head and smiled.
Alex did not return the smile.
He could not return it. He was almost physically ill with premonitions
of death, and he wished that he had never left the room.
He was still too far away from the doors to make a run for either of
them. Before he could have crossed the open floor and gained the
threshold, he would almost certainly have felt the ax blade bite down
between his shoulder blades . . .
Rain dripping from his clothes, the stranger moved in on Doyle, quiet
and swift for such a large man. The noises which he had made outside,
on the steps and promenades, could not have been accidental. He had
been luring Alex along those shadowy corridors, drawing him to a place
where he might be trapped.
A place like this.
Now only the wooden bench separated them.
“Who are you?” Doyle asked.
The stranger was no longer smiling when he stopped on the other side of
the waisthigh bench. In fact, he was frowning intensely, even wincing,
as if he were being cruelly pinched or jabbed with pins. What was it,
what was on his mind? More than murder, now? He was annoyed
considerably by something; that much was obvious. His mouth was set in
a tight, straight, grim line, and he appeared to be struggling
desperately to choke back a reaction to an inner pain.
“What do you want from us?” Doyle asked.
The man only glared at him.
“We’ve never hurt you.”
No answer.
“You don’t even know us, do you?”
Even though his voice was weak, an involuntary whisper, and even though
the terror that it betrayed might have goaded the madman into even
bolder action, Doyle had to ask the questions. All of his life he had
been able to settle other people’s anger with sympathetic words, and now
it became essential that he elicit some response-at least
contrition-from this man. “What have you to gain by hurting me?”
The madman swung the ax horizontally this time, from right to left,
trying to chop Doyle’s torso from his legs.
It was close. His long arms had sufficient reach and strength to make
the trick work, even with the bench between them. But Doyle saw it
coming just in time to avoid it. He scrambled backward, out of the
murderous arc.
Then he tripped over a large metal toolbox which he had not noticed. He
windmilled his arms in a hopeless attempt to recover, lost his balance
altogether. The room tilted around him. In that instant Doyle knew
that he probably did not have a chance of getting out of this place
alive. He was not going to return to Room 318, where Colin waited for
him, was never going to finish the drive to San Francisco or see the new
furniture in the new house or begin his wonderful new job with the
agency or make love to Courtney again. Never. Falling, he saw the tall
blond man start around the end of the workbench.
He did not stay down on the floor any measurable length of time, not
even a second. The moment he hit, he pushed to his feet and staggered
backward, trying to keep out of the madman’s reach for at least one
more precious minute.
In three short steps, however, he backed straight into the pegboard wall
where the tools were hung.
Even as Doyle realized that he had nowhere left to run, the stranger
stepped in front of him and swung the ax from right to left.
Doyle crouched.
The blade skimmed the pegboard above his head.
Rising even as he heard the ax whine by him, Doyle grabbed a heavy claw
hammer which dangled from a hook on the wall. He had it in his hand
when he was knocked sideways and down by a blow from the ax.
The hammer clattered across the floor.
But losing the hammer, Doyle thought, was the least of his troubles. The
oppressive, pulsing pain in his side and chest made him all but
helpless. Had he been cut up? Torn open? The pain . . .
pain was terrible, the worst he had ever endured. But please, God, no .