Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

immediate matters.
    Even though things look pretty bad right now, I need to try to get out of this.
    Which was why was still clawing at her throat, trying, without success, to get her fingers under the bathrobe sash.
    “You must have been there,” Garfield said through gritted teeth. “You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can figure it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you figured you could blackmail me. A thousand today, another thousand next week, and then the week after that, until I had nothing left.”
    He had the ends of the sash twisted several times around his palms and kept pulling. Keisha could feel herself starting to lose consciousness. Her fingers stopped trying. Her hands fell away from her neck and landed next to her, resting on the chair cushion. She wondered, ever so briefly, what he would do with her body. He hoped he wouldn’t put her in the lake along with Mrs. Garfield.
    She didn’t like the water. When she was ten, her mother briefly dated a man who had a place on Cape Cod, and Keisha never so much as stuck her toe into the Atlantic. She had a fear of sharks from that movie. No way she was going out into that. Luckily, they never went back because the man decided to return to his wife.
    In the seconds just before Keisha figured she was going to black out, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.
    Her right hand brushed up against something.
    Something soft, almost furry.
    Yarn.
    And as her fingers fumbled across the yarn, they landed on something else. Something long, and narrow, and pointed. Like a stick, or a needle.
    A knitting needle.
    In the last second Keisha had before she blacked out, she grasped the knitting needle with her right hand and swung her hand up and over her shoulder. As hard as she could.
    The scream was only an inch from her ear. And it was horrific.
    As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair and collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath. She was on her knees, one hand on the floor supporting her, the other on her neck. Air rushed into her lungs so quickly it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s anguished screams.
    Keisha, even as she struggled to get her breath back, had to turn and see what she had done.
    The knitting needle was sticking straight out of Garfield’s right eye. Blood poured from the socket, covering the right half of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha figured a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.
    But he could see her with his left eye, and, still screaming, proceeded to come around the chair after her.
    Keisha struggled to her feet, moving in the direction of the door. But she hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand onto her arm.
    “You bitch!” Garfield said, although there was blood leaking into his throat and it sounded as though he was gargling.
    He yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down to the floor again. She landed on her back, and before she had a chance to roll away, he was on top of her, straddling her mid-section.
    He didn’t have the sash any more. He was going to finish her off with his bare hands. He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping—no, pouring—onto Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but he had her neck pinned to the floor.
    She started blacking out all over again. With her last ounce of strength she raised her hand and shot the heel of it straight up against the end of the knitting needle.
    She drove the plastic spear another three inches into Garfield’s head.
    There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he froze above her. His grip on her neck relaxed, his arms went weak, and his body collapsed on top of her.
    Keisha didn’t even take time to get her breath back this time. She pushed frantically at his dead body until it was off of her, crawled a few feet away, and then, once she was able to breathe normally again, decided she had earned the right to take a moment and become hysterical.

Sixteen
    “You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?” Rona Wedmore asked.
    “I’m positive,” Melissa Garfield said. “I’m going to plead guilty to everything.” Like a child saying she’d eaten all her