Strangers

to faint in fear or in a swoon of reluctant passion, an action that brought her mouth to his throat. In swift succession, she bit him hard in the Adam's apple, slammed one knee into his crotch, and clawed at his gun hand to keep the pistol away from her.
        He partially blocked the knee, limiting the damage to his privates, but he was unprepared for the bite. Shocked, horrified, and reeling from the devastating pain in his throat, the gunman pushed away from her and stumbled backward two steps.
        She had bitten deep, and now she gagged on the taste of his blood, though she did not permit her revulsion to delay her counterattack. She grabbed his gun hand, brought it to her mouth, and bit his wrist.
        A sharp cry of pain and astonishment burst from him. Because she was delicate, waiflike, he had not taken her seriously.
        As she bit him again, he dropped the gun, but simultaneously he made a fist of his other hand and with tremendous force slammed it into her back. She was driven to her knees and thought for a moment that he had broken her spine. Pain as bright and scintillant as an electric current shot up her back into her neck, flashed through her skull.
        Stunned, her vision briefly blurred, Ginger almost did not see him bending to retrieve the gun. Just as his fingers touched the butt, she frantically threw herself at his legs. Seeing her coming and hoping to jump out of her reach, he whipped upright as if he were a lashed-down sapling suddenly cut loose. When she hit him a fraction of a second later, he windmilled his arms in a brief attempt to keep his balance. Falling backward, he crashed into one of the library's chairs, knocked over a small table and a lamp, and rolled onto Pablo Jackson's corpse.
        Equally breathless, staring warily at each other, they were both petrified for a moment. They were on their sides on the floor, curled fetally in reaction to their pains, gasping for breath.
        To Ginger, the gunman's eyes seemed as wide and round as clock faces, proof that he was filled with fevered thoughts of his own mortality ticking close. The bite would not kill him. She had not bitten through the jugular vein or the carotid artery, had merely pierced the thyroid cartilage, mangling tissue, severing a few small vessels. However, it was easy to understand why he might be convinced it was a mortal wound; the pain must be excruciating. He put his unbitten hand to his damaged throat, then pulled it away and stared aghast at his own gore dripping off his fingers. The killer thought he was dying, and that might make him either less or more dangerous.
        Simultaneously, they saw that his pistol had been kicked halfway across the library during their tussle. It was closer to him than to Ginger. Bleeding from throat and wrist, making a strange wheezing-gurgling noise, he scrambled across the floor toward the weapon, and Ginger had no option but to get up and run.
        She fled from the library into the living room, hobbling more than running, slowed by the pain in her back, which pulsed through her in diminishing but still debilitating waves. She intended to leave the apartment by the front door, but then she realized there was no escape in that direction because the only exits from the public corridor were the elevator and the stairs. She could not wait for the elevator, and in the stairwell she could easily be trapped.
        Instead, hunched because of her aching back, she scurried crablike across the living room, down a long hall, into the kitchen, where the swinging door softly swished shut behind her. She went directly to the utensils rack on the wall by the stove and took down a butcher's knife.
        She became aware that a shrill, eerie keening was issuing from her. She held her breath, cut off the sound, and got a grip on herself.
        The gunman did not immediately burst into the kitchen, as Ginger expected. After a few seconds she realized that she was lucky he had not yet appeared, because the butcher's knife was of no use against a pistol at a distance of ten feet. Silently cursing herself for almost having made a fatal error, she quickly and light-footedly returned to the door and took up a position to one side of it. Her back still ached, but the sharpest pain was gone. Now she was able to stand straight and flat against the wall. Her heart was pounding so loud that it seemed as if the wall against which she leaned was a drumhead,