Holly lifts her shirt and does a complete turn without being asked.

“Now pull up your pantslegs.”

She does this, too.

“No throwdown,” George says. “Good.” He cocks his head, looking at her the way an art critic might study a painting. “Gosh, you’re an ugly little thing, aren’t you?”

Holly makes no reply.

“Have you ever in your life had so much as a single date?”

Holly makes no reply.

“Ugly little waif, no more than thirty-five but already going gray. Not bothering to cover it up, either, and if that isn’t waving the white flag, I don’t know what is. Do you send your dildo a card on Valentine’s Day?”

Holly makes no reply.

“My guess is you compensate for your looks and insecurity with a sense of…” He breaks off and looks down at Barbara. “Jesus Christ, you’re heavy! And you stink!”

He lets go of Barbara’s arm and she collapses in front of the women’s room door with her hands spread, her bottom raised, and her forehead on the tiles. She looks like a Muslim woman about to begin Isha’a. Her sobs are low, but Holly can hear them. Oh yes, she can hear them very well.

George’s face changes. Not back to Chet Ondowsky’s, but into a feral sneer that shows Holly the real creature inside him. Ondowsky has a pig face, George has a fox face, but this is the face of a jackal. Of a hyena. Of Jerome’s gray bird. He kicks Barbara’s bluejeaned butt. She wails in pain and surprise.

“Get in there!” he shouts. “Get in there, clean yourself up, let the grownups finish their business!”

Holly wants to run those last fifteen yards, shouting at him to stop kicking her, but of course that’s what he wants. And if he really means to stash his hostage in the women’s bathroom, it may give her the chance she needs. At the very least it opens the playing field. So she holds her ground.

“Get… in there!” He kicks her again. “I’ll deal with you after I deal with this meddling bitch. You want to pray she plays straight with me.”

Sobbing, Barbara pushes the door to the women’s bathroom open with her head and crawls inside. Not, however, before George administers another kick to her backside. Then he looks at Holly. The sneer is gone. The smile is back. Holly guesses it’s supposed to look charming, and on Ondowsky’s face it might. Not on George’s.

“Well, Holly. Girlfriend’s in the shithouse and now it’s just us. I can go in and open up her guts with this…” He holds up the knife. “…or you can give me what I came for and I’ll leave her alone. I’ll leave you both alone.”

I know better, Holly thinks. Once you get what you came for, no one is walking away, including Jerome. If he isn’t dead already.

She tries to project both doubt and hope. “I don’t know if I can believe you.”

“You can. Once I have the drive, I’ll fade away. From your life and from the world of Pittsburgh broadcasting. It’s time to move along. I knew that even before this guy—” He draws the hand not holding the knife slowly down the length of his face, as if drawing down a veil. “—planted the bomb. I think maybe that’s why he planted it. So yes, Holly, you can believe me.”

“Maybe I should run back to the office and lock the door,” she says, and hopes her face shows she’s actually considering this. “Call 911.”

“And leave the girl to my tender mercies?” George points his long knife at the door to the women’s room and smiles. “I don’t think so. I saw how you looked at her. Besides, I’d have you before you took three steps. As I told you in the mall, I’m fast. Enough talk. Give me what I want and I’ll go away.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“What do you think?”

She pauses, sighs, wets her lips, finally nods. “You win. Just leave us alive.”

“I will.” As at the mall, the response is too fast. Too glib. She doesn’t believe him. He knows and doesn’t care.

“I’m going to take my cell phone out of my pocket,” Holly says. “I have to show you a picture.”

He says nothing, so she takes it out, very slowly. She opens her photo stream, selects the picture she took in the elevator, and holds the phone out to him.

Now tell me, she thinks. I don’t want to do it myself, so tell me, you bastard.

And he does. “I can’t see it. Come closer.”

Holly steps toward him, still holding the phone out. Two steps. Three. Twelve yards away, then ten. He’s squinting at the phone. Eight yards now, and see how reluctant I am?

“Closer, Holly. My eyes are a little wonky for a few minutes after I change.”

You’re a black liar, she thinks but takes another step, still holding the phone out. He’ll almost certainly take her with him when he goes down. If he goes down. And that’s okay.

“You see it, right? It’s in the elevator. Taped to the roof. Just take it and g—”

Even in her hyper-alert state, Holly barely sees George move. At one moment he’s standing outside the women’s, squinting at the picture on her phone. At the next, he’s got one arm around her waist and the other gripping her outstretched hand. He wasn’t kidding about being fast. Her phone tumbles to the floor as he drags her toward the elevator. Once inside, he’ll kill her and take the package taped to the ceiling. Then he’ll go into the bathroom and kill Barbara.

That, at least, is his plan. Holly has another one.

“What are you doing?” Holly cries—not because she doesn’t know, but because this is now the required line.

He doesn’t answer, only pushes the call button. It doesn’t light, but Holly hears the elevator hum into life. It’s coming up. She will try to break free of him at the last second. Likewise he’ll try to break free of her when he understands what’s happening. She cannot let that happen.

George’s narrow fox face breaks into a smile. “You know what, I think this is all going to work out just fi—”

He stops because the elevator doesn’t. It passes the fifth floor—they can see a brief shutter of light from inside as it goes by—and keeps rising. His hands loosen in surprise. Only for a moment, but it’s long enough for Holly to break his grip and step back.

What happens next takes no more than ten seconds, but in her current amped-up state, Holly sees it all.

The door to the stairwell bangs open and Jerome lurches out. His eyes stare from a mask of caked blood. In his hands is the mop that was on the stairwell, the wooden shaft leveled. He sees George and charges at him, yelling as he comes: “Where’s Barbara? Where’s my sister?”

George sweeps Holly aside. She strikes the wall with a bone-rattling thud. Black dots swarm across her vision. George reaches for the mop’s shaft and yanks it easily out of Jerome’s hands. He pulls it back, meaning to strike Jerome with it, but that is when the women’s room door bangs open.

Barbara runs out with the pepper spray from her purse in her hand. George turns his head in time to catch a faceful. He screams and covers his eyes.

The elevator reaches the eighth floor. The hum of the machinery stops.

Jerome is going for George. Holly screams “Jerome, no!” and drives her shoulder into his midsection. He collides with his sister and the two of them hit the wall between the two bathroom doors.