The Widow File (29 page)

She was headed toward the Tidal Basin where the sidewalks were dark and hidden from traffic. It would have been a smart play if the weather was warm and the trees and bushes in bloom. There might have been a place to hide or groups of tourists strolling in the warm night air to seek help from. This time of year, however, the branches were bare and the sidewalks deserted. With her injured leg, she wouldn’t get far and when he caught up with her, he would have her to himself. Booker bit his lip and smiled.

Even as she ran Dani knew she was screwed. If she’d run the other direction, she might have seen a cop or gotten to the street, but running the other direction would have put her closer to Tom. She would have had to step over Ev’s bloody body.

Who was she kidding? She’d run the direction she’d run because that was the direction she’d been facing and her only thought was to go forward. Forward meant down to the Tidal Basin and the long, open sidewalk.

She bit her lip against the shrieking pain of her leg. Her boot felt like it was full of pudding as blood soaked into her sock, and her jeans stuck to her in the most revolting way. She barreled lopsided and off rhythm toward the stone wall around the water. Tom shouted something but she couldn’t hear him. She could only hear her heartbeat in her ears and the
thump-slide thump-slide
of her gait.

The wall around the basin gave her something to lean on, speeding up her pace. She wouldn’t say it made her optimistic but the increase in distance held despair slightly further at bay.

The mist had turned to full-blown rain. Her clothes weighed a ton. If she had any hope of keeping up this pace or any pace, she had to shed some of the weight. The wet woolen outer shirt clung to her as she peeled it off
and Dani nearly lost her balance as she wrestled the clinging beast from her wrists. Images of falling on her face, her hands bound neatly behind her in her stupid shirt, made panic rise up in her chest until she finally freed herself from the garment, flinging it behind her. Maybe Tom would trip on it.

Tom wiped R’s blood from the serrated knife on his pants leg as he trotted along the basin wall. The hooked blade was his second favorite weapon, the first being the smaller knife at his back. He debated which one to use. The serrated blade ended things quickly and really he did owe Dani as much mercy as he could summon. Yet he was drawn to that little blade, the one he called Nugget, which required skill and proximity. It made a mess and worked best in the closest of quarters. It wasn’t a coward’s knife.

Something black lay heaped on the sidewalk and Booker slowed to study it. He crouched down beside it and poked at it with the hooked tip of the blade. A shirt. It could have been anyone’s—D.C. had no shortage of homeless people, or a jogger or any of the tourists who had strolled this sidewalk when the sun had been up could have dropped it—but Booker decided it was Dani’s, that she had peeled it off as she ran. She’d been wearing a shirt like this, something two times too big for her.

He tried to dam the thought before it got to him but failed. He kept forgetting how small Dani was. If she hit five feet, he’d give her a nickel. He kept seeing those little boots in her closet and how low the clothing bar had been set. She’d even installed a second, lower peephole in her apartment door. It didn’t make him pity her. Far from it. Booker didn’t know if he was even capable of pity anymore. He’d kill a frail old woman just as quickly as a strapping young buck. No, what he admired in Dani was the contrast between her petite frame and her mighty presence. That was the only word he could find to describe her—mighty. She’d eluded him, ducked him, lied to him, smiled at him, and talked to him, really talked to him. He wished he could call her right now. He wished he could get his thoughts straight, because even as he didn’t want to kill her, he also knew that he looked forward to it.

The small elation of confidence she’d felt when she’d hit the wall dissolved further with every step she took. Dani knew she was hitting a different wall altogether. She didn’t know how much blood she was losing. She told herself that if it had been a femoral artery she’d be dead already but that didn’t comfort her much. She felt cold to the bone, not the cold that came from the rain or the night air but a cold that came from shock and loss and operating at a deficit of supplies. She couldn’t keep this up. She couldn’t keep running but the dark and the rain made focusing difficult. A few pathways rose up from the sidewalk but from where she stood, the enormity of propelling her body up the slope seemed insurmountable.

Maybe Tom had given up. The dwindling rational voice in her brain screamed “NoNoNo” but the rest of her rejoiced at the thought, clinging to any possibility that meant stopping this marathon, closing the eyes, laying the body down. She should never have entertained the thought, because her legs mutinied and her hands joined in, grabbing at the wall and hauling her into one of the shallow look-out alcoves peppering the wall around the Tidal Basin. Less than three feet deep and six feet wide and open to the sidewalk, the alcove had waist-high metal fencing that let visitors peer down into the icy water of the man-made reservoir. Dani would have been hard-pressed to find a worse hiding place short of just lying down in the middle of the sidewalk. But it seemed she was no longer the master of her own body. The arms and legs and cold toes and bleeding fingers commandeered the decision and Dani found herself crouched in the corner of the alcove, her head resting on a lower rung, her bleeding leg straight out before her. The buckle of the Rasmund pouch strap dug into her side where she pressed against the wall. She started to pull the damned thing off and got only as far as pulling her shoulder free. The pouch rested in her lap, the strap around her neck.

In the unfunniest of ways, it was funny. She’d started this whole nightmare in a crouch. She’d crouched in front of Hickman when she’d heard gunshots and seen him dead. She’d spent the day scrabbling and crouching and hiding until she was running and sliding and jumping off of roofs.
She’d been shot. She’d hidden in a beanbag chair. She’d had a bologna sandwich just like the ones her dad would make her. She wished she’d kissed Joey from Big Wong’s. She wished she’d kissed Choo-Choo. She doubted there was going to be much more jumping and sliding tonight. At least she didn’t feel cold anymore.

Booker stopped and listened. He didn’t hear any footsteps. The soft sound of traffic floated in from a distance but he no longer heard the irregular beat of Dani’s footsteps.

Was she hurt? Worry stabbed at his gut. He didn’t want to think of Dani fallen down or unconscious. He knew what he was going to do to her would hurt but he would make that hurt better, he would make it mean something. Dani didn’t deserve to die alone and cold, hit by a car or bleeding out from a bullet.

Or was she hiding? Had she found a lead pipe or a two-by-four and decided to lie in wait for him? Did she have a plan even now, injured and exhausted, shocked beyond reason? The idea of stepping from a shadow and seeing Dani coiled and bloody, her messy hair and bright eyes waiting to attack, thrilled Booker in a way that surprised him. He felt that same rush of blood he’d felt upon entering her apartment. It felt sexual and spiritual and primitive and scintillating all at the same time. More than a little bit, he hoped he’d get the chance to wrestle a weapon from her.

He saw her boot first.

The little round toe of it peeked from the edge of one of the fenced viewing alcoves around the basin. Booker froze, waiting, but the boot didn’t move. He risked another step, leaning forward to peer around the edge. Her right leg, the injured one, sprawled out before her, her left leg was bent and falling to the side. Dani looked too pale as she lay with her head back against the fencing, her mouth open, her eyes closed.

Booker’s breath caught in his throat. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be dead. But she could be close.

“Dani?”

She was in the cubby behind her father’s seat. She could feel the rumble of the road in her skull where it rested against the metal. She was warm and he was talking to someone and she didn’t want to open her eyes. “Dani?” her father called to her. She didn’t want to open her eyes but she wanted to see her father. “Dani? Come on. Wake up.”

She peeled one eye open, then the other, blinking hard to bring them into focus. A wide, pale face smiled at her, pretty blue eyes with long lashes and deep wrinkles in the corner. Chapped lips smiling at her. Not her father—he had brown eyes like hers. This was…

“Oh shit!”

Dani banged her head on the fence, throwing herself backward where there was nowhere to go. The sudden rush of panic gave her strength to get her feet under her, hardly aware of the pain shooting up her right leg. Her heels slipped in the wetness and her hands grabbed at the stone and the railing to lift her up and away from the face, the man, Tom, the killer, who held his hands up, still smiling, letting her get up on her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

He sighed and scratched his head. “Dani…”

“Oh, oh.” She started to cry. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t do this.”

“If there was any other way—”

“Don’t. Don’t. You don’t have to do this.”