High Noon Page 0,40

as she pitched forward from a violent shove. Shock and pain radiated as her body hit the landing, rolled. She tasted blood, and through the thunder of her own gasps, heard her attacker laugh. Praying for a miracle, she kicked out. And when hands closed around her throat, she thrashed.

Not this way, she couldn't die this way. Unable to look into the eyes of who killed her. Who took her away from her baby.

Her body bucked, her legs pushed and kicked while her lungs wept for air. When the pressure released, she gasped and gulped it in only to fight to scream it out again when she felt a knife, the point of a knife, cutting through her clothes, and the quick, horrible sting of that point slicking carelessly into her flesh. Hands-gloved hands, part of her mind registered-squeezed her breasts.

It couldn't be happening. Attack and rape a cop in her own precinct? It was madness. But her kicks and struggles didn't stop his hands from tearing, from touching, from pushing roughly between her legs. And she hated herself from the sobs and pleas that babbled behind the tape. Hated that they made him laugh, that they gave him power.

"Don't worry." He whispered it, the first words he'd spoken. "I don't fuck your kind."

Fresh pain erupted from the blow to her face. She teetered toward unconsciousness, almost welcomed it. Dimly she heard, thought she heard, footsteps.

Someone coming. Please, God. But no, no, leaving. He was leaving. Leaving her alive. She moaned. Everything wept, everything wept with pain. But survival, that primal need to survive, was stronger. She was afraid to roll, to try to get to her knees, to her feet. How close was she to the stairs, how close to a nasty, perhaps fatal, fall?

The cuffs he'd snapped on her bit brutally into her flesh, weighed down by her own body. The need to see-escape, survive-was greater than the need for relief. She hunched her shoulders, turned her head right and left, inching tortuously forward as she tested the ground with her feet. Slowly, keeping a vicious grip on panic, she worked the hood up her face until her chin was clear, her mouth, her nose. Then blessedly her eyes.

And those eyes wheeled around. She could see spots and smears of her own blood on the wall of the stairwell where her head had hit, just as she could taste it in her throat.

But she could see the door below. She had to reach that door, get down the short flight of steps to that door. To survival.

Now she rolled, and her gasp went to a keening as she pushed to her knees. Tattered strips of her shirt and skirt hung on her. The rags of the rest were scattered on the stairs.

He'd left her naked, humiliated, bound. But he'd left her alive.

She used the wall to brace herself, used her trembling legs to push, push, until she could stand, leaning back on the wall. Giddiness and nausea rolled through her, and she prayed she could hold off both until she reached help.

Even as the voice inside her head screamed to hurry, hurry, he could come back, she made herself step carefully down, back to the wall for safety. At the bottom, with her body quivering with fear and exhaustion, she had to find the strength to turn, to grip the door handle with her clammy hands and pull.

She fell through the doorway, into the corridor. Shuddering, she began to crawl.

Someone shouted. She heard it like some dim bell through a fog. And, spent, she collapsed.

She wasn't out long, the pain wouldn't allow it, but when she groped back, she was on her side and the rawness around her mouth told her someone had ripped the tape away.

"Get a blanket. Give me your damn jacket, and somebody get a key that'll open these cuffs. You're all right, Lieutenant. It's Liz Alberta. Do you hear me? You're going to be all right."

Liz? Phoebe stared into grim brown eyes. Detective Elizabeth Alberta. Yes, yes, she knew that name, she knew those eyes. "The stairwell." Her voice was a raw wheeze. "He got me in the stairwell."

"A couple of guys are already in there, checking it out. Don't worry. Paramedics are coming. Lieutenant." Liz leaned closer. "Were you raped?" ioo I

"No. No, he just..." Phoebe closed her eyes. "No. How bad am I hurt?"

"I don't know yet."

"My weapon." Phoebe's eyes flew open. "God, my weapon. I couldn't get to it in time.