JANE PIVOTED TOWARD THE THREAT, but the naked woman was too close, coming in as low and fast as a striking snake unraveling from its coils, so damn fast, already past the pistol. The knife slashed right to left across Jane’s abdomen, slicing open her T-shirt as if the fabric were gossamer, making a zipperlike sound as it scored the SafeGuard vest underneath. The body armor featured fine chainmail to protect against edge weapons, plus an underlying Kevlar layer that provided ballistic protection.

The vest didn’t fail. Would never fail. But it was only a vest, leaving points of vulnerability—face, throat, hands. The attacker had ferocious energy, feral quickness, uncanny strength. Even as the knife sliced across the armor, she body-slammed Jane, driving her back into a wall. A hard shock to the spine. A moment when darkness encroached at the edges of vision. A transient right-side weakness. Jane’s right hand opened involuntarily, and the Heckler fell with a soft thump on the carpet.

Full-body contact now, hand-to-hand, a death struggle. Jane seized the other’s right wrist in her left hand as the woman raised the knife to stab.

Her foul breath a thick tide, the stink of sour sweat and urine and blood steaming off her, the woman didn’t cycle through a panoply of tortured expressions, as had the man before her. Her face seemed forged of iron, every bone beneath the skin and every muscle in that rigid countenance fired into hard angles of fury and hate. In her eyes an icy void attested to a mind pitiless and purged of empathy. She growled low in her throat and hissed and spat, but said not a word, not one obscenity or curse, as though in her depravity she wasn’t human any longer, but an animal, a predator at least as vicious as any in nature.

She clutched Jane’s throat, trying to choke her, but that hand was slick with blood from a wound in the palm, and the woman didn’t have full strength in it.

Martial arts had their uses, but they seldom worked on the street the way they did in a dojo. When you were pinned against a wall by a zombified psychopath who pressed closer in her frenzy, trying to bite your face, judo and karate were strictly action-movie choreography. You needed to resort to plain techniques, plain old everyday brutality, plain-Jane stuff.

Caused by the shock of impact, Jane’s brief right-side weakness passed. With her left hand, she continued to stiff-arm the insistent attacker’s raised knife. With her right, she now clutched the wrist of the hand at her throat and used her thumb to apply crippling pressure on the radial nerve, maintaining eye contact because animals could sometimes be intimidated by an unrelenting stare. She planted her right foot flat against the wall, tensed the calf and thigh, and drove her knee hard between her assailant’s spread legs, did it again, and a third time. A woman wouldn’t be incapacitated by such a blow, as a man might be, but the vulva was richly endowed with nerves; the pain should make her relent or even drop the knife.

Didn’t happen. In her killing fury, the woman was beyond pain, an engine of destruction fueled and armored by epinephrine.

They were deep in the extreme cage fight of which Jane had warned Bernie, mean and dirty, no rules, no compassion, a contest that allowed only one survivor. As the pinched radial nerve failed the tendons and muscles that it served, the attacker suffered wrist-drop, her grip strength gone. Jane punched her assailant’s throat, hoping to tear the cartilage around the larynx. The woman’s head snapped back. Jane punched again, harder than before. A third punch, aimed higher, broke the nose. She clawed at an eye. Gagging, gasping, the attacker dropped the knife, stumbled backward. Jane stooped and grabbed the pistol from the carpet and rose and fired once point-blank. She would have fired again, but that was when the blast came and the house rocked on its foundation and part of the front wall collapsed into the living room.

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THE TUBULAR-FRAME NYLON-WEBBING lounge chairs floating in the sun-sparkled pool, bobbing and yawing, turning in circles, knocking together, as if invisible sunbathers were frolicking together in some water game …

On the farther side of the pool from Bernie Riggowitz, the raging person wasn’t only tossing lounge chairs into the swimming pool. He was also overturning tables with their big center-fixed red umbrellas and kicking over the other chairs.

At first it didn’t occur to Bernie, watching from the cockpit of the motor home, that the man might be homicidal, only that he must have a grudge against the RV park management or maybe a crazy hatred of outdoor furniture. And surely he must be very drunk. At the moment there were no vacationers in the pool or on the deck around it, no one whom the shikker might attack.

Then Holden Hammersmith, patriarch of the clan that operated Hammersmith Family RV Park, the man who registered Albert Rudolph Neary and took his cash and escorted the Tiffin Allegro to its current campground space, hurried into view from the direction of the park office and convenience store. He was accompanied by his sixteen-year-old son, Sammy, who had assisted Bernie, alias Rudy, with the electrical hookup. Holden was about six feet one, maybe 220 pounds. A neck that could never be encompassed by the collar of an off-the-rack shirt. Shoulders like the Hulk. Popeye forearms. The boy was still growing, a few inches shorter than his dad, forty pounds lighter.

The elder Hammersmith shouted at the vandal, though Bernie couldn’t hear what he was saying. The shikker, if in fact he was a drunk, at first ignored father and son, moving to the next lounger and pitching it into the pool.

Holden caught up with the guy and seized him by one shoulder, which was when things took a turn Bernie couldn’t have foreseen.

The vandal stood about five feet eight, weighed like 150. He was little Paddington Bear to Holden’s full-size grizzly. Even if the guy wanted a fight and was something of a scrapper, he would likely wind up with two broken arms and kishkes scrambled like eggs.

Except when the guy turned on Holden Hammersmith, he didn’t do anything that a drunken brawler would do. Didn’t throw a wild punch. Didn’t kick or pull a knife. With startling swiftness, as bold as a tiger and as lithe as a monkey, he scrambled up the bigger man as if scampering up a tree. From this distance, Bernie couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though, as Holden staggered backward in surprise, the vandal seized his ears or his hair and bit his face.

Whatever was happening over there, it seemed too weird to be only a common occurrence in another sunny day in beautiful Borrego Valley. Somehow it had to do with this cabal Jane had squared off against, these shmucks who thought people were just tools that they could use and break and discard.

From under the driver’s seat, Bernie withdrew a Springfield TRP-Pro chambered for .45 ACP. He threw open the door and got out of the motor home and hurried out from under the palm trees, across the blacktop loop that served the campground, onto the pool decking, and around the long rectangle of water toward the men struggling on the farther side.

18

THE HOUSE ROCKED WITH THE BLAST, which subsumed the crack of the Heckler & Koch, and the naked attacker fell backward with a third eye weeping in her forehead.

Jane thought, Bomb.

Window glass cascaded into the room. Wallboard bowed inward and fissured and expelled clouds of plaster dust, followed by shattered wall studs and exterior sheathing and blue stucco and elements of the front porch. Ultimately, in another half second, there followed the bumper, grille, and hydraulic rams of an immense front-loaded garbage truck.

The huge vehicle exploded into the house, shoving a dry tide of ruins ahead of it, engine howling, blazing headlights burning away shadows, the billowing dust motes glittering like minute droplets in a fog of pesticide. The ceiling sagged. The rotting carpet split, the wood flooring gave way, and the truck lurched to a halt as its front wheels dropped between floor joists and through the ceiling of the basement, stranding it in the living room.

The wiper blades began to sweep across the windshield, whisking off the dust. Up there in the driver’s seat loomed a macabre figure out of A Clockwork Orange, a man who shrieked with a kind of fierce and wrathful delight—part madhouse laugh, part scream, all threat. His lewd, goatish face was distorted by lust and by hatred of the lusted-after Other, for in a savage and deranged mind, sex and murder were two sides of the same thrill, neither as satisfying as when they were combined in one violent act.

The sagging ceiling began to collapse. As wallboard buckled and split overhead, Jane turned and sprinted into the kitchen, toward the back door. The floor shuddered and rolled underfoot, staggering her, as though the garbage truck might plunge through the joists and into the basement, pulling with it the entire back half of the small house.

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