Deja Who (Insighter #1)(68)

Perhaps he recalled how Nellie fought him. He had expected Leah to pull back, to flee from him. Instead she jerked her head out of the way and as his knife zinged down the side of her face, she planted hers in his breastbone.

“If this were TV,” she shouted, her spittle speckling his reddening face, “I would say something clichéd like ‘this is for my mother,’ but this is for me, you festering poisonous penis!”

Triumph filled her like a drug, but then she looked down and saw what she had done, and cursed her rookie mistake.

So comforting to know about the error that kills me. After all that time, wondering . . . at last I know.





FORTY-TWO


Archer was out of the cab before it stopped moving, sprinting into Leah’s apartment building. He’d shouted—babbled—at the driver to call the police, but the poor guy was just relieved to get the hysterical nutjob out of his cab. And Archer wouldn’t wait for the cops. In TV, as in real life, they often arrived too late.

He would have needed a key to get through the outer door and into the lobby, but all he had to do was bull past the young mother with her arms full of kids and groceries. Any other day he would have helped. Any other day he could have repacked her groceries for her (part-time job number nineteen, bagger at Dominick’s).

Any other day but not today and, thank God, she couldn’t fumble the toddlers and the food and her key fast enough. He had plenty of time to race past and ignore her startled, “Hey!”, glance at the elevator and see it was on sixteen (Leah was on four), and plunge into the stairwell.

There was an old horror movie that scared the crap out of him when he was a kid, A Nightmare on Elm Street. A babysitter let him watch it and he never forgot it.

Most of it was cheesy and silly (he still didn’t understand why Nancy got so freaked when she unplugged her phone from the wall and it still rang (good Lord, was this movie made in the 1800s?) but there was a part at the end that terrified him. Nancy, the last (wo)man standing, was running down the stairs to flee the bad guy when the stairs became all gooey. They were carpeted on top but like giant marshmallows inside and the faster she tried to go and the harder she struggled to wrench her feet free of the mess, the more her feet got stuck in the goo.

He’d slept with the lights on for a week and refused to use the stairs for a month. This proved problematic as the only bathroom was upstairs, but that was why, eight-year-old Archer reasoned, God made backyards. During the course of that month, he spent so much time in the yard it eventually led to part-time job number three, lawn boy.

This was just like that. He knew the stairs were concrete but he also felt like his feet were sticking to them, preventing him from making any headway. He knew he was taking the stairs as fast as he could, but it felt like he was stuck in goo. Like he wasn’t moving at all and somewhere Leah needed him and he knew no matter what he did or how he did it, he wouldn’t be there in time.

He made it to four after a thousand years and barreled through the door and into the hallway right outside Leah’s apartment, slumping against the door

(breathe you’ve got to breathe you’re no good to Leah if you pass out in the hall so for Christ’s sake breathe and then get in there and take that fucker apart starting with his eyes if he can’t see her he can’t knife her come on come on COME ON)

for half a second.

And in that half second, the door to Leah’s apartment opened and Tom Winn stumbled out. Archer had never been more horrified in his life, and that included part-time job number nine, the month he spent working on a Wisconsin dairy farm (some of the things livestock did, like give birth, were so gross). Awful enough that Tom was here. So much worse that he was leaving. Because if Tom was leaving, that meant Leah was dead.

There was also something wrong with him, besides the psycho killer thing. It was so obvious, but so startling, Archer’s eyes had a tough time processing the image and reporting it to his brain: Tom had a knife in one hand (to be expected) and a knife sticking out of his chest (unexpected). Quivering out of his chest, to be specific; it looked like it was only in partway, half an inch or so, and it wiggled back and forth when he moved.

He realized at once what had happened, and as if Leah were standing beside him, he remembered what she said when she’d stabbed him.

It’s just as well I could not ram it home in your heart. All those ribs to get through—ugh. Most of the time the blade just glances off them. In the end it’s often too much trouble.

She’d gone for a kill shot and the knife had gotten stuck in the guy’s breastbone. It must have hurt like a bitch, but wasn’t fatal. It was barely slowing him down. But it had served to scare him off—for the first time in all her lives, Leah had finally fought back.

“I loved her,” Tom the Psycho was saying, sounding amazed and hurt, like he couldn’t believe Leah had the gall to actually resist being murdered. His trembling fingers kept coming up and trying to pluck at the knife, but would skitter away at the last second and he’d let out another whimper.

Awwww, poor baby. Don’t like the pain of getting knifed? Buck up, little camper, just make sure you take your antibiotics! Take it from one who knows.

“Do not touch him!” Leah, screaming from very far away. The most beautiful sound in the world, the universe, the most beautiful sound in the history of sounds. No one screaming like that was dying, not if they were getting that much oxygen. (Part-time job number eleven: EMT.) Her shrieks sounded like a seagull set on fire, which, for some reason, he found sexy.