John Lutz - Urge to Kill

Something, probably a shoulder, slammed into his midsection, and the air rushed from him as he bounced off the door and wall.

The door had slammed shut from the impact, and Quinn, fighting to breathe, saw the shadowed bulk of a man trying to open it. Quinn tried to get up, tried to stop the dark figure, but the spastic action of his lungs sucking in nothing kept his body curled in on itself; he was helpless.

Not quite.

He wasn’t sure how he did it, but he was aware of his arm extending, his fingers closing on a handful of material. A cuff, the man’s pants leg. He squeezed the wadded material harder, harder…

The leg jerked a few times in an effort to break free, and then the shadowed figure twisted and bent over Quinn.

There was a loud grunt, and something hard smashed into the side of Quinn’s head. He felt his grasp on the pants cuff lose its strength. Then his hold on consciousness started to fade. Lost him… He could breathe a little now, but he knew he was going to pass out.

He’d been intent on preventing the intruder from escaping, but now there was another possibility.

Is whoever attacked me still here? Ready to strike again?

Fear arrived, something real and palpable that began crushing down on him like a weight. He began to crawl, not even sure of his direction. His left shoulder brushed something hard. One of the desks?

He tried to stand up, but that only made him dizzy and wobbly. And closer to unconsciousness. It was like the condition brought on by that stuff they gave you intravenously in hospitals to calm you before the big hit of anesthetic in the OR. He became too woozy even to be afraid.

He sought the strength and will to stay conscious, but realized it was a losing battle. It had been from the beginning.

Slipping into darkness, the last thing he thought was that he didn’t want to dream again about the gigantic bird.

Mitzi Lewis knew she was dying.

Perspiration ran down her face and stung the corners of her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t rub them.

“He was so stupid,” she said, “that he thought the B on elevator buttons meant Backward. ”

The audience’s reaction was at best muted. A couple of smiles here and there, but Mitzi knew they were due more to embarrassment than amusement. Embarrassment for her. She hated that strained and polite expression on people’s faces. Right now she hated people in general, her profession, the human race, herself.

“You guys have been great!” she yelled through a frozen smile, her eyes glittering from sweat that might be taken for tears. She could feel waves of pity rolling up from the audience. She loathed pity. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She blew everyone a big kiss and did her trademark prance off the stage.

Thank God that’s over!

“Don’t take it so hard,” Jackie Jameson told her as she finally made it offstage. It was obvious that the game little girl from Brooklyn was upset. “It wasn’t you.”

“It sure felt like me out there,” Mitzi said, her shoulders slumping.

“It was the crowd. They’ll laugh at those same jokes tomorrow night.”

“You got a lot of laughs during your set,” she said, wiping at her eyes. Real tears now, dammit!

“I pay them a lot of money,” Jackie said, straight-faced.

Mitzi almost, but not quite, smiled at that. One corner of her mouth twitched upward. Jackie pointed at it and grinned.

“Bastard!” Mitizi said. “You won’t even let me feel bad.”

“Against the rules, Mitz.”

She pushed past him and hurried into Say What?’s communal dressing room, where she rinsed off her face and put on some fresh makeup. She yanked up her white blond hair into longer and more defined spikes, then reassessed herself in the mirror.

Okay, she thought. You’d never know I was run over by a train.

She left the dressing room and went down the short corridor to the exit. Once she got through that door, she’d have to work her way-unnoticed, she hoped tonight-through the back of the crowd, around the bar, toward the club’s street door.

She wished she were invisible. All she wanted right now was for tonight to be over.

Some loudmouth at the bar was holding court with a drunken story, creating something of a diversion, as she made herself small and edged toward the glowing red EXIT sign.

When she was almost at the door, a voice said, “ I thought you were funny.”

She turned and found herself looking into the dark, dark eyes of Mr. Handsome from last night. He had even more of an effect on her close up. Her throat tightened so she couldn’t speak.

Not like me, to be at a loss for words.

“You must have been the only one who thought so,” she finally said in a choked voice.

“The others were too busy thinking you were beautiful.”

“That’s…uh, very nice of you.”

“Seriously, you were great. It was just a tough crowd.”

“Like when I played Arlington,” she said.

He looked blank for a moment. Blank, but still handsome. Then he smiled. “Oh, the cemetery. Sorry, you’re a bit quicker than I am.”

“I kind of doubt that.” She was finding herself now. The guy was easy to talk to, and smooth enough that she knew she should be careful.

“Since you’re convinced you died up there,” he said, motioning with his head toward the stage, “why don’t we go someplace else where we can have a drink and hold a proper requiem?”

She pretended to think about it, all the time knowing she was going to leave with him.

Gotta put up a front, signal that you ’re resisting. Every mother’s advice, as if we were all born through immaculate conception.

He moved closer to her, as if she had emitted some kind of magnetic field.

Had she?

“I think you’ll find” he said in a gentle voice, “that you didn’t really die onstage. It was only a near-death experience.”

She smiled at him and took the arm he offered. “That was pretty good,” she said.

“Use it in your routine.”

“I would if it was funny enough,” she said honestly. “I have no scruples.”

“Ah, we’re a perfect match.”

He pushed open the street door, and the damp heat of the night dared them to leave.

Mitzi thought she heard someone call her name, but she didn’t look back.

The morning sunlight’s warmth on his bare right arm woke Quinn. Something about the way it angled through the window made the flesh it contacted feel as if it might burst into flame. It was almost enough to take his mind off his terrific headache.

He didn’t open his eyes, but right away he knew where he was, on the floor of the Seventy-ninth Street office. He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten there.

He lay motionless, curled on the hard, cool linoleum, or sheet goods, or whatever it was being called these days. Recollection came slowly, and then in a rush. He remembered unlocking and opening the office door late last night-early morning, actually, but a long way from daybreak. As soon as he’d stepped inside, even before he’d had a chance to flip the wall switch, something, some one, had slammed into him. There’d been a brief, confused struggle; he’d managed to crawl away from it, and then…

His headache flared as if to remind him that he’d been struck just above his left temple.

Beeker. He realized he’d been thinking about Dr. Alfred Beeker as he’d lost consciousness, and something about a giant bird.

The stuff dreams are made of.

Quinn gradually opened his eyes to the bright morning light. Ouch! His eyelids seemed to be dragging themselves across sandpaper. And the light was blinding.

Almost blinding.

Through the brilliance and swirling dust motes he could make out the form of a woman standing in the office’s half bath with the door open. Washing her hands? No, not that. She was standing at the washbasin though, leaning forward so she could stare at herself in the mirror. In the blinding light and through his aching eyes she might have been an apparition. Like the bird. Was he still unconscious? Still dreaming? Had the blow to his head damaged his brain?