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By the time she got to the end, Dickerson was nodding.“Your daughter… you have a husband?”
“Had. He walked out when I refused to undergo any immediate treatments. He… he was murdered not long after that. And when he died, I had to accept thatandknow that he didn’t support my decision. So… yes, I do know what you’re going through. I even thought I had beaten mine with a new and experimental drug but… no. It came back worse than before. I was asked to leave work six weeks ago and now I—”
“You… you better not be lying.”
“She’s not,” Jack said. “I’ve had to watch her go through it all. She’s so damned strong, but to watch this slowly take her away…it’s been rough.”
“I know you feel betrayed by her,” Rachel said, nodding to Pamela. Her eyes were starting to slowly close, and blood was quickly soaking into the couch and spilling to the floor. “But the tumor isn’t from her. She had nothing to do with it. She had—”
“But she left!” he screamed. “Right when I needed her the most, she—”
Rachel saw the knife trembling and took her chance. The left arm of the couch and Pamela’s body were the only things between her and Dickerson. She leaped, her hands outstretched for Dickerson’s arm. In mid-air, her left legs touched the arm of the couch, and that may have been what kept her from getting stabbed.
She fell a bit short, but her right hand clamped down on Dickerson’s wrist as he drove the knife down. Rachel pushed up and away, trying to keep the knife from plunging in too deep as she fell. And when she did, she felt just how weak and fragile Dickerson was. There was some fight in him, but Rachel’s force easily overtook him.
They both went falling to the floor. In her fall, Rachel’s legs tangled with Pamela’s, and Rachel went to the floor, slipping in the woman’s spilled blood. At the same time, she heard the knife clattering to the floor somewhere, bouncing on the wood. As she hit the floor, Rachel was vaguely aware of Jack rushing forward, scrambling for his gun. But at the same time, in a moment that she wondered might be the universe actually giving Dickerson a weird sort of break, he was scrambling to get to his feet. In his frantic urgency, his left foot struck out and slammed directly into Jack’s shoulder—the same one that had taken the brunt ofthe impact in knocking down the apartment door.
Jack cried out and went falling backward. Rachel didn’t see the end result of this because she was too busy trying to get to her feet as well. She still held Dickerson’s right wrist, but as she slipped a bit in the blood on the floor, he managed to free himself.
He was screaming in rage as he made a clumsy half-dive for the knife. As Rachel managed to get to her knees and look around to get acclimated, she saw that Jack was going for the knife, too.
But it was clear that Dickerson was going toreach it first. Just as Rachel also went scrambling for it, she saw that it wasn’t the knife they were going for.
It was Jack’s gun. And Dickerson already had his hand on it. Rachel scurried forward, hoping to tackle him as he drew the gun up in Jack’s direction. Her first hope was to knock Dickerson down before he could fire it.
But as she surged forward, another of her dizzy spells hit her. This one came like a bolt of lightning, and every bit of her balance seemed to leave her body.
The result was an awkward sprawl forward. Rather than striking him in the side and tackling him to the ground, she fell forward and barely grazed him.
As she fell into the open space between Dickerson and Jack, she heard the gun go off.
The sound of it made her head feel as if it had split open and let out a monstrous peal of thunder. But that was secondary to the pain that ripped through her side. She feltit right in the center of her body, a hot stabbing that seemed to be both dull and excruciating at the same time. The breath went out of her, and something inside of her set off every single internal alarm bell shed ever known.
When she hit the ground, she thought, rather dimly:Damn. I’ve been shot.
The world started fading at an alarming rate. And in that quickly approaching darkness, she heard Jack roaring out in terror and rage. She heard the sounds of a struggle, then the weak cries of James Dickerson.
After that, things came and went. Brief flickers of light, Jack’s face, odd noises.
That darkness finally came, settling in like snow on a cold field. And as it swept her up, she felt Jack holding her hand, squeezing it gently and whispering something to her that went unheard. Her final thought, though, was of Paige. And a quick, fleeting sadness escorted her away into the black when she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the bus stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The man sitting across from her was Alex Lynch. He was smiling, and his hands were covered in blood. Rachel couldn’t move, could barely even think. Lynch’s eyes held her tight in their gaze, and he was frozen.
“You really are trying to die, aren’t you?” he said.
“I’m going to die anyway,” Rachel said.
“True. But are you too impatient to wait for the tumor to do it? Jesus, you really are no better than this James Dickerson character, are you?”
They were sitting in an interrogation room that was the size of a library. Their voices echoed, and even Rachel’s labored breaths seemed to echo on forever.
It was the sort of dream that was so surreal that Rachel knew it was a dream even as she was having it. Of course, Alex Lynch wasn’t there. He was dead and gone, and…
Wait. Maybe she was dead and gone, too. Maybe she was dead, and this was what waited for her on the other side. St. Peter or God weren’t going to judge her. Apparently, Alex Lynch got that job.
She recalled the pain that had exploded through her body as James Dickerson had raised the gin; her body extended to knock him down, only to fall. That memory tore Alex Lynch and the cavernous interrogation room away. She tried opening her eyes but was unable to. But she heard voices, a familiar one and a deep, male voice she didn’t recognize.
