Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(90)

As his jeans slid down his hips, his left hand pulled at his underpants, and his right was already deep inside the pouch of the garment, fondling what he sought to free. His eyes, heavy-lidded with insane desire, widened only when her hand thrust forward. He saw the wicked knife an instant before he felt it. His shirt split as if it were paper, and his flesh proved no more resistant than butter. The blade went in to the hilt. His left hand closed over hers, as if to extract the switchblade in such a way as to minimize further damage, but Bibi twisted it before yanking it out of him, cross-cutting the original wound. And thrust it again, past his grasping, ineffectual hand. And tore it free. She heaved up, rocked him. He fell not upon her, but to her right, and she scrambled away from him.

In the heat of it, under the hammer and seemingly helpless, Bibi had remained cool, had done what needed to be done, as best she could do it. But now fright rode her back and whipped her, and her spinning mind spun out at once a dozen ways that she could still end up dead here in her old bedroom.

He would have a gun. He hadn’t thought he needed it. Pride in his brute strength and the pleasure of physically overwhelming her had ironically made him vulnerable. But the gun would be under his coat—was he wearing a coat?—or in an ankle holster. And right now he was surely fumbling for it.

She recovered the flashlight, swept the floor with it, saw her pistol. It was at the farther end of the room. Near the closet door. She would have to circle the would-be rapist to get to it.

He struggled to sit up, a bear of a man, his neck so thick and corded that it would have foiled a hangman’s noose. No coat on this chilly night. Or he’d left it in another room before creeping up on her. Jeans and a bloody Hawaiian shirt. Arms sculpted by thousands of hours in a gym.

Quick but wary, hobbling, wincing with pain from the beating she had taken, Bibi circled him. She recovered the pistol, inexpressibly grateful that Pax had insisted she have it and learn to use it.

The barbarian was sitting up now, trying to reach behind himself and under his Hawaiian shirt, no doubt seeking a holstered weapon belted in the small of his back. The effort strained his damaged guts, and he strove to bite off a grudging squeal of pain each time he found that he couldn’t twist his torso even slightly to reach what he sought. His face glistened with sweat, his eyes with hate.

Bibi wanted to be gone from there, but she had to see this through to the end. She put the flashlight on the floor, aimed at the bastard, and she stood over him, just out of his reach. In spite of her two-hand grip, the pistol jumped up and down on target, as though it had a will of its own. Even in his agony, the barbarian took note of the twitching gun, and Bibi saw him take note of it. Any sign of weakness invited violence. She steadied herself. “You make a wrong move, and I’ll shoot you dead.”

He seemed to have given up the idea of reaching the gun at his back. His face cleared of hatred and rage and pain. He sat there like a giant infant, legs splayed, hands palms-up in his lap, as though bewildered that his misbehavior had resulted in these consequences.

He didn’t look at her when he spoke, and there was no strong emotion in his voice. “You’ll never get out of this alive.”

If Bibi might have answered him, the blood bubbling on his lips suggested there was no point to either argument or interrogation.

“It’s the Library of Babel,” he said, spitting blood with the strain of forming words. “An infinite number of rooms. No way out.”

He fell backward from his sitting position, and his skull rapped the floor. But he felt nothing, for he was dead, and bewilderment, too, was gone from his face, with nothing to replace it.





Bibi wanted to be gone from the bungalow, but not with the urgency that she had desired escape only moments earlier.

First, sickened by the need to do so, she went through the dead man’s pockets and found nothing. She rolled him onto his side with the intention of extracting his wallet from a hip pocket, but he carried no wallet.

She sat on the floor, with her back against a wall. She tasted blood each time she licked the throbbing corner of her mouth, and she chose not to count all the places where she ached. Now she waited for calm to settle upon her, and not just calm but also a sense of being fully and rightfully acquitted.

That Bibi had killed in self-defense should not have brought her to despondency and certainly not to despair, and in fact it did not. To kill wasn’t the same as to murder, because killing was done to protect oneself or those who were innocent—or, in war, to deny the aggressor the fruits of his onslaught and to preserve the kind of civilization that valued life and freedom above ideology, above even peace and justice, two words easily and routinely perverted by most authoritarians. The ability to recognize this was why the work of Solzhenitsyn meant so much more to her than the novels of Tolstoy, and always would.

In this case, Bibi had killed to save herself and to have the chance to find and save a girl named Ashley Bell. Horrified by the necessity of killing, she nevertheless sat there without serious doubt about her actions.

She kept the flashlight trained on the dead man and delayed her departure for no reason other than to consider his reference to the Library of Babel. He didn’t seem to be the kind of man who would, by his nature, make such an allusion.

That library was a literary conceit with which several writers had played over the years, though it was most widely known because of a short work of fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”