Death of a Blue Movie Star

the neck. He wasn’t strong. But he had surprise on his side—and desperation. He kicked her in the chest, again knocking her windless. She curled into a ball, gasping. Vaguely she saw his blurry form groping for the razor knife. She smelled old wood and salt water and motor oil and rot, and she tasted salt—maybe her tears, maybe blood.
    Christ, her eyes stung. Like alcohol.
    She too began looking for her weapon, slapping her hand on the floor, trying to find the canister of tear gas.
    He gave up on the knife and looked at the floor near them. Then he grabbed her by the collar and dragged her toward the jagged black opening that led down to the Hudson. A roar was in her ears. He pushed her head, then her shoulders into the hole. He gripped her belt and she started to go in.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     

    Rune lashed out with her boot and came close to catching his groin but her aim was bad. She hurt him only slightly and he just grunted angrily and drove a fist into her back.
    She gave a faint scream. Tears ran. The rotten, fishy scent of the water rose from the water and choked her.
    He kicked boards into the hole to widen it; they fell into darkness. He pushed her farther and farther in.
    It was so dark beneath her!
    She got a hand on the banister and held tight. But this was just a minor inconvenience; he kicked her hand and easily broke her grip.
    I’ll swim … But can I see the light of the surface? What if there’s no way to swim out from underneath, what if there’s just a pipe that goes a hundred feet down?
    He dropped to his knees and took her by the hair with one hand, then reached out with the other toward the edge of the hole to get a good grip and fling her into it.
    “Hell-o? Ohmygod!”
    A man’s voice.
    The attacker froze.
    “Jesus, what’s going on?” the other man, from upstairs, asked. They’d either given up on their tryst or finished it and had come to investigate the noise.
    The man let go of Rune and glanced up the stairs. She twisted away from him, as he leapt back, panicking. She rolled away from the foot of the stairs. When the attacker turned back toward her, reaching forward, what he was looking at wasn’t Rune but a tiny hissing nozzle.
    The stream of tear gas caught him in the nose.
    Breathe it, sucker, breathe!
    The man gasped, covered his eyes and took a wild swipe at her. Rune fired again. He stumbled past her, shoved her hard into the hole that led to the river and then ran into the warehouse.
    His pounding footsteps faded, then vanished.
    Rune pulled herself from the hole and collapsed onto the floor, frozen. She pressed her eyes shut against the terrible pain. Her nose and throat burned violently. She rested her face against the wooden floor as her breathing calmed and she smelled grease, felt the coolness of fresh air returning.
    “Oh, my God,” one of the men said. They were dressed now. “Are you all right? Who
was
he?”
    They helped her to her feet.
    “Did you get a look at him?” she asked.
    “No, just saw that jacket.”
    “It was red,” his friend answered. “Like I said. Oh, and the hat.”
    “You have to call the police…. What’s that smell? It’s terrible.”
    “Tear gas.”
    A pause. “Just who
are
you?”
    Rune rose to her feet slowly, thanked them. Then stumbled through the warehouse out into the daylight.
    When she got to a pay phone she called the police. They showed up pretty quickly. But, as she’d expected, there wasn’t much they could do. She didn’t have a detailed description of the attacker. Probably white male, medium build. No hair color, no eye color, no facial characteristic. A red windbreaker, like in
Don’t Look Now
—that scary movie based on the Daphne du Maurier story. Which Rune deduced neither of the responding cops had seen or read, judging by the blank look on their faces.
    They said they’d check into it, though they weren’t happy that she’d had a canister of CS-38, which was illegal in the city.
    “You have any idea why he’d want to do it?”
    She supposed it might have something to do with her movie and the porn theater and the Sword of Jesus. She told them this and the look on their faces told her that, as far as they were concerned, the case was already a dead end. They flipped their notebooks closed and said they’d have a patrol car cruise past occasionally.
    She asked them again how many men they were going to put on the case but they just looked at her blankly and told her they were sorry for her