight, and I was thrilled to see it was pointed ahead—that is, away from me. And even as she ascended, Kineally was already spitting nails.

  “What did I tell you about escape attempts?” she growled in my general direction as she rose, moving the flashlight back and forth in an attempt to locate me.

  It’s really hard to stand absolutely still when you’re holding a floor lamp, watching a deranged killer come toward you raging mad, and feeling like the pounding of your heart could undoubtedly be heard in a parking lot two blocks away. So give me some props for not collapsing to the floor and begging for mercy.

  “You’re going to pay dearly for this,” she continued, apparently attempting to go through all the moustache-twirling clichés in one fell swoop. “I tried to deal with you fairly, but you had to break the rules. Now you’ll feel pain.”

  Was it better to smash her in the back of the head or the face? The skull is much thicker in the back than any bone in the face. But be careful to aim low enough, because the forehead is not a thin piece of bone at all.

  Thank you, Dr. Duffy.

  “Sorry for spoiling your plans, bitch!” I screamed as Kineally’s foot hit the attic floor, and sure enough, she turned toward the sound of my voice. I had ducked down, anticipating her shining the flashlight in my face and that worked, too, as the beam went over my head and not into my eyes. I swung the lamp like a baseball bat and hit my target.

  But I had swung too low. The lamp impacted with Kineally’s shoulder, not her face. Hey. It was a heavy lamp. You try it sometime and see how it goes for you.

  She moved and grunted, but she didn’t fall down the stairs, which was a disappointment, and she did not become unconscious, which wasn’t surprising but was a considerable setback. So I swung the lamp again, but this time Kineally could anticipate the movement and ducked. The element of surprise was completely gone.

  Advantage, Kineally.

  Two elements made me drop the lamp: first, it clearly was not going to be the instrument of liberation I had hoped for, and second, it was getting really heavy. But, sorry, did I say drop the lamp? What I actually meant was throw the lamp with all my might at the window and hope it would break through so I could scream and someone would come rescue me.

  Alas, the lamp base hit the plywood blocking the window and bounced off, falling harmlessly to the floor. They don’t make lamps like they used to, or they make plywood better. Either way, I was screwed.

  “You idiot!” Kineally hissed. “I told you there was no way you could get out!”

  “Yeah, you told me you were an FBI agent, too. Why should I believe anything you say?” You can say what you want about Jersey girls, but if you knock us out and lock us up in an attic with a clear intention of killing us, you should definitely expect to get back a decent dose of attitude.

  Wait. Was that a doorbell I heard? Nah. It was too far away. Nobody was coming for me.

  “You made all the power in the house go out!” I was being scolded like a naughty child. There was a certain absurdity to her giving me a hard time about it that I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or kick her. She was too far away, luckily, to kick, and I didn’t think it was all that funny, so I passed on both.

  “Yeah, excuse me for making it harder for you to imprison and murder me; I don’t know what I was thinking.” I backed up a little bit farther, feeling for the wall with the soles of my shoes, to get a better feel for my position in the room. I had to keep both eyes on Kineally, who was circling around the open hatch and toward me. She was still holding the flashlight, which was doing nothing for my vision at all, but did not appear to have a weapon in her hands. What is it they say about small favors?

  Maybe if I kept her circling and reversed our positions in the room, I could lunge for the stairs and lock her in the attic! There was a delicious sense of justice in the notion; I was careful to keep my steps small and my movements slow so she wouldn’t understand my intentions until it was too late.

  Okay, so my hands tingled a bit from the electrical interlude, and my legs still were a little stiff from having spent a good number of hours lying drugged on the attic floor, but adrenaline will d
o a lot for your body for a short period of time. I was counting on that.

  Distract her, keep her talking. My inner Duffy was still trying to help, the dear thing. “Why on earth does a person do something like this?” I demanded. “You killed four authors.”

  “So far,” Kineally intoned. She took a step toward me; I moved a bit to my right while I backed up.

  “Fine, if you’re going to kill me, can’t I know why? How will I learn otherwise?”

  She didn’t even pick up on the absurdity of that notion; the woman was so far into the bonkers category, she probably thought I was making sense. “You’re different. You aren’t like the others; I didn’t plan for you. It’s because you became an irritant. You sent me back rude e-mails, and you helped with the investigation to find me. You are a pest, Ms. Goldman.”

  So that meant that everything that was about to get me killed was something I wouldn’t have done if it weren’t for that tall, rangy lunatic who ambled into my life and told me he was my own fictional creation. He made me come along to Ocean Grove. He made me send the e-mails that pissed off the killer. He caused me to discover Sunny Maugham’s body.

  It was Duffy’s fault I was going to die.

  Don’t get mad at me; keep her talking.

  Yeah, an obvious dodge, you jerk. But it was all I had left as I moved with sickening stealth toward my goal. “Why the others, then? What did they ever do to you? They all paid you for your work, didn’t they?”

  I couldn’t really get a good look at Kineally’s face, but her inflection carried enough hate for me to grasp everything I needed to understand. “Oh, they paid me, all right,” she said. “They paid me to clean up their ridiculous spelling errors—they didn’t know ‘your’ from ‘you are.’ And they made sure that I was there to repair their torturous mangling of punctuation. Apostrophes! What did they have against apostrophes?!”