She slides down the wall of the elevator with her eyes bulging from their sockets. Her bowels and bladder let go.
Then the jelly head solidifies, but the face that appears is entirely different from that of the man who knocked Jerome unconscious and forcibly escorted her to the elevator. It’s narrower, and the skin is two or three shades darker. The eyes are tilted at the corners instead of round. The nose is sharper and longer than the blunt beak of the man who hauled her into the elevator. The mouth is thinner.
This man looks ten years younger than the one who grabbed her.
“Good trick, wouldn’t you say?” Even his voice is different.
What are you? Barbara tries to say this, but no words will come out of her mouth.
He bends down and gently places the strap of her purse back on her shoulder. Barbara shrinks from the touch of his fingers but can’t entirely avoid them. “Don’t want to lose your wallet and credit cards, do you? They’ll help the police to identify you, in case… well, in case.” He makes a burlesque of holding his new nose. “Dear me, did we have a little accident? Oh well, you know what they say, shit happens.” He titters.
The elevator stops. The doors slide open on the fifth-floor hall.
16
When the elevator stops, Holly takes one more quick glance at the screen of the computer, then clicks the mouse. She doesn’t wait to see if the floor-stops, B through 8, gray out as they were when she and Jerome did their repair-job, following the steps Jerome found at a webpage titled Erebeta Bugs and How to Fix Them. She doesn’t need to. She’ll know one way or the other.
She walks back to the office door and looks down the twenty-five yards of hallway to the elevator. Ondowsky has Barbara by the arm… only when he looks up, she sees it’s no longer him. Now it’s George, minus the mustache and the delivery man’s brown uniform.
“Come on, girlfriend,” he says. “Move those feet.”
Barbara comes stumbling out. Her eyes are huge and blank and wet with tears. Her beautiful dark skin has gone the color of clay. Spittle runs from one side of her mouth. She looks almost catatonic, and Holly knows why: she saw Ondowsky change.
This terrorized girl is her responsibility, but Holly can’t think about that now. She has to stay in the moment, has to listen, has to have Holly hope… although that has never seemed so distant.
The elevator doors slide closed. With Bill’s gun removed from the equation, any chance Holly has depends on what happens next. At first there’s nothing and her heart turns to lead. Then, instead of staying put, as Erebeta elevators are programmed to do until they are called, she hears it descending. Thank God, she hears it descending.
“Here’s my little girlfriend,” George the killer of children says. “She’s kind of a bad girlfriend. I believe she’s gone pee-pee and poo-poo in her pants. Come closer, Holly. You’ll smell it for yourself.”
Holly doesn’t move from the doorway. “I’m curious,” she says. “Did you actually bring any money?”
George grins, showing teeth that are a lot less TV-ready than those of his alter-ego. “Actually, no. There’s a cardboard box behind the Dumpster where I hid when I saw this one and her brother coming, but there’s nothing in there but catalogues. You know, the kind that come addressed to Current Resident.”
“So you never intended to pay me,” Holly says. She takes a dozen steps down the hall, stopping when they’re fifteen yards apart. If this was football, she’d be in the red zone. “Did you?”
“No more than you ever intended to give me that flash drive and let me go,” he says. “I can’t read minds, but I have a long history of reading body language. And faces. Yours is completely open, although I’m sure you think otherwise. Now pull your shirt out of your pants and lift it. Not all the way, those bumps on your chest hold no interest for me, just enough so I can make sure you’re not armed.”
Holly lifts her shirt and does a complete turn without being asked.
“Now pull up your pantslegs.”
She does this, too.
“No throwdown,” George says. “Good.” He cocks his head, looking at her the way an art critic might study a painting. “Gosh, you’re an ugly little thing, aren’t you?”
Holly makes no reply.
“Have you ever in your life had so much as a single date?”