Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

“I’m going to take my cell phone out of my pocket,” Holly says. “I have to show you a picture.”

He says nothing, so she takes it out, very slowly. She opens her photo stream, selects the picture she took in the elevator, and holds the phone out to him.

Now tell me, she thinks. I don’t want to do it myself, so tell me, you bastard.

And he does. “I can’t see it. Come closer.”

Holly steps toward him, still holding the phone out. Two steps. Three. Twelve yards away, then ten. He’s squinting at the phone. Eight yards now, and see how reluctant I am?

“Closer, Holly. My eyes are a little wonky for a few minutes after I change.”

You’re a black liar, she thinks but takes another step, still holding the phone out. He’ll almost certainly take her with him when he goes down. If he goes down. And that’s okay.

“You see it, right? It’s in the elevator. Taped to the roof. Just take it and g—”

Even in her hyper-alert state, Holly barely sees George move. At one moment he’s standing outside the women’s, squinting at the picture on her phone. At the next, he’s got one arm around her waist and the other gripping her outstretched hand. He wasn’t kidding about being fast. Her phone tumbles to the floor as he drags her toward the elevator. Once inside, he’ll kill her and take the package taped to the ceiling. Then he’ll go into the bathroom and kill Barbara.

That, at least, is his plan. Holly has another one.

“What are you doing?” Holly cries—not because she doesn’t know, but because this is now the required line.

He doesn’t answer, only pushes the call button. It doesn’t light, but Holly hears the elevator hum into life. It’s coming up. She will try to break free of him at the last second. Likewise he’ll try to break free of her when he understands what’s happening. She cannot let that happen.

George’s narrow fox face breaks into a smile. “You know what, I think this is all going to work out just fi—”

He stops because the elevator doesn’t. It passes the fifth floor—they can see a brief shutter of light from inside as it goes by—and keeps rising. His hands loosen in surprise. Only for a moment, but it’s long enough for Holly to break his grip and step back.

What happens next takes no more than ten seconds, but in her current amped-up state, Holly sees it all.

The door to the stairwell bangs open and Jerome lurches out. His eyes stare from a mask of caked blood. In his hands is the mop that was on the stairwell, the wooden shaft leveled. He sees George and charges at him, yelling as he comes: “Where’s Barbara? Where’s my sister?”

George sweeps Holly aside. She strikes the wall with a bone-rattling thud. Black dots swarm across her vision. George reaches for the mop’s shaft and yanks it easily out of Jerome’s hands. He pulls it back, meaning to strike Jerome with it, but that is when the women’s room door bangs open.

Barbara runs out with the pepper spray from her purse in her hand. George turns his head in time to catch a faceful. He screams and covers his eyes.

The elevator reaches the eighth floor. The hum of the machinery stops.

Jerome is going for George. Holly screams “ Jerome, no! ” and drives her shoulder into his midsection. He collides with his sister and the two of them hit the wall between the two bathroom doors.

The elevator alarm goes off, an amplified bray that screams panic panic panic .

George turns his red and streaming eyes toward the sound just as the elevator doors open. Not just the doors on five, but on all the floors. This is the glitch that caused the elevator to be shut down.

Holly runs at George with her arms outstretched. Her scream of fury merges with the bellowing alarm. Her outstretched hands connect with his chest and she pushes him into the shaft. For a moment he seems to hang there, eyes and mouth wide with terror and surprise. The face starts to sag and change, but before George can become Ondowsky again (if that is what’s happening), he’s gone. Holly is hardly aware of the strong brown hand—Jerome’s—that grabs the back of her shirt and saves her from following George down the shaft.

The outsider screams as he goes.

Holly, who considers herself a pacifist, is savagely delighted by the sound.

Before she can hear the thud of his body at the bottom, the elevator doors slide shut. On this floor and all the other floors. The alarm stops and the car starts down, on the way to the basement, its other terminal point. The three of them watch the brief flash of light from between the doors as the car passes five.

“ You did that,” Jerome says.

“Damn right,” Holly says.

Barbara’s knees fold and she goes down in a half-faint. The can of pepper spray falls from her relaxing hand and rolls to a stop against the elevator doors.

Jerome kneels beside his sister. Holly pushes him gently away and takes Barbara’s hand. She brushes back the sleeve of Barbara’s coat, but before she can even begin to take a pulse, Barbara is trying to sit up.

“Who… what was he?”

Holly shakes her head. “No one.” This might actually be the truth.

“Is he gone? Holly, 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?”