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.I felt for her pulse but could find none.I panicked.I left her, and ran along the river.Finally, I came to my senses and went back to where she had been lying.She was not there.One morning a week or so later, a pair of policemen appeared at my front door.They told me that Carina’s body had been found floating in Lower New York Bay, an apparent suicide.Her body was badly decomposed at that point.They had discovered my name on some papers in her room.They were hoping I could tell them more about her family.I told them that she was a fan, a particularly devoted fan, which I had seen at first as flattering but who increasingly had become a pest.I had been forced to tell her to leave me alone and to threaten her with a formal protective order.Other than that, I knew nothing.That satisfied them.As they were leaving, I asked how they knew it was a suicide.They said she had been alive when she went into the river.Her lungs were full of water.She must have gotten to her feet, disoriented by the blow, and stumbled off the pier.If I had stayed, I could have prevented her death.The image of her disappearing under the water has haunted me ever since: the possibility that she may have come to and struggled vainly to reach the surface.It was a fitting punishment that I could no longer write.To purge the memories of that terrible time from my life, and to make amends to Carina, I plotted to kill and castrate those two men and to finally write the truth of the whole story.Now I am prepared for one last death and the punishment that I deserve.”The crowd was hushed after she spoke.Across the open area, Jane saw that Smalley had pushed to the edge of the crowd.He spoke into a radio.Maggie gave the papers to Judith and pulled a pistol out of her bag—the same pistol Jane had seen in the drawer of Maggie’s dresser at the farm.The sight caused the entire crowd to draw in its breath and several to cry out in alarm.With the gun at her side, Maggie started walking across the street toward the bar where the men stood outside.Before she was halfway there, several police officers had drawn their guns and blocked her way, shouting at her to drop her weapon.Jane ducked under the barricade.A police officer immediately stopped her.“Get back!” he said.“Don’t shoot her!” Jane screamed.“Smalley, stop them! Maggie’s gun is empty.She just wants to be shot.”Smalley stepped forward his identification held high in the air.“Hold your fire!” Smalley shouted.Maggie paused, turning to Jane with a slight smile on her face, shaking her head.“I left one in the chamber, Jane,” she said.“And I had more bullets hidden away.Didn’t I tell you—false in one thing, false in all things.”Then she looked again at the officers and lifted the gun toward them, holding it with two hands.Screams erupted in the crowd, and several bystanders dropped to the ground.In the confusion, Jane pulled away from the cop and raced toward Maggie, tackling her around the waist and grabbing the gun.“No, Janey, no!” Maggie screamed, her voice filled with despair as she fell to the pavement.“Why won’t you let me die?”“What happened was an accident, Maggie.”Maggie sat up, rocking her body forward and backward.“I killed Carina.I killed her!”“Please stop talking this way,” Jane said.“We will face that together! You made a mistake.I still love you.Why won’t you let yourself be loved?”At that moment, while the police and the rest of the people in the crowd focused on Maggie, the overhead street lights along the block were smashed, and out of the darkness two bricks were heaved through the bar’s front windows, leaving jagged openings through which Molotov cocktails were thrown.Immediately, the interior of the bar erupted into flame.The men who were still inside scrambled through the door, one of them screaming as he beat at the flames that engulfed his shirt.Before anyone had a chance to help him, the Eumenides emerged from the crowd and fell on the men from the bar with baseball bats and crowbars, breaking legs and knees to render them helpless to run away.The crowd panicked at the sudden darkness, and the explosion and fire.They spilled over the barricades, running in all directions.Smalley tried to organize the officers, but his voice could barely be heard and they were all swept up in the surging waves of people.One or two cops reached the Eumenides but were set upon before they could do anything.The heavyset man who had been standing in the center of the men outside the bar, the one called Nat, grabbed a trashcan and used it to defend himself, but a blow from behind at the side of his leg crippled him.He was limping away down the block, when a second swing of a baseball bat shattered his other leg and he fell to the pavement.Desperately, he dragged himself into an alley, followed by two women.When a man appeared out of the shadows, Nat thought he had found an ally.But the man simply stood and watched as the two women grabbed his hair in their clenched fists and pushed his head downwards hard against the concrete, leaving him flat on his back.Nat was stunned momentarily.He struggled to sit up, but his head was smashed against the pavement a second time.Blood appeared at one edge of his mouth.His arms were restrained.The man knelt awkwardly beside Nat, who looked up to see his tormenter’s face in the darkness.“Remember me, Nat?” the man said.Nat seemed on the verge of recollection when a knife disappeared upward between his legs, penetrating just below his scrotum.The surge of pain turned Nat’s eyes glassy for a moment.Then he gasped and shook as the knife moved up his body slowly, cutting him open in a line six inches deep across his belly to the ribcage, where it stopped, stuck in his bloody entrails.“Justice,” one of the three whispered.Back in the street, Jane helped Maggie to her feet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]