Along Came a Spider

was long, and so sharp I hadn’t even felt the first wound. It had cut right through.
    I heard another scream — a fierce shriek. Soneji stood frozen for the eeriest split second.
    Then he whirled around with another growl.
    A figure came sweeping at him from the doorway. Nana Mama had distracted him.
    “This is our house!” she shouted with all her fury. “Get out of our house!”
    A glint of light caught my eye on the bureau. I reached out and grabbed the scissors on top of Jannie’s book of paper dolls. A pair of Nana’s shearing scissors.
    Soneji/Murphy slashed out with his knife again. The same knife he’d used in his murders around the projects? The knife he’d used on Vivian Kim?
    I swung the scissors at him and felt tearing flesh. The shearing scissors slashed down across his cheeks. His cry echoed through the bedroom. “Motherfucker!”
    “Something to remember me by,” I taunted him. “Who’s bleeding now? Soneji or Murphy?”
    He screamed something I didn’t understand. Then he rushed at me again.
    The scissors caught him somewhere on the side of his neck. He jumped back, pulling them right from my hand.
    “C’mon, you bastard!” I yelled.
    Suddenly he reeled and staggered out of the children’s bedroom. He never struck out at Nana, the mother figure. Maybe he was too badly wounded to strike back.
    He held his face in both hands. His voice rose in a high, piercing scream as he ran from the room. Could he be in another fugue state? Was he lost inside one of his fantasies?
    I had gone down on one knee and wanted to stay there. The noise was a loud roar in my head. I managed to get up. Blood was splattered everywhere, on my shirt, all over my shorts, my bare legs. My blood, and his.
    A rush of adrenaline kept me going. I grabbed some clothes and went after Soneji. He couldn’t escape this time. I wouldn’t let him.

CHAPTER 89

    I RAN TO THE DEN and grabbed my revolver. I knew he had a plan — in case he had to escape. Every step would have been thought through a hundred times. He lived in his fantasies, not in the real world.
    I thought that he would probably leave our house.
Escape
, so he could fight again. Was I beginning to think like him? I thought that I was. Scary.
    The front door was wide open. I was on track. So far. Blood was smeared all over the carpet. Had he left a trail for me?
    Where would Gary Soneji/Murphy go if something went wrong at our house? He would always have a backup plan. Where was the perfect place? The completely unexpected move? I was finding it hard to think with blood dripping from my side and left shoulder.
    I reeled outside and into the early morning darkness and biting cold. Our street was as silent as it ever got. It was 4 A.M. I had only one idea where he might have gone.
    I wondered if he thought I’d try to follow him. Was he already expecting me? Was Soneji/Murphy still two jumps ahead of me again? So far, he always had been. I had to get ahead of him — just this once.
    The Metro underground ran a block from our house on 5th Street. The tunnel was still being built, but a few neighborhood kids went down there to walk the four blocks over to Capitol Hill…
underground
.
    I hobbled, and half ran, to the subway entrance. I was hurting, but I didn’t care.
He’d come inside my house. He’d gone after my children
.
    I went downstairs into the tunnel. I drew my revolver from the shoulder holster I’d slung over my shirt.
    Every step I took put a ragged stitch in my side. Painfully, I began to walk the length of the tunnel in a low shooter’s crouch.
    He could be watching me. Had he expected me to come here? I walked forward in the tunnel. It could be a trap. There were plenty of places for him to hide.
    I made it all the way to the end. There was no sign of blood, anywhere. Soneji/Murphy wasn’t in the underground. He’d escaped some other way. He’d gotten away again.
    As the adrenaline rush slowed, I felt weak and weary and disoriented. I climbed the stone stairs out of the underground.
    Night people were coming and going from the Metro paper store and from Fox’s all-night diner. I must have been a sorry sight. Blood was spattered all over me. No one stopped, though. Not a single person. They had all seen too much of this ghoulish stuff in the nation’s capital.
    I finally stepped in front of a truck driver dropping off a bundle of
Washington Posts
. I told him I was a police officer. I was feeling a little high with the loss of blood.