voice. ”He’s here! If you’re still there, run and get help!”
Rosie’s husband looked startled again for a moment, then relaxed. His smile resurfaced. He snatched a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure Cynthia was still there, then looked back at Gert. His upper body resumed its back-and-forth swaying.
“Where’s my wife?” he asked. “Tell me that and maybe I’ll only break one of your arms. Hell, I might even let you go. She stole my bank card. I want it back, that’s all.”
Can’t rush him, Gert thought. He has to come to me—there’s no other way I have even a chance of handling him. But just how am I supposed to make him do that?
Her thoughts turned to Peter Slowik—the parts that had been missing, and the places where the concentration of bite-marks had been the heaviest—and thought she might know.
“You give the term eat me a whole new meaning, don’t you, fagboy? Just sucking his cock wasn’t enough for you, was it? So what do you say? Are you coming for me, or do women scare you too much?”
The smile did not just slip from his face this time; when she called him a fagboy it fell off so suddenly that Gert almost heard it shatter like an icicle on the steel toes of his boots. The weaving stopped.
“I’LL KILL YOU, YOU, BITCH!” Norman screamed, and charged.
Gert turned sideways, just as she had when Cynthia charged her on the day Rosie had brought her new picture down to the basement rec room at D & S. She kept her hands lowered longer than she did when she was teaching throw-holds to the girls, knowing that not even his blind rage was enough to guarantee her success—this was a powerful man, and if she didn’t suck him all the way in, she’d be chewed up like a rat in a threshing machine. Norman reached for her, his lips already peeling back from his teeth, getting ready to bite. Gert tucked even further, her fanny slapping against the brick wall, and thought, Help me, God. Then she seized both of Norman’s thick, hairy wrists.
Don’t spoil it by thinking about it, she told herself, and turned back toward him, socking one big hip into his side and then snap-pivoting to her left. Her legs spread, then bunched, and her corduroy jumper never had a chance; it split up the back almost all the way to her waist with a sound like a pineknot exploding in a fireplace.
The move worked like a charm. Her hip had become a ball-bearing and Norman went flying helplessly across it, his expression of rage turning to a faceful of shock. He crashed headfirst into the wheelchair. It overturned and landed on top of him.
“Wheee,” Cynthia said in a husky little croak from where she was leaning against the wall.
Lana Kline’s brown eyes peered cautiously around the side of the building. “What is it? What are you shouting ab—” She saw the bleeding man trying to crawl out from beneath the overturned wheelchair, saw the bright malevolence in his eyes, and stopped talking.
“Run and get help,” Gert snapped at her. “Security. Right now. Scream your head off.”
Norman shoved the wheelchair away. His forehead was only dripping blood, but his nose was gushing like a fountain. “I’m going to kill you for that,” he whispered.
Gert had no intention of giving him a chance to try. As Lana turned and fled, howling at the top of her lungs, Gert landed on Norman Daniels in a flying drop that Hulk Hogan would have envied. There was a lot of her to drop—two hundred and eighty pounds at last count—and Norman’s efforts to get to his feet ceased at once. His arms collapsed like the legs of a card-table that has been asked to hold a truck engine, his already wounded nose slammed into the hard-packed dirt between the brick wall and the fence, and his balls were driven into one of the wheelchair footrests with paralyzing force. He tried to scream—his face certainly looked like the face of a man who is screaming—and produced only a harsh wheezing sound.
Now she was sitting on top of him, the jumper’s split skirt hiked almost all the way to her hips, and as she sat there, wondering what to do next, she found herself remembering the first two or three times in Therapy Circle when Rosie had finally mustered enough courage to speak. The first thing she told them was that she had