is he gone?”
“He’s gone.”
“Down the elevator shaft?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good.” She starts to get up.
“Just lie still for a minute, Barb. You only grayed out. It’s Jerome I’m worried about.”
“I’m okay,” Jerome says. “Hard head. That was the TV guy, wasn’t it? Kozlowski, or whatever.”
“Yes.” And no. “You look like you’ve lost at least a pint of blood, Mr. Hard Head. Look at me.”
He looks at her. His pupils are the same size, and that’s good news.
“Can you remember the name of your book?”
He gives her an impatient look through his raccoon mask of congealing blood. “Black Owl: The Rise and Fall of an American Gangster.” He actually laughs. “Holly, if he’d scrambled my brains, I never could have remembered the code for the side door. Who was he?”
“The man who blew up that school in Pennsylvania. Not that we’re ever going to tell anyone that. It would raise too many questions. Lower your head, Jerome.”
“It hurts to move it,” he says. “My neck feels sprung.”
“Do it anyway,” Barbara says.
“Sis, don’t mean to get personal and all, but you don’t smell so good.”
Holly says, “I’ve got this, Barbara. There’s a pair of pants and some tee-shirts in my closet. They’ll fit you, I think. Take something to change into. Clean yourself up in the bathroom.”
It’s clear that Barbara wants to do just that, but she lingers. “You sure you’re all right, J?”
“Yes,” he says. “Go on.”
Barbara goes down the hall to Finders Keepers. Holly feels the back of Jerome’s neck, finds no swelling, and tells him again to lower his head. She sees a minor laceration at the crown and a much deeper gash lower down, but the occipital bone must have caught (and withstood) the brunt of the blow. She thinks Jerome got lucky.
She thinks they all did.
“I need to clean myself up, too,” Jerome says, looking at the men’s room.
“No, don’t do that. I probably shouldn’t have let Barbara do it, either, but I don’t want her meeting the cops with her… in her current state of disarray.”
“I sense a woman with a plan,” Jerome says, then wraps his hands around himself. “God, I’m cold.”
“That’s shock. You probably need a hot drink. I’d make you tea, but there’s no time for that.” She is struck by a sudden, horrible thought: if Jerome had taken the elevator, her whole plan—rickety thing that it was—could have fallen apart. “Why did you take the stairs?”
“So he wouldn’t hear me coming. Even with the world’s worst headache, I knew where he’d be. You were the only one in the building.” He pauses. “Not Kozlowski. Ondowsky.”
Barbara returns with the clean clothes bundled in her arms. She has begun crying again. “Holly… I saw him change. His head turned to jelly. It… it…”
“What in God’s name is she talking about?” Jerome asks.
“Never mind now. Maybe later.” Holly gives her a brief hug. “Clean up, change your clothes. And Barbara? Whatever it was, it’s dead now. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispers, and goes into the bathroom.
Holly turns back to Jerome. “Were you tracking my phone, Jerome Robinson? Was Barbara? Were both of you?”
The bloody young man standing in front of her smiles. “If I promise to never, ever, call you Hollyberry again, do I have to answer those questions?”
18
In the lobby, fifteen minutes later.
Holly’s pants are too tight for Barbara, and they’re highwater, but she managed to get them buttoned. The ashy look is fading from her cheeks and forehead. She’ll survive this, Holly thinks. There will be bad dreams, but she’ll come through.
The blood on Jerome’s face is drying to a crack-glaze. He says he has a bitch of a headache but no, he’s not dizzy. Not nauseous. Holly isn’t surprised about the headache. She has Tylenol in her purse, but she doesn’t dare give him any. He’ll get stitches—and an X-ray, no doubt—at the ER, but right now she has to make sure their stories are straight. Once that’s taken care of, she has to finish cleaning up her own mess.
“You two came here because I wasn’t at home,” she says. “You thought I must be at the office, catching up, because I’d spent a few days with my mother. Right?”
They nod, willing to be led.
“You went to the side door in the service alley.”
“Because we know the code,” Barbara says.
“Yes. And there was a mugger. Right?”
More nods.
“He hit you, Jerome, and tried to grab Barbara. She got him with the pepper spray in her purse. Full face. Jerome, you jumped up and grappled with him. He