voice was perfectly lucid. “I told you, didn’t I? That’s what her friends have taught her! Nice! Very nice!”
“I’m going to kill you, motherfucker, ” he whispered into the unseen face of the man who was Rose’s boyfriend, and forced him back against the vestibule wall. “And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me, I’m gonna kill you twice. ”
He clamped his hands around Bill Steiner’s throat and began to squeeze.
11
“Norman!” Rosie screamed in the darkness. “Norman, let him go!”
Bill’s hand, which had lightly been touching the back of her arm ever since she had pulled her key out of the door, was suddenly gone. She heard stumbling footfalls—foot-thuds—in the darkness. Then there was a heavier bump as someone drove someone else into the vestibule wall.
“I’m going to kill you, motherfucker,” came whispering out of the dark. “And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me—”
I’m gonna kill you twice, she finished in her head before he could finish out loud; it was one of Norman’s favorite threats, often yelled at the TV screen when an umpire made a call that went against Norman’s beloved Yankees, or when someone cut him off in traffic. If God lets me, I’m gonna kill you twice. And now she heard a choking, gargly sound, and of course that was Bill. That was Bill in the process of having the life choked out him by Norman’s large and powerful hands.
Instead of the terror Norman had always roused in her, she felt a return of the rage she’d experienced in Hale’s car and then at the police station. This time it seemed almost to engulf her. “Let him alone, Norman!” she screamed. “Get your fucking hands off him!”
“Shut up, you whore!” came out of the darkness, but she could hear surprise as well as anger in Norman’s voice. Until now she’d never given him a single command—not in the entire course of their marriage—or spoken to him in such a tone.
And something else—there was a band of dull heat above the place where Bill had been touching her. It was the armlet. The gold armlet the woman in the chiton had given her. And in her mind, Rosie heard her snarl Stop your stupid sheep’s whining! at her.
“Quit it, I’m warning you!” she screamed at Norman, and then started toward the place from which the choking sounds and the effortful grunts were coming. She went with her hands held out before her like the hands of a blind woman, her lips drawn back from her teeth.
You’re not going to choke him, she thought. You’re not, I won’t let you. You should have gone away, Norman. You should have gone away and left us alone while you still could.
Feet, drumming helplessly against the wall just ahead of her, and she could imagine Norman holding Bill up against it, lips drawn back in his biting smile, and suddenly she was a glass woman filled with a pale red liquid, and that liquid was pure and untinctured fury.
“You shit, didn’t you hear me? PUT HIM DOWN, I SAID!”
She reached out with her left hand, which now felt as strong as an eagle’s talon. The armlet was burning fiercely—she felt she should almost be able to see it, even through her sweater and the jacket Bill had loaned her, glowing like a dull ember. But there was no pain, only a kind of dangerous exhilaration. She grabbed the shoulder of the man who had beaten her for fourteen years and dragged him backward. It was astoundingly easy. She squeezed his arm through the slippery waterproof fabric of his coat, then whipped her own arm out and slung him off into the darkness. She heard the rapid rattle of his stumbling feet, then a thud, then an explosion of breaking glass. Cal Coolidge, or whoever it was in the picture over there, had taken a dive.
She could hear Bill coughing and gagging. She groped for him with splayed fingers, found his shoulders, and settled her hands upon them. He was hunched over, tearing for each breath and immediately coughing it back out. This didn’t surprise her. She knew how strong Norman was.
She slipped her right hand down his left arm and grasped him above the elbow. She was afraid to use her left hand, afraid she might hurt him with it. She could feel power humming in it, throbbing through it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the sensation was how much she liked it.
“Bill,” she whispered.