Die Again (Rizzoli & Isles, #11)(96)

He must have found what he wanted, because I hear my purse thud onto the countertop. Please leave. Please leave.

But he doesn’t. He moves, instead, across the kitchen. He will have to pass the pantry to get to the rest of the house. I stand frozen in the shadows, not daring to breathe. As he walks past the doorway crack, I glimpse his back and see curly dark hair, thick shoulders, a squarish head. There is something shockingly familiar about him, but it isn’t possible. No, that man is dead, his bones scattered somewhere in the Okavango Delta. Then he turns toward the cracked doorway and I see his face. Everything I believed these past six years, everything I thought I knew, flips on its axis.

Elliot is alive. Poor, awkward Elliot, who pined after the blondes, who stumbled around in the bush, who was always the butt of Richard’s jokes. Elliot, who claimed he found a viper in his tent, a viper that no one else saw. I think back to the last night my companions were alive. I remember darkness, panic, gunshots. And a woman’s last scream: Oh God, he has the gun!

Not Johnny. It was never Johnny.

He keeps walking past the pantry, and his footsteps fade away. Where is he? Is he standing still, just out of sight, waiting for me to show myself? If I step out of the pantry and try to slip out the kitchen door, will he spot me? Frantically I try to picture the backyard beyond that door. It’s fully fenced, but where is the gate? I can’t remember. I could get boxed in by that fence, trapped in a killing yard.

Or I could stay right here in the pantry and wait for him to find me.

I reach for a jar on the shelf. Raspberry jam. It feels solid and heavy in my hand; not much, but it’s the only weapon I have. I ease around from behind the pantry door and peer out.

No one there.

I creep out of the pantry, into the brightly lit kitchen, where I’m painfully exposed in the glare. The back door is maybe ten paces away, across a floor littered with broken glass.

The phone rings, loud as a shriek. I freeze in place and the answering machine picks up. I hear Detective Rizzoli’s voice on the line: Millie, please pick up. Millie, are you there? This is important …

Through the urgent sound of her voice, I listen desperately for other sounds in the house, but I can’t hear him.

Go. Go now.

Terrified of betraying my presence, I tiptoe around the broken glass. Nine paces to the door. Eight. I make it halfway across the kitchen when the cat shoots into the room, claws sliding across the slick tiles, loudly scattering shards.

The noise alerts him, and heavy footsteps move toward me. I’m out in the open, with nowhere to hide. I make a dash for the door. Just manage to grasp the knob when hands grab my sweater and wrench me backward.

I whirl around, blindly swinging the jar at him. It slams into the side of his head and shatters, releasing a spray of raspberry jam, bright as blood.

He howls in rage and loses his grip. Just for an instant I’m free, and again I lurch for the door. Again, I almost make it.

Then he tackles me and we both go sprawling to the floor, sliding across glass and raspberry jam. The trash can topples, spilling out dirty wrappers and coffee grounds. I struggle to my knees, desperately crawling through scattered garbage.

A cord loops around my neck, goes taut, and yanks my head back.

I reach up, clawing at the cord, but it’s tight, so tight it cuts like a blade into my flesh. I hear his grunt of effort. I can’t loosen the cord. I can’t breathe. The light starts to dim. My feet no longer work. So this is how I die, so far from home. From everyone I love.

As I sag backward, something sharp bites into my hand. My fingers close around the object, which I can barely feel because everything is going numb. Violet. Christopher. I should never have left you.

I fling my arm backward, slashing at his face.

Even through my darkening fog, I can hear his shriek. Suddenly the cord around my neck goes limp. The room brightens. Coughing, gasping, I release the object I’ve been holding and it clatters to the floor. It’s the open cat-food can, its exposed lid sharp as a razor.

I haul myself to my feet and the countertop block of kitchen knives is right in front of me. He’s moving in, and I turn to face him. Blood streams from his slashed brow, a waterfall of it, dripping into his eyes. He lunges, hands reaching for my throat. Partly blinded by his own blood, he doesn’t see what I’m holding. What I bring up just as our bodies collide.

The butcher knife sinks into his belly.

The hands grappling at my throat suddenly fall away, limp. He drops to his knees where, just for an instant he remains upright, his eyes open, his face a bloody mask of surprise. His body tilts sideways, and I close my eyes as he hits the floor.

Suddenly I myself am wobbling. I stagger across the blood and glass and I sink into a chair. I drop my head in my hands, and through the roaring of blood in my ears I hear another sound. A siren. I have no strength to lift my head. I hear banging on the front door, and voices shouting: Police! But I cannot seem to move. Only when I hear them step in through the back door, and one of them utters a startled oath, do I finally look up.

Two policemen loom in front of me, both of them staring at the carnage in the room. “Are you Millie?” one of them asks. “Millie DeBruin?”

I nod.

He says, into his radio: “Detective Rizzoli, she’s here. She’s alive. But you’re not gonna believe what I’m looking at.”





A DAY LATER, THEY UNCOVERED HIS LAIR.