by Dean Koontz
When he opened his eyes, he saw Connie on the ledge.
She motioned for him to hurry.
If he didn’t move, she would die. He would fail her utterly. She didn’t deserve that after the eighteen months she’d given him, eighteen months of tender care and saint-like understanding. She hadn’t once criticized him for whining, for his paranoia or his self-pity or his selfishness. She had put herself in emotional jeopardy that was no less terrifying than the physical risk demanded of him. He knew that mental anguish was every bit as painful as a broken leg. In return for those eighteen months, he had to make this climb for her. He owed her that much; hell, he owed her everything.
The perspiration had dissolved some of the coating of Chap Stick on his forehead and cheeks. As the wind dried the sweat, it chilled his face. He realized again how little time they could spend out here before the winter night sapped their strength.
He looked up at the piton that anchored him.
Connie will die if you don’t do this.
He was squeezing the line too tightly with his left hand, which ought to be used only to guide him. He should hold the line loosely, using his right hand to pass rope and to brake.
Connie will die....
He relaxed his left-hand grip.
He told himself not to look down. Took a deep breath. Let it out. Started to count to ten. Told himself he was stalling. Pushed off the wall.
Don’t panic!
As he swung backward into the night, he slid down the rope. When he glided back to the wall, both feet in front of him and firmly planted against the granite, pain zigzagged through his game leg. He winced, but he knew he could bear it. When he looked down, he saw that he had descended no more than two feet: but the fact that he had gotten anywhere at all made the pain seem unimportant.
He had intended to thrust away from the stone with all his strength and to cover two yards on each long arc. But he could not do it. Not yet. He was too scared to rappel as enthusiastically as he had done in the past; furthermore, a more vigorous descent would make the pain in his leg unbearable.
Instead, he pushed from the wall again, swung backward, dropped two feet along the line, swooped back to the wall. And again: just a foot or eighteen inches this time. Little mincing steps. A cautious dance of fear along the face of the building. Out, down, in; out, down, in; out, down, in ...
The terror had not evaporated. It was in him yet, bubbling, thick as stew. A cancer that had fed upon him and grown for years was not likely to vanish through natural remission in a few minutes. However, he was no longer overwhelmed by fear, incapacitated by it. He could see ahead to a day when he might be cured of it; and that was a fine vision.
When he finally dared to look down, he saw that he was so near the ledge that he no longer needed to rappel. He let go of the rope and dropped the last few feet.
Connie pressed close to him. She had to shout to be heard above the wind. “You did it!”
“I did it!”
“You’ve beaten it.”
“So far.”
“Maybe this is far enough.”
“What?”
She pointed to the window beside them. “What if we break in here?”
“Why should we?”
“It’s somebody’s office. We could hide in it.”
“What about Bollinger?”
She raised her voice a notch to compensate for a new gust of wind. “Sooner or later, he’ll go to your office.”
“So?”
“He’ll see the window. Carabiners and ropes.”
“I know.”
“He’ll think we went all the way to the street.”
“Maybe he will. I doubt it.”
“Even if he doesn’t think that, he won’t know where we stopped. He can’t blast open every door in the building, looking for us.”
The wind whooshed between them, rebounded from the building, rocked them as if they were toy figures. It wailed: a banshee.
Snowflakes sliced into Graham’s eyes. They were so fine and cold that they affected him almost as grains of salt would have done. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force out the sudden pain. He had some success; but the pain was replaced by a copious flow of tears that temporarily blinded him.
They pressed their foreheads together, trying to get closer so they wouldn’t have to yell at each other.
“We can hide until people come to work,” she said.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“Some people will work. The custodial crews, at least.”
“The city will be paralyzed by morning,” he said. “This is a blizzard! No one will go to work.”
“Then we hide until Monday.”
“What about water? Food?”
“A big office will have water coolers. Coffee and soda-vending machines. Maybe even a candy and cracker vendor.”
“Until Monday?”
“If we have to.”
“That’s a long time.”
She jerked one hand to the void at her left side. “And that’s a long climb!”
“Agreed.”
“Come on,” she said impatiently. “Let’s smash in the window.”
Nothing out of the ordinary. No sign of the prey.
Where in the name of God were they?
He was turning to leave when the green velvet drapes billowed out from the wall.
He brought up the Walther PPK, almost opened fire. Before he could squeeze off the first shot, the drapes fell back against the wall. Nobody could be hiding behind them; there wasn’t enough room for that.
He went to one end of the drapes and found the draw cords. The green velvet folded back on itself with a soft hiss.
As soon as the middle window was revealed, he saw that something was wrong with it. He went to it and opened the tall, rectangular panes.
The wind rushed in at him, fluttered his unbuttoned collar, mussed his hair, moaned to him. Hard-driven flakes of snow peppered his face.
He saw the carabiners on the center post, and the ropes leading from them.
He leaned out of the window, looked down the side of the building.
“I’ll be damned!” he said.
Above him, the wind made a strange sound. Whump! A loud, blunt noise. Like a muffled crack of thunder.
He finally got the hammer off the strap.
Whump!
Connie grabbed his arm. “Bollinger!”
At first he didn’t know what she meant. He looked up only because she did.
Thirty feet above them, Bollinger was leaning out of the window.
To Connie, Graham said, “Stand against the wall!”
She didn’t move. She seemed stunned. This was the first time she had ever looked frightened.
“Don’t make a target of yourself!” he shouted.
She pressed her back to the building.
“Untie yourself from the safety line,” he said.
Overhead, a tongue of flame licked out of the pistol’s muzzle: whump!
Graham swung the hammer, struck the window.
Glass exploded inward.
Frantically, unable to forget the vision of himself being shot in the back, he smashed the stubborn, jagged shards that clung to the frame.
Whump!
The sharp sound of a ricochet made Graham jump. The bullet skipped off the stone inches from his face.
He was sweating again.
Bollinger shouted something.
The wind tore his words apart, transformed them into meaningless sounds.
Graham didn’t look up. He kept working at the spiked edges of the window.
Whump!
“Go!” he shouted as he shattered the last dangerous piece of glass.
Connie scrambled over the windowsill, disappeared into the dark office.
He slipped the safety line knot at his harness.
Whump!
The shot was so close that he cried out involuntarily. The slug plucked at the sleeve of his parka. He was unbalance
d by the surprise, and for an instant he thought he would fall off the ledge.
Whump!
Whump!
He plunged forward, through the broken window, expecting to be stopped at the last second by a bullet in the spine.
35
In the unlighted office on the thirty-eighth floor, the glass crunched under their feet.
Connie said, “How could he miss us?”
As he patted the sweat from his face with the palm of his glove, Graham said, “Wind’s near gale force. Could have deflected the bullets slightly.”
“In just thirty feet?”
“Maybe. Besides, he was firing from a bad angle. Leaning out the window, shooting down and in. Light was bad. Wind was in his face. He’d have been damned lucky if he’d hit us.”
“We can’t stay here as we planned,” she said.
“Of course not. He knows which floor we’re on. He’s probably running for the elevator right now.”
“We go back out?”
“I sure don’t want to.”
“He’ll keep popping up along the way, trying to shoot us off the side of the building.”
“Do we have a choice?”
“None,” she said. “Ready to climb?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“You’ve done well.”
“I’m not all the way down yet.”
“You’ll make it.”
“Are you the clairvoyant now?”
“You’ll make it. Because you aren’t afraid anymore.”
“Who? Me?”
“You.”
“I’m scared to death.”
“Not like you once were. Not that bad. Anyway, there’s good reason to be afraid right now. It’s a healthy fear you’ve got this time.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m brimming with healthy fear.”
“I was right.”
“About what?”
“You’re the man I’ve always wanted.”
“Then you haven’t wanted much.”
In spite of what he said, she detected pleasure in his voice. He didn’t sound as if he were seriously denigrating himself; at worst, he was poking fun at the sort of inferiority complex he’d displayed before tonight. Already, he had regained some of his self-respect.
He pulled open the second half of the window and said, “You wait here. I’ll set another piton, tie up a new line.” He took off his gloves. “Hold these for me.”
“Your hands will freeze.”
“Not in just a minute or two. I can work faster with bare hands.”
Cautiously he put his head out of the window, looked up.
“Is he still there?” she asked.
“No.”
He crawled onto the six-foot-wide ledge, stretched out on his stomach. His feet were toward her, his head and shoulders over the brink.
She took a few steps away from the window. Stood very still. Listened for Bollinger.
Sitting up, he took the hundred-foot length of rope from his right hip and quickly arranged it in a coil that would unravel without a hitch. The wind had sufficient force to disturb the coil; he would have to watch it all the while he was belaying Connie. If it got fouled on itself, they would both be in trouble. He tied a knot in one end of the line, a knot with two small loops rising above it.
Lying down again, he reached over the brink and hooked the loops of rope through the carabiner. He shut the gate on the snap link and screwed the sleeve in place.
He sat up, his back to the wind. He felt as if strong hands were trying to shove him off the ledge.
Already, his fingers were numb with cold.
The two safety lines they had used during their descent from the fortieth floor were dangling beside him. He took hold of one.
Overhead, the line had been fixed to the carabiner in such a fashion that it could be tugged loose and retrieved from below. As long as there was heavy tension on the line, the knot remained tight and safe; in fact, the more tension there was—and the greater the climber’s weight, the greater the tension—the firmer the knot. However, when the climber left the rope, releasing the tension, and when the rope was tugged in the proper manner, the knot would slip open. He jerked on the line, then again, and a third time. Finally it freed itself from the snap link and tumbled down into his lap.
He took a folding knife from a pocket of his parka, opened it. He cut two five-foot pieces from the eleven-yard safety line, then put the knife away.
He stood up, tottering slightly as pain shimmered through his bad leg.
One of the five-foot lines was for him. He tied an end of it to his harness. He tied the other end to a carabiner and snapped the carabiner to the window post.
Leaning in the window, he said, “Connie?”
She stepped out of the shadows, into the wan fan of light. “I was listening.”
“Hear anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Come out here.”
On his way to the elevator, Bollinger thought about Billy, mostly about the first few nights they had known each other.
They had met on a Friday and spent nine hours in a private all-night club on Forty-fourth Street. They had left well after dawn, and they were amazed at how the time had flown. The bar was a favorite hangout for .city detectives and was always busy; however, it seemed to Bollinger that he and Billy had been the only people in the place, all alone in their corner booth.
From the start they weren’t awkward with each other. He felt as if they were twin brothers, as if they shared that mythical oneness of twins in addition to years of daily contact. They talked rapidly, eagerly. No chitchat or gossip. Conversation. Honest-to-God conversation. It was an exchange of ideas and sentiments that Bollinger had never enjoyed with anyone else. Nothing was taboo. Politics. Religion. Poetry. Sex. Self-appraisal. They found a phenomenal number of things about which they held the same unorthodox opinions. After nine hours, they knew each other better than either of them had ever known another human being.
The following night they met at the bar, talked, drank, picked up a good-looking whore and took her to Billy’s apartment. The three of them had gone to bed together, but not in a bisexual sense. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the two of them had gone to bed with her, for although they performed, sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously, a wide variety of sex acts with and upon her, Billy did not touch Bollinger, nor did Bollinger touch Billy.
That night, sex was more dynamic, exhilarating, frenzied, manic, and ultimately more exhausting than Bollinger had ever imagined it could be. Billy certainly didn’t look like a stud. Far from it. But he was precisely that, insatiable. He delighted in withholding his orgasm for hours, for he knew that the longer he denied himself, the more shattering the climax when it finally came. A sensualist, he preferred to refuse immediate satisfaction in favor of a far greater series of sensations later on. Bollinger realized from the moment he climbed into the bed that he was being tested. Rated. Billy was watching. He found it difficult to match the pace set by the older man, but he did. Even the girl complained of being worn out, used up.
He vividly recalled the position in which he’d been when he’d climaxed, because afterward he suspected that Billy had maneuvered him into it. The girl was on hands and knees in the center of the bed. Billy knelt in front of her. Bollinger knelt behind, stroking her dog-fashion. He faced Billy across her back; later, he knew that Billy had wanted to finish while confronting him.
He watched himself moving in and out of the girl, then looked up and saw Billy staring at him. Staring intently. Eyes wide, electric. Eyes that weren’t entirely sane. Although he was frightened by it, he returned the stare—and was plunged into an hallucinogenic experience. He imagined he was rising out of his body, felt as if he were floating toward Billy. And as he floated, he shrank until he was so small he could tumble into those eyes. Knowing that it was an illusion in no way detracted from the impact of it; he could have sworn that he actually was sinking into Billy’s eyes,
sinking down, down....
His climax was considerably more than a biological function; it joined him to the whore on a physical level, but it also tied him to Billy on a much higher plane. He spurted deep into her vagina, and precisely at that moment Billy spilled seed into her mouth. In the throes of an intense orgasm, Bollinger had the odd notion that he and Billy had grown incredibly inside of the girl, had swelled and lengthened until they were touching at the center of her. Then he went one step further, lost all awareness of the woman; so far as he was concerned, he and Billy were the only people in the room. In his mind he saw them standing with the tips of their organs pressed together, ejaculating into each other’s penis. The image was powerful but strangely asexual. There was certainly nothing homosexual about it. Absolutely nothing. He wasn’t queer. He had no doubt about that. None at all. The imaginary act that preoccupied him was similar to the ritual by which members of certain American Indian tribes had once become blood brothers. The Indians cut their hands and pressed the cuts together; because they believed that the blood flowed from the body of one into that of the other, they felt that they would be part of each other forever. Bollinger’s bizarre vision was like the Indians’ blood-brother ceremony. It was an oath, a most sacred bond.
And he knew that a metamorphosis had taken place; henceforth, they were not two men but one.
Now, feeling incomplete without Billy beside him, he reached the elevator cab and switched it on.
Graham quickly tied the free end of the hundred-foot main line to her harness.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Not quite.”
His hands were getting numb. His fingertips stung, and his knuckles ached as if they were arthritic.
He tied carabiners to both ends of one of the five-foot pieces of rope he had cut. He snapped both carabiners to a metal ring on her harness. The rope between them looped all the way to her knees.
He clipped the hammer to the accessory strap on the waist belt of her harness.
“What’s all this for?” she asked.