Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,30
to use her newly freed leg to propel herself off of the doors, but she couldn’t even feel her foot.
The doors continued their inexorable opening. Gravity and rain-slick metal were working together to pull Jill toward that opening, through which she could see nothing but impenetrable darkness. But the tape decided to help the process along anyway.
Jill felt as if a two-ton anchor had just latched on to the bottom of the tape around her ankle. Even using both hands and her one free leg to resist, there was nothing she could do.
Screaming, she slid into the opening, wedging there for a moment because it wasn’t large enough to admit her. Then the doors opened just a fraction more, and she was dragged down into the darkness below.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The good news was that Dad decided to give my cell phone back before my official grounding was over—not because I’d been such a perfect angel (the detention was proof that wasn’t the case), but because he didn’t like the idea of me being out in the city without a way to call for help if I needed it. Apparently the crime spree and wacko 9-1-1 calls were still in full force.
The bad news was that the crime spree made it so Dad was literally never home even close to on time. And even when he was home he was on the phone practically all the time. Which meant that not only was it up to me to stock our groceries and make our meals, I was also stuck walking Bob every night, once after dinner and once right before going to bed, if Dad wasn’t home yet.
I know walking the dog a couple of times a day doesn’t sound like much of a hardship, especially with one as well-behaved as Bob, but reports said we were having the coldest November in more than a century, and I had no trouble believing it. It didn’t matter how cold it got, or if it was pouring down rain, or even if there was a freaking blizzard. Bob still had to go out, and I still had to clean up after him. All of which made me jealous of people who lived out in the ’burbs and had fenced-in yards.
Although Bob’s intimidating presence made me feel pretty safe, I still kept a careful eye on my surroundings when I walked him, feeling a heightened sense of awareness both because of the crime spree and because of my own recent … misadventures. I was using a different dog-walking route these days, avoiding the alley by the church, but there was nothing on my new route I hadn’t passed a thousand times before over the years of living here. Apparently I’d never really bothered to look at my surroundings before. Not closely anyway.
It was when I was walking Bob right before bed on Thursday night that I realized how truly oblivious I usually was to what was around me. For instance, I’d never noticed before that the metal grille the proprietor of a nearby antiques store lowered over his windows at night had wickedly sharp little burrs at regular intervals. You could see what was in the window through the grille, but heaven help you if you tried to, say, stick your face in the window to get a better look at something.
I stopped and frowned when I noticed the burrs, and Bob took that opportunity to mark the shop as belonging to him. There used to be a homeless guy who frequently hung out on the stoop next to the shop, and I could have sworn I used to see him sitting with his back against that grille sometimes. Though now that I thought of it, I hadn’t seen him in a while. Maybe the owner had added the burrs to discourage just that kind of thing, and that was why the homeless guy had moved on.
I continued on around the block, and I noticed several more little oddities. Like the knocker on one of the doors on a row of houses being in the shape of a tongue. It was a small thing, but I wondered how I’d never noticed and had a little laugh at it before. It was possible whoever lived there had just installed it, though, so maybe there was nothing strange about my not noticing.
Then there was the iron railing on the sides of the stoop of another house. I’d noticed its highly ornamental ironwork before and had somehow thought