There was another one—and the woman sort of fell into the light where you could see her, clutching the door edge. It looked like she was keeping herself from falling on the floor just by her fingertips dug in the wood. She swayed, and her head sagged forward, and her shirt was swinging down from one shoulder, and there was blood in her hair and blood smeared all over her side. She pulled in her breath, loud as a broken engine, and pulled up her head too—one eye was closed and the other one, with just a sliver of gray showing, blinked—and heaved forward. The way it dragged from her hip, I figure one leg was almost as useless as the girl’s, and I thought she was going to crash flat, but she caught herself on the counter edge and pulled her other leg up under her. Her face was wrinkled as a rubber mask somebody’s just grabbed from behind: all bloody, it came up to look at us. Then it swiveled, and looked down at the girl on the floor.

Then it came up again.

Then the one eye opened real wide. So did her mouth—round, like the eye of a camera, I was thinking—and kept opening, and … did not scream. She rasped, a hoarse, gravelly sound, that drew both shoulders in and pulled her head, still facing us, down between them.

“Jesus …” Jimmy whispered; I wondered what he saw here he hadn’t seen in the back before.

The rasp came on and, in the middle, something fell out her mouth and broke on the floor: a bridge of about five teeth. I could see the little metal wires. In the fight they must have cut up her mouth pretty bad, because they were so bloody it took me three seconds to figure out what it was.

“… Christ,” Jimmy finished, in a voice that made me look at him.

He had his fist all balled up and he looked scared as hell; then the scared suddenly got all nasty in his face: he started forward, like he was going to rush her and do her in right there.

Hogg’s arm just came up, and Jimmy hit right into it when he started forward. “Hold on,” Hogg said. “We done finished here. Come on, boy.”

Jimmy was shaking and really looked funny.

Hogg just pulled him right around. “Come on.”

The woman lurched another few feet, holding to the counter.

“Shit,” the nigger said, turned, real cool and easy, opened the door and ambled out. Jimmy, with Hogg leading him—Jimmy trying to glance back and not quite doing it—went next.

“Come on,” the wop said and gave me a shove on the shoulder. So me and Denny went next, with the wop behind us. He slammed the door.

Through it I could hear her dragging her foot the next couple of feet.