Before David could retreat, the fanboy styling himself after Ronny Jessup came through the archway, barefoot and bare chested, as if he was at home here, the new master of the murder maze. He wore a belt holster at his right hip. “You,” he declared as if David had been a lifelong nemesis who had, for the hundredth time, appeared to thwart Ulrich’s intentions. He picked up the remote control from the arm of the chair and clicked off the TV. He threw down the remote and put his right hand on the grip of the holstered pistol.
| 80 |
David in the doorway. The locked labyrinth lay behind him, every corridor a dead end.
“You got yourself big trouble,” Stuart Ulrich said, halting a few steps into the far end of the room. “What you think you’re doin’ here besides trespassin’？”
David’s racing heart decelerated. A seeming calm overcame him, which was in fact cold expectation, the stabilizing clarity of the survival instinct. “And what’re you doing here like this, like you are?”
“It’s my place, isn’t it? I can be here any damn way I want. I don’t answer to you or nobody. You answer me and quick.”
“You said I couldn’t come back,” David reminded him.
“That need a translation, asshole?”
“I had to do more research. Anyway, I didn’t want to pay for the privilege, not at the rates you charge.”
“Like you’re poor or somethin’。 People like you got it all and still pinch every dime. You oughta embarrass yourself.”
“So I’ll pay.”
“You will, huh? Maybe I don’t need your money. What you think I’m doing here, dressin’ the place up like this?”
David looked at the bed, the TV. “I guess you’ll tell me.”
“Tour business went away. So if I dress it up, like them real estate agents stage houses, show it like Ronny is still here and all, that’s the kind of full experience people are gonna pay for.”
“You’re talking real showmanship,” David said.
“Man’s got an asset like this, he can’t let it lay fallow.”
“Exactly right. So maybe hire some girl to play dead, half-naked, smear her with fake blood. Tourists will pay extra to have their photo taken with one of Ronny’s victims.”
Ulrich’s hatred was palpable. David’s skin prickled as if peppered with lethal radiation.
“You make it sound all cheap,” Ulrich said, “when it’s nothin’ worse than history. Maybe you come here to make more history.”
David said nothing.
“Why you come here with them knives danglin’？ You mean to cut someone?”
The moment was near. Ulrich knew that his story of staging the killing ground for tourists didn’t ring true. He probably hoped to encourage David to go upstairs at gunpoint, where he could be more conveniently killed, freeing his murderer from the chore of hauling a corpse up the steps.
Ulrich said, “Maybe you figured to bring someone down here later, have your fun, cut her, and leave me to explain to the cops.”
Although David focused on Ulrich’s eyes, he was keenly aware of the hand on the grip of the holstered gun. “So . . . what’s her name?”
“Whose name?”
“The woman you’ve targeted. Or the girl. A man like you, she’s probably just a girl, easy to grab, easy to terrorize. You’re no match for a grown woman.”
Ulrich’s face was as stiff as a lacquered mask, his mouth a slit from which words issued as if in the voice of a ventriloquist. “Not everyone is sick like you.”
“Is she sixteen? Fourteen? Ten? Is she even eight years old, you sick sonofabitch?”
As his voice rose to a shout, David reached cross body with his right hand and plucked the smaller knife from its sheath.
Ulrich, a ready-to-be rapist and wannabe killer, flushed with outrage at being accused of child molestation. He drew his pistol.
David tossed the knife with the confidence of a blade master in a carnival act, though he had no such skill. Ulrich took the throw seriously—twisting to his right, almost falling—as if he expected to be skewered through the heart. He squeezed off a shot that went wild.
David pivoted, ducked, and went out through the doorway by which he’d entered.
A second shot, a third. The maze seemed to shake with the roar of the pistol, as if a primordial monster, previously in suspended animation, must be rising from caverns even deeper and stranger than Jessup’s labyrinth.
| 81 |
Maybe Stuart Ulrich didn’t have a second magazine for the pistol. Maybe the weapon’s capacity was eight or ten rounds, with five or seven shots remaining. However, a knife against a pistol didn’t work either in a dueling field at dawn or in a windowless labyrinth.