Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [64]
He grabbed my collar and held it, tight enough to choke, and fairly lifted me off the ground and put his rock hard knee against my pubic bone and pummeled up and down.
“What are you doing to me?” he said.
I gasped. It was like his knee was penetrating to my bladder.
“Get out of my life. Get out of my business. Stay away from my pussy.”
He let me go, and I kicked him.
“You bitch!”
He backed up, clutching his groin.
“Get out of here!” I roared, but instead he sprang forward and grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the deep rose coffee table. The edge went into my back and my head snapped. I kept on kicking, and he backed off and was groping himself and spinning around and saying, “You bitch! You bitch!”
I rolled off the coffee table. I could feel warm blood down my leg as if he had ruptured something inside. My intestines hurt and I retched. I was hunched over holding my stomach.
I had instinctively moved in front of the couch, keeping the coffee table between us.
“Stay over there,” I warned.
Andrew veered forward.
Inside the drawer of the deep rose coffee table was the Colt .32. I pulled it out and aimed the gun at Andrew.
“If you don’t leave right now I’ll shoot you.”
He looked at me with reddened eyes, leaning over, cupping his groin. The only light in the room was from the TV. He came at me. He kept coming. I fired once, wounding him in the torso.
A small-caliber round, especially with old hard-ball copper-jacketed bullets sitting in there from the time my grandfather had given me the gun, does not produce big holes. Still, I found it hard to believe he was coming at me again, but he was. I fired and he tackled me, and the shot went into the wall. We flew backwards over the coffee table and halfway onto the couch. The gun went off for the third time, hitting him in the thigh. We wrestled for control of the barrel, slippery with blood and meat. His big heavy body was on top of mine, and I saw his leg dripping blood. Then he just stood up and got off me. He walked out the front door and left it wide open.
I staggered into the kitchen. I walked around in a circle, dazed, then I thought, Where is he going? and ran down the hallway after him.
Andrew was already outside at the carport. He had one hand pressed against his rib cage and with the other he was awkwardly trying to open the door.
“What are you doing, Andy? Please stop, Andy. Andy, wait. Please let me call the paramedics—”
He never spoke. Somehow he had gotten the gun. I didn’t realize it, but I had known, disoriented in the kitchen, something was wrong because I was no longer holding the gun. Now he tossed it into the passenger seat. I was gripping the top of the driver’s door. We had a little tug-of-war, I tried to pull it open, but he was stronger and jerked it out of my hands and slammed it and drove away. The glass was streaked with blood. We must have been out there less than a minute. Nobody saw us and nobody heard the low-velocity shots over the sounds of the TV.
I went inside and locked the door to my apartment and stood there. My insides were burning. I went into the bathroom and urinated blood.
My ankle hurt. My head hurt from where it concussed against the coffee table. I came back into the living room. There was glass all over my floor. I picked up three bullet casings. I put a pad in my underwear to absorb the blood and lay down on the couch. I needed to call somebody. I lay there in a stream of blood and tears, thinking someone would come and take care of this, but nobody came.
I swept up the glass. The sun had come up by then. I crouched in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and then crawled out, clutching my gut like some primitive thing. Then I got dressed and went to work.
Part Two
SAFE PASSAGE
Fifteen.
I went up in the elevator and got off and used my card to access the revolving entry. I passed through a smudged white door that led to the Corridor of Winds and out to the matrix. Setting the briefcase down, I took off the blazer and hung it on a wooden hanger that