Then the killer turned the revolver away from her and pulled the trigger. The blast rattled windows, and the slug tore through a cabinet door along the nearest wall, spraying splinters of pine and shattering dishes inside.
Bits of wood were still flying when Chyna grabbed a drawer and yanked it out of the cabinet. It was so heavy that it almost pulled out of her hand, but she was suddenly strong with desperation, and she slung it upward at the killer’s head, the contents spilling from it as it arced high toward his brow.
Spoons, forks, butter knives dueling in the air, flashing with cold fluorescent reflections, ringing down on him and across the tile floor, startled him backward into the dinette table.
Even as the killer stumbled away in surprise, Chyna was moving toward the sink. An instant after she heard the empty drawer crash against something, she put her hand on the grip of the pistol. She saw a red dot on the steel frame, which was probably exposed when the safety was off, as on other pistols with which she was familiar, and she didn’t have to worry about empty chambers, as with the revolver, because if there was even one bullet in the magazine, just one, it would be in the breech, please, and at this close range one round might be all that she needed.
But her trigger finger was already stiffening and swelling, and when she tried to hook it through the guard, the flare of pain rocked her. She bobbled on a black tide of nausea, swayed, fumbling at the trigger guard with her middle finger.
Skating across the littered floor with an ice-brittle clatter-clink of scattering tableware, the killer reached Chyna before she could bring the gun up and turn. He slammed his arm down on hers and trapped her hand against the countertop.
Reflexively her finger pulled the trigger. A bullet smashed the backsplash. Chips of yellow ceramic tile sprayed in her face, and she might have been blinded if she hadn’t squeezed her eyes shut in time.
He slammed the heel of his hand against the side of her head, sending a spray of darkness across the backs of her eyes, like shards of exploding black glass, and then he clubbed his fist against the nape of her neck.
With no memory of having fallen, Chyna was lying on the kitchen floor, with a bug’s-eye view across the vinyl tile, gazing through a cataclysmic tumble of eating utensils. Interesting. Spoons were the size of shovels. Forks as big as pitchforks. Knives were lances.
The killer’s boots. Black boots. Moving around.
For a moment she became confused, thinking that she was back in the Templeton house in the Napa Valley, hiding under the bed in the guest room. But there hadn’t been flatware scattered across that bedroom floor, and when she focused on the stainless-steel utensils again, her thoughts cleared. “Now I’m going to have to wash all these,” the killer said, “before I put them away.”
He was circling through the kitchen, picking up the flatware and being methodical about it, keeping spoons with spoons, knives with knives.
Chyna was surprised that she could move her arm, which was as heavy as a great tree limb, a petrified tree once wood but now stone. Nevertheless, she managed to point at the killer and even curl her throbbing trigger finger, swallowing her pain and the bitter taste that came with it.
The gun didn’t fire.
She squeezed the trigger again, and still there was no boom, and then she realized that her hand was empty. She wasn’t holding the pistol.
Strange.
One of the knives was near her hand. It was a table knife with a finely serrated edge, suitable for spreading butter or for slicing well cooked chicken or for cutting green beans into bite-size pieces, but not ideal for stabbing someone to death. A knife was a knife, however, better than no weapon at all, and she quietly closed her hand around it.
Now all she had to do was find the strength to get off the floor. Curiously, she couldn’t even lift her head. She had never before felt so tired.