Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

And the mass was moving relentlessly toward the only escape: windows.

Ardel heard a loud snap in her shoulder and her vision filled with yellow light, and pain, horrific pain, shot from her jaw to the base of her spine. A scream, lost amid the other screams. She couldn't even turn to look. Her head was sandwiched between one man's shoulder and another's chest.

"Ardie!" Sally called.

But Ardel had no idea where her friend was.

The voice on the P.A.--it wasn't the author; he was long gone--cried, "Get away from the door. He's almost here!"

A series of crashes, breaking glass, behind her and the mob surged in that direction, Ardel with them. Not that she had any choice; her feet were off the ground. Finally she could turn her head and she saw attendees throwing chairs through the windows. Then: silhouettes of desperate people climbing to the window frames, some cutting hands and arms on jutting shards of glass. They hesitated, then jumped.

She recalled looking out the window earlier. It was three stories above the shoreline; you'd have to leap far out to hit the water, and even then it seemed there were rocks and concrete abutments just below the surface, some bristling with steel rods from an old pier foundation.

People were looking down and screaming, perhaps seeing their friends and family hit the rocks.

"No, I'm not jumping!" Ardel shouted to no one as the bodies pushed her closer to the window frames. And tried to use her good arm to scrabble in the other direction. She'd take her chances with the gunman.

But she had no say in the matter, no say at all. The crowd pressed closer and closer to the windows, where some people were hesitating and others pushing the reluctant ones down and climbing on their backs or chests or bellies to launch themselves into the questionable safety of the stony shoreline below.

"No, no, no!" Ardel gasped as the cluster around her mounted the fallen attendees, taking her with them. Suddenly she found herself on the sill. She couldn't look down, couldn't steady herself, couldn't even find a safe place to land, if there was such a place.

"Stop it!" she shouted.

But then she was tumbling through space, terrified but also curiously grateful, in those two or three seconds of free fall, to be out of the constrictor grasp of the surging crowd.

Then a jarring, breath-wrenching thud.

But she wasn't badly injured. She'd landed on top of the man who'd jumped just before her. He lay, unconscious, on the outcropping of rock, the right side of his face torn open, jaw and cheek and arm shattered. She'd even landed more or less on her feet, and slid back on her butt, avoiding what would have been a catastrophic, torturous collision of her shattered shoulder and the cracked rock.

A massive spray of pungent salt water flared over Ardel and those around her, sprawled and sitting and crawling on the stone, cold as ice.

Screams from the victims, roaring from the water. Two fellow attendees landed nearby, one middle-aged man on his neck and shoulder. She could actually hear the snap of breaking bone.

She rose, unsteadily, looking around, clutching her shoulder. No pain now. Was that good or bad?

Her eyes stinging from the saltwater spray, Ardel scanned the huddled bodies for her friend. "Sally!" She thought she saw her about thirty feet away. But first she had to get out of the way of the--

"Ah!" Ardel barked a scream as one of the falling patrons landed directly behind her, propelling her off the rock. She stumbled forward and fell into the raging water.

A wave was now receding, pulling her in the undertow, fast, away from shore.

She inhaled from the pain and got only water. Retching, coughing, looking back for help, looking back to see how far she was from shore. Fifteen feet, then twenty, more. The chill stole her breath and her body began to shut down.

She glanced at her useless right arm, floating limp in the water.

Not that it mattered; even if it had worked perfectly fine, there was nothing she could do. Ardel Hopkins couldn't swim a stroke.

Chapter 32

Antioch March had returned from the Bay View Center and was sitting in his Honda parked about five blocks away from the venue, near the Sardine Factory, the wonderful restaurant featured in the harrowing movie by Clint Eastwood, Play Misty for Me. It was one of March's favorite flicks, about a beautiful woman obsessed with a radio disk jockey. Psychotically obsessed.

It was really about the Get, of course.

Anything to seize what she desired.

He stretched and reflected on the plan he'd just put into place. It'd gone quite well.

Forty minutes earlier he'd carted a Monterey Bay Aquarium shopping bag along Cannery Row, then slipped behind a restaurant near the Bay View Center. He'd changed into his "uniform," militia chic, he joked to himself--camo, bandanna, gloves, mask, boots. Then, ten minutes after the self-help author had started his reading, time for rampage.