The meanest Flood

ex-lady-friends. Last week everything was running along in semi-boring mode, there was order surrounding most of the things in life. Now there’s nothing but chaos and it looks as though it’ll get worse before it gets better.
    She lifted her hand from the telephone handset and decided to go home. Celia would be waiting for her. She wouldn’t think about the stairs to the street door. She’d just waltz down them and get outside the way other super-heroes do. Heroines, too.
    So resolved, loins girded, Marie strode out of the office and was halfway across the vestibule before she stopped dead. The man standing at the top of the stairs was precisely the kind she’d worried about when her imagination had taken off a few minutes earlier. No, longer than that; his archetype had hovered on the fringes of her perception since she was a small girl. Whenever she’d had the willies or the heebie-jeebies they were inevitably connected with a picture of this kind of primitive.
    The first thing was the beer on his breath, though he was still several feet away from her. He was big, broad as well as tall, and he wore tight black jeans with a leather belt and a brown suede jacket. On his feet he had black slip-ons with ornamental chains across the top and between the black of the shoes and the black of the jeans there was a flash of sky-blue socks.
    It was only when he stepped towards her and she backed into the office that Marie noticed the growth of hair on the back of his hands. She moved towards the phone but he was watching every move and came quickly across the room to cut her off. He took the phone and ripped it from its socket on the wall. There was a moment when he was going to throw it across the room but he thought again and placed it on the desk.
    ‘Don’t try anything like that,’ he said. He spoke quietly, a note of weariness in his words. His tone gave the lie to his appearance. Marie had expected him to be loud, overbearing, bullying, but he was none of these things. On the other hand his jaded control was in itself unnerving, giving the man’s suppressed violence a sharper and perhaps more jagged edge. Marie suspected a cocktail of alcohol and steroids running through his bloodstream. This was a situation which could go very badly wrong.
    ‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘There’s no money here.’
    ‘Turner. The detective.’
    ‘Sam’s gone away. He’s out of the country. We don’t know where.’
    The man shook his head slowly. He came towards her and took her by the wrist. He walked around the office, taking Marie with him. His hand was so large that his fingers wrapped almost twice around her wrist. He peered into Celia’s small cubby-hole and opened the broom cupboard to make sure Sam wasn’t hiding in there.
    He brought her back to the computer desk and sat her down on the chair. He stood in front of her. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m not the kind of guy who hits women. But I’m not good at the moment. The other day I hurt a guy for no reason at all. Dragged him out of his bed and opened up the back of his skull.
    ‘Where I am at the moment, I don’t have no plans to hurt you. But if I don’t get the right answers I could lose it. You hearing what I’m saying?’
    Marie could hear him clearly. No problem at all. She began shaking. Her teeth were chattering in her head and she lost the natural rhythm of her breathing. Small breaths caught at her vocal cords, forcing her to come out with tiny cries that seemed to unsettle the man and add to her own distraction. But she couldn’t regain control of herself. The man was saying he wasn’t going to hurt her but he was also saying that he might crack her head open.
    He was so volatile, so out of it, that he didn’t know himself what was going to happen next. As he grappled with the competing emotions within him small flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.
    ‘First, I’m gonna ask you again,’ the man said, ‘where’s Turner? And don’t tell me you don’t know.’
    Marie couldn’t speak. Her mouth and throat had dried up and she was convinced that this man was going to turn on her. She only hoped that he wouldn’t inflict as much damage as he was capable of.
    ‘You gonna answer me?’ he said. He used the back of his hand to wipe his mouth.
    Marie moved her lips. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. She shook her head, clenched her fists. There was no way of defending herself against him. He was