Velocity

mouth and in the nose will somewhat inhibit an attacker. You can stop him hard and fast only if you squirt him liberally in the eyes.
    The stream doused both eyes, point-blank, and also hosed his nostrils.
    Zillis dropped the toothbrush, covered his eyes with his hands, too late, and turned blindly away from Billy. He collided at once with the end wall of the hallway. Making a desperate wheezing sound, he bent over, retching, and spewed gobs of toothpaste foam as if he were a rabid dog.
    The burning in his eyes was hellacious, his pupils open so wide that he could see only a fierce blurred brightness, not even the form of his assailant, not even a shadow. His throat also burned with the chemical that had gone down by way of his nose, and his lungs tried to reject every tainted breath that he drew.
    Billy went in low, grabbed the cuff of a pajama leg, and jerked the man’s left foot out from under him.
    Clawing the air in search of a wall, a doorway, something that would offer support, finding nothing, Zillis dropped hard enough to make the floorboards vibrate.
    Between gasps and wheezes, between fits of choking, he shrieked about his eyes, the pain, the stinging brightness.
    Billy drew the 9-mm pistol and rapped him along the side of the head with the barrel, just hard enough to hurt.
    Zillis howled, and Billy warned, “Quiet down, or I’ll hit you again, harder.”
    When Zillis cursed him, Billy rapped him with the gun once more, not as hard as promised, but that got the idea across.
    “All right,” Billy said. “Okay. You’re not going to see well for twenty minutes, half an hour—”
    Still inhaling in rapid shallow pants, exhaling in shudders, Zillis interrupted Billy: “Jesus, I’m blind, I’m—”
    “It was just Mace.”
    “What’re you nuts?”
    “Mace. No permanent damage.”
    “I’m blind,” Zillis insisted.
    “You stay there.”
    “I’m blind.”
    “You’re not blind. Don’t move.”
    “Shit…”
    A thread of blood unraveled from Zillis’s scalp. Billy hadn’t hit him hard, but the skin had broken.
    “Don’t move, listen to me,” Billy said, “cooperate, and we’ll get through this, it’ll be all right.”
    He realized that he was already comforting Zillis as if the man’s innocence were a foregone conclusion.
    Until now, there had seemed to be a way to do this. A way to do it even if Steve Zillis turned out not to be the freak, and to walk away with minimal consequences.
    In his imagination, however, the opening encounter had not been this violent. A spritz of Mace. Zillis at once disabled, obedient. So easy in the planning.
    They had hardly begun, and the situation seemed out of control.
    Striving to sound confident, Billy said, “You don’t want to be hurt, then just lie there till I tell you what to do next.”
    Zillis wheezed.
    “You hear me?” Billy asked.
    “Shit, yeah, how could I not hear you?”
    “You understand me?”
    “I’m blind here, I’m not deaf.”
    Billy stepped into the bathroom, switched off the water running in the sink, and looked around.
    He did not see what he needed, but he saw something that he did not want to see: his reflection in the mirror. He might have expected to look frantic, even dangerous, and he did. He might have expected to look scared, and he did. He would not have expected to see the potential for evil, but he did.
     
     
     

Chapter 61
     
    On the bedroom TV, a naked man in a black mask lashed a woman’s breasts with a cluster of leather straps.
    Billy switched off the TV. “I’m thinking about you handling the lemons and limes you slice for drinks, and I want to puke.”
    Lying disabled in the hall past the open door, Zillis either didn’t hear him or pretended that he didn’t.
    The bed did not have a headboard or a footboard. The mattress and box springs sat on a wheeled metal frame.
    Because Zillis didn’t bother with such niceties as bedspreads and dust ruffles, the frame of the bed was exposed.
    Billy took the handcuffs from the bread bag. He locked one of the bracelets to the bottom rail of the bed frame.
    “Get up on your hands and knees,” he said. “Crawl toward my voice.”
    Remaining on the hall floor, breathing easier but still noisily, Zillis spat vigorously on the carpet. His flooding tears had carried the Mace to his lips, and the bitter taste had gotten in his mouth.
    Billy went to him and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the nape of his neck. I.
    Zillis became very still, wheezing