Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [141]
He laughed, but it rang false. He was trying his best to be The Great Evildoer, but somewhere deep down he knew it was wrong and twisted, and he wasn’t proud of himself—even though he was trying to convince himself he was. I don’t think villainy came naturally to him, although self-deception certainly did.
“She made the wrong choice. It was as simple as that.” He clearly regretted killing Achara. He stared at the floor between us, and his voice grew softer. “What happened after she made that choice, well, that was out of my hands.”
“Please let us go,” Stephanie said.
“Sorry. Letting you go is not an option.”
“Sure it is,” I said, moving toward the telephone on the desk. “I’ll call the police. We’ll turn ourselves in.”
Donovan stepped forward and centered the pistol on my chest. We were fifteen feet apart now.
Stephanie was at the outer edge of his peripheral vision. I took another step toward the gun.
“Just stay where you are,” he said.
Donovan wanted to kill us both in a civilized manner, but I was determined not to make it easy for him. He killed me, he was going to remember it. He’d already made the transformation, and now I was, too, reverting to the primordial, moving backward through evolution, returning to a time before civility, a time when men brained each other with rocks.
A man as large as Scott Donovan didn’t spend his spare time lifting weights and practicing karate because he felt he was in control. He was compensating. I had no idea what he was compensating for, but it was for something. And a man compensating as hard as he was didn’t take goading well.
So I called him a tub-o’-lard.
Okay, I know, but I was under a lot of pressure, and I couldn’t think of anything else. Besides, it seemed to actually work. The natural pink in his cheeks began turning bright red.
“If you think calling me names is going to get you anywhere . . .”
“Jesus. You’d fall into a barrel of tits and come out sucking your thumb. I bet your karate works great against a mattress tied to a post.”
“You don’t think I could take you?”
“Not if I had one arm tied behind my back.”
Donovan sneered and tucked his pistol into the waistband behind his back. This was too good. He began rolling his shoulders, flicking his arms back and forth like a swimmer on the starting block, warming up. You were about to kill someone with your bare hands, there was no point in pulling a muscle.
Stephanie crept along the far wall toward the corner. “Don’t do it, Jim.”
Donovan and I locked eyes, mimicking the prefight ritual of a couple of over-the-hill club fighters. I tried to look mean. He did, too. It must have been hilarious.
Before he could make a move, I turned and sprinted out the door.
You can imagine his surprise.
60. A MINOR SCUFFLE; OR,
THE DAY I LOST SOME OF MY MOST VERY FAVORITE TEEFFS
“You crazy fuck!” Donovan shouted. “Come back here.”
Too late. I was around the corner. In the corridor. Moving fast.
And then . . .
Bullets began tearing through the wall. He hadn’t bothered to chase me, was shooting through the wall at where he guessed I might be. A stream of bullets.
Fragments of wallboard whizzed behind me in staccato ruptures, lead chasing me up the corridor like a zipper. Though each missile was closer than the last, by some miracle none of the slugs nicked me.
Instead of continuing down the corridor, I ducked through DiMaggio’s shower room. When I opened the door that led from the bathroom back into DiMaggio’s office, Stephanie and Donovan were in the doorway I’d just exited.
I stepped back into the office in time to see him hit her with an elbow. She went down hard but managed to slip her arms around one of his ankles, anything to hamper him.
Neither noticed me.
I ran across the room and launched myself through the air, striking Donovan across his midsection, using shoulders and fists and all the momentum I could generate.
The collision propelled