“You said you’d let her go,” Mick spoke from the couch. He sounded as if he’d been shot, too, as if he had only one lung working. “You said you’d showed her, and now you wouldn’t have to kill her.”

“And I wouldn’t have had to, you little prick, except here she is. She needed showing again. What was I supposed to do? Let her kill me instead?”

“You promised me — if she got away from you, you’d let her go. You promised.” Mick rose, shakily. What had happened to him in the last weeks? What had Tom done to him? Whatever it was, why hadn’t it given him a sensible distrust of promises from Tom Worecski?

Frances hadn’t moved, but I saw her eyes open and squint in the blaze of lightning. Rain was projected on her face, the image of it running down the glass. I wondered if I could get to her discarded pistol unnoticed.

Tom faced Mick, his whole face alive with anger. Then it fell. “You’re right. I broke my promise.” Tom dropped to his knees on the carpet and held the pistol out to Mick. “Kill me. Kill me, goddammit. If you can bring yourself to do it, then I must deserve to die.”

Mick took the pistol. The big window rattled with the thunder. “Oh, I can do it,” Mick said in a trembling voice.

I thought, No.

Then Tom sagged to the floor and Mick smiled. “Jesus, what a sucker,” he drawled, and put the barrel in his mouth.

“No!” Frances screamed, but it was drowned by the double crack of thunder, inside and out.

Tom stood up and shook himself. “Shit,” he said. “Shouldn’t’ve done that. There was still plenty of fun in him.”

He’d been weak, that was all. Mick had cared for Frances; he’d even cared, I realized, for me. But he’d been too weak to stand against a thing like Worecski. And I’d been too weak to save him.

Frances’s head dropped back against the door frame, and I heard a little despairing noise from her. Her eyes were tight shut. Mick had slid in a heap to the carpet, smearing the white couch on the way. The pistol lay on the floor between his body and his arm.

“One down,” said Tom. “Come on, girl. Jump for it.”

Slowly, Frances shook her head.

The bead of glass at my throat was cool and hard. My head was swimming with heat and loss of blood, and my legs were shaking under me. But neither gun was in Tom’s reach. So I took a last shuddering breath and flung myself untidily at him.

His arm came up across the side of my face like a log. There was no reason why someone who could do what he did should be so strong. He hoisted me up in two handfuls of shirtfront and shook me. I hit him as hard as I could in the stomach with my right fist, but the angle was bad, I was weak, and it wasn’t hard enough. He grunted and bared his clenched teeth, and pushed me backward into the wall. I sobbed when my left shoulder hit.