Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

And there had been a certain tone to the way she’d said it that Barbara didn’t like. Sad, almost. And now the green dot tells Barbara that Holly isn’t staying the night at her mother’s after all. She’s apparently headed back to the city. Change of plans? Maybe a fight with her mother?

Or had she flat-out lied?

Barbara glances at her desk and sees the DVDs she’s borrowed from Holly for her report: The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep , and Harper . She thinks they’ll be the perfect excuse to talk to Holly when Holly gets back. She’ll affect surprise to find Holly at home, then try to find out what was so important in Portland and Pittsburgh. She may even confess to the tracker—that will depend on how things go.

She checks Holly’s location on her phone again. Still the turnpike. Barbara guesses that the traffic might be jammed up by construction or an accident. She looks at her watch, then back at the green dot. She thinks that Holly will be lucky to get back much before five o’clock.

And I’ll be at her apartment by five-thirty, Barbara thinks. I hope nothing’s wrong with her… but I think maybe there is.

The traffic crawls… then stops.

Crawls… and stops.

Stops.

I’m going to lose my mind, Holly thinks. It’s just going to snap while I sit here looking at the back of that dumptruck. I’ll probably hear the sound when it goes. Like a breaking branch.

The light has begun to drain out of this December day, just two calendar squares away from the shortest day of the year. The dashboard clock tells her that the earliest she can now hope to arrive at the Frederick Building is five o’clock, and that will only happen if the traffic starts to move again soon… and if she doesn’t run out of gas. She’s down to just over a quarter of a tank.

I could miss him, she thinks. He could show up, and call me to text him the door code, and get no answer. He’ll think I lost my nerve and chickened out.

The idea that coincidence, or some malign force (Jerome’s bird, all frowsy and frosty gray), may have decreed that her second face to face with Ondowsky should not happen brings her no relief. Because she’s not just on his personal hit parade now, she’s number one with a bullet. Facing him on her home ground, and with a plan, was to be her advantage. If she loses it, he’ll try to blindside her. And he could succeed.

Once she reaches for her phone to call Pete, to tell him that a dangerous man is going to show up at the side door of their building, and he should approach with caution, but Ondowsky would talk his way out of it. Easily. He talks for a living. Even if he didn’t, Pete is getting on in years and at least twenty pounds over what he weighed when he retired from the police. Pete is slow. The thing pretending to be a TV reporter is fast. She will not risk Pete. She’s the one who let the genie out of the bottle.

Ahead of her, the dumptruck’s taillights go out. It rolls ahead fifty feet or so and stops again. This time, however, the stop is briefer and the next forward advance is longer. Is it possible that the jam is breaking? She hardly dares to believe it, but she has Holly hope.

Which turns out to be justified. In five minutes she’s doing forty. After seven, she’s up to fifty-five. After eleven, Holly puts her foot down and takes possession of the passing lane. When she shoots by the three-car pileup that caused the jam, she barely gives the wrecks that have been pulled over to the median strip a glance.

If she can keep her speed to seventy until she leaves the turnpike at midtown, and if she catches most of the traffic lights, she estimates she can be at her building by five-twenty.

Holly actually arrives in the vicinity of her building at five minutes past five. Unlike the weirdly underpopulated Monroeville Mall, downtown is busy-busy-busy. This is both good and bad. Her chances of spotting Ondowsky in the bustle of bundled-up shoppers on Buell Street are small, but his chances of grabbing her (if he means to do that, and she wouldn’t put it past him) are equally small. It’s what Bill would call a push.

As if to make up for her bad luck on the turnpike, she spots a car pulling out of a parking space almost directly across from the Frederick Building. She waits until it’s gone, then backs carefully into the space, trying to ignore the poophead behind her laying on his horn. Under less fraught circumstances that constant blare might have induced her to let the space go, but she doesn’t see another space on the whole block. That would leave her with the parking garage, probably on one of the upper levels, and Holly has seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages. Especially after dark, and it’s dark now.

The horn-blower rolls past as soon as the front end of Holly’s rental car has cleared enough space, but the poophead—not a he but a she—slows long enough to wish Holly a little Christmas cheer with her middle finger.

There’s a break in the traffic when Holly exits the car. She could jaywalk to the other side of the street—jay- trot , anyway—but she joins a crowd of shoppers waiting for the walk light at the next corner instead. Safety in numbers. She has her key to the building’s front door in her hand. She has no intention of going around to the side entrance. It’s in a service alley where she’d be an easy target.

As she slips the key into the lock, a man with a muffler over his lower face and a Russian hat jammed down to his eyebrows passes her almost close enough to jostle. Ondowsky? No. At least probably no. How can she be sure?

The shoebox of a lobby is empty. The lights are low. Shadows stretch everywhere. She hurries to the elevator. This is one of downtown’s older buildings, only eight floors, Midwest to the core, and there’s only the one for passengers. Roomy and supposedly state-of-the-art, but one is one. Tenants have been known to grumble about this, and those in a hurry often take the stairs, especially those with offices on the lower floors. Holly knows there’s also a freight elevator, but that one will be locked off for the weekend. She pushes the call button, suddenly sure the elevator will once more be out of order and her plan will collapse. But the doors open immediately and a female robo-voice welcomes her in. “Hello. Welcome to the Frederick Building.” With the lobby empty, it sounds to Holly like a disembodied voice in a horror movie.

The doors close and she pushes for 5. There’s a TV screen that shows news items and ads during the week, but now it’s off. No Christmas music either, thank heaven.

“Going up,” the robo-voice says.

He’ll be waiting for me, she thinks. He’s gotten in somehow, he’ll be waiting for me when the elevator doors open, and I’ll have nowhere to run.

But the doors open on an empty hall. She walks past the mail-drop (as old-fashioned as the talking elevator is newfangled), past the women’s and men’s, and stops at a door marked STAIRS. Everybody complains about Al Jordan, and with cause; the building’s superintendent is both incompetent and lazy. But he must be connected somehow, because he keeps his job in spite of the way the trash piles up in the basement, the broken side entrance camera, and the slow—almost whimsical—delivery of packages. Then there’s the matter of the fancy Japanese elevator, which pissed everybody off.

This afternoon Holly is actively hoping for more of Al’s carelessness, so she doesn’t have to waste time getting a chair to stand on from the office. She opens the door to the stairs, and she’s in luck. Clustered there on the landing—and blocking the way to the sixth floor, probably a fire code violation—is a cache of cleaning supplies which include a mop leaning against the stair rail and a squeegee bucket half-filled with wash water.