After a hesitation, he leans through the open door and looks down the cellar stairs.
The woman is only a few steps from the bottom. She’s got one hand on the railing, the revolver held out in front of her in the other hand.
Not a cop. An amateur.
Nonetheless, she might be Mr. Vess’s blown tire, and he’s jumpy, twitchy, still extremely curious about her but prepared to put his safety ahead of his curiosity.
He eases through the doorway onto the upper landing.
As close as she is, she does not hear him because all is concrete, nothing to creak.
He aims his pistol at the center of her back. The first shot will catapult her off her feet, send her flying with her arms spread toward the basement below, and the second shot will take her as she is in flight. Then he’ll race down the stair behind her, firing the third and fourth rounds, hitting her in the legs if possible. He’ll drop on top of her, press the muzzle into the back of her head, and then, then, then when he’s totally in control of her, dominant, he can decide whether she’s still a threat or not, whether he can risk questioning her or whether she’s so dangerous that nothing will do but to put a couple of rounds in her brain.
As the woman passes under the light near the foot of the stairs, Mr. Vess gets a better look at her revolver. It is indeed a Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special, as he had thought earlier, when he had seen it from the second-floor bedroom window, but suddenly the make and model of the weapon have electrifying meaning for him.
He smells a Slim Jim sausage. He remembers liquid-night eyes widening in shock, terror, and despair.
He has seen two of these guns in the past several hours. The first belonged to the young Asian gentleman at the service station, who drew it from under the counter in self-defense but never had the opportunity to fire.
Although the Chief’s Special is a popular revolver, it is not so universally admired that one sees it everywhere in use. Edgler Vess knows, with the certainty of a fox on the scent of a rabbit in the weeds, that this is the same gun.
Although there are still many mysteries about the woman on the stairs below him, though her presence here is no less astonishing to him than it was before, there is nothing supernatural about her. She knows the name Ariel not because she has been watching from some world beyond this one, not because she is in the dutiful service of some higher force, but simply because she must have been there, in the service station, when Vess was chatting up the two clerks and when, moments later, he killed them.
Where she could have been hiding, how he could have overlooked her, why she would feel the need to pursue him, where she got all the courage for this reckless adventure—these are things he can’t discern through intuition alone. But now he will have the opportunity to put these questions to her.
Lowering his pistol, he steps back into the laundry room, lest she glance up the stairs and see him.
His uncharacteristic fear, his eerie perception of oppressive supernatural forces, lifts like a fog from him, and he is amazed by his own brief spasm of gullibility. He, who has no illusions about the nature of existence. He, who is so clear-seeing. He, who knows the primacy of pure sensation. Even he, the most rational of all men, has spooked.
He almost laughs at his foolishness—and at once puts it out of his mind.
The woman must be to the bottom of the stairs by now.
He will allow her to explore. After all, for whatever bizarre reasons, this is what she has come here to do, and Vess is curious about her reactions to the things that she discovers.
He is having fun again.
Once more, the game is on.
*
Chyna reached the bottom of the stairs.
The outer wall of mortared stone was to her right. There was nowhere to go in that direction.