Calm down, Pom.Maybe he was wearing work boots because he was here to do work. Maybe Lina had booked someone to work on the plumbing or whatever before she quit and had forgotten to let me know. Maybe Bibi had sent someone over to assess the property.
A voice filtered down the stairs, through the cracked-open basement door. Definitely male. “Where aaaaare you? Where are you hiding?”
Okay, scratch those theories. I gasped. It didn’t matter if the intruder heard it—he already would’ve been able to track me bythe sound of my heart pounding the walls of my chest. “What do we do?” I said frantically. Vienna always knew what to do. She would know what to do. Right?
Wrong. Her eyes were as wide as those on one of Damien Hirst’s famed diamond skulls, and she had to swallow three times before squeaking, “Run?”
We stiffened again as the footsteps ranged overhead, pausing every so often as if the intruder were looking inside closets and checking under couches. “He might see us,” I whispered back. “And I don’t think we want him to see us.”
If only there was another way out of the basement than the stairs back up to the—oh. Therewasanother way out of the basement. Old New York City buildings like this had exits from the basement directly to the street for the servants back in the old days, so that the home’s residents wouldn’t have to see them going about their work. I scanned the basement. Not there, not there—oh, there. I pointed. Vienna followed me as I bolted over to the cobwebby door, leaping not-very-gracefully over a wooden box so that I wouldn’t hit it and make a noise.
We were both pulling at the door together, our Pilates-toned arms bulging at full strength, for what felt like an hour before we had to admit it wasn’t working. It was either locked or totally jammed. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. “Okay,” I hissed. “When we hear the footsteps get faint, or if we hear him go up the stairs to the second floor, we wait a minute and we run for it.”
Vienna nodded quickly, jerkily, like a rabbit. “Who knows we’re here? Were we followed?”
We both held our breath as the intruder repeated his questions from before, the words filtering eerily through the crack in the basement door. “Where aaaaare you? Where are you hiding?” Then something new, a note of menace hanging heavy in his tone: “When I find you, I’m going to rip you to pieces. Nobody’s going to know you ever existed.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins. Which was probably agood thing, because it kept me from melting into a terrified puddle of goo on the floor. Anyone could know we were here. The killer, or someone associated with the killer, or someone who just didn’t like me, could’ve been keeping an eye on my building and/or this building. It was a matter of public record that I owned my apartment in the first and was involved with the second. And it didn’t have to be someone watching us: People snapped photos of me on the street and posted them on social media all the time. “Who wants usdead?”
The footsteps thump-thump-thumped overhead. My heart pattered frantically. I went to whisper again to Vienna, but then stopped. They sounded close. Too close. Like they were right—
Light flooded the staircase as the basement door creaked open. Vienna and I scuttled backward toward the wall like cockroaches.
The intruder’s voice crooned down the stairs. “I bet you’re hiding down here, aren’t you? I bet I’m going to find you all tucked away neatly in a little box, waiting for me.”
My legs were shaking so hard I swore I could hear the bones rattling. I’d drag raced on the Autobahn with no speed limit in a car that didn’t have seat belts. I’d popped a random pill from the stash of a man who claimed to have spent a year in the north of Canada living with polar bears that made me believe I was half-mermaid and that I could breathe underwater. Those near-death experiences would have, at least, made for obituaries that were both cool and not embarrassing.
This one?Pomona Abigail Afton, twenty-nine, was found sliced to ribbons while hiding in a cardboard box in the basement of a dilapidated town house in Chelsea. Her murderer will most likely never be found, as the mind most talented at hunting murderers died with her.
Nowaywas I going to let theNew York Postprint that alongside what would surely be the most unflattering photo of me they could find (probably from the year I let a psychic convinceme that waxing was bad for my aura). I girded my shoulders, fists balling, as a footstep thumped onto the top step, a very long, very broad, shadow falling down them. Another step, then another, and I could see glimpses of him. Not that it helped, because he was wearing a black balaclava over his head.
Quick. Take stock of what I had. Pepper spray, but that was, helpfully, in my bag that I’d left upstairs. Lots of papers, but those weren’t useful for anything besides giving the intruder some paper cuts. The drawers from the filing cabinet, which were sharp at the corners and heavy enough to hurt when hit, but not too heavy for a woman with toned but not too muscular arms to pick up and swing.
Jackpot.
I slid one of the drawers out as the intruder’s feet landed at the bottom. My goal had been to keep it on the down-low, but it made a horrible screech as I pulled it from the cabinet. Vienna let out a gasp that sounded as if she was choking.
Well, so much for the down-low. Before my brain could convince me this was a very bad idea and we’d be better off sinking to our knees and begging for our lives, I forced myself to lunge forward. “Aiiiiiiaaaaaahhhh!” tore itself from my throat.
The intruder shouted something incomprehensible at me as I lunged at him, fully expecting that, any second, he’d grab me by the waist and snap me in half. But he didn’t. Somehow the power of surprise was on my side, and I was able to bash him in the head with the filing cabinet drawer before he could react.
It wasn’t hard enough to kill him or even knock him out, I realized right away. Curse my mother for spending my entire young adulthood telling me that if my arms got too bulky, nobody would ever love me. But I did hit hard enough to send him reeling to the side, where he smashed into the wall and went reeling again.
I didn’t spare a second. “Run!” I shouted at Vienna, already moving toward the stairs. I was halfway up before I heard him lumber back to his feet. God, I hoped Vienna was behind me.
She was. She’d barely cleared the doorway behind me before I slammed the basement door shut and threw the dead bolt. As I pulled my hand away, I realized how hard it was shaking. “Oh my God, we almost died,” I breathed, the shock hitting me now. I expected the shock to hit the intruder, too, for him to roar in anger or pound on the door, but nothing. Maybe he’d passed out. Or he was lifting one of the big filing cabinets up to heft on his shoulder and use as a battering ram.
Well, I wasn’t going to stick around and find out. “Call 9-1-1,” I directed at Vienna as we hustled as far away from the basement as we could. My purse! It had been dumped from where I’d left it sitting on a side table. And not like he’d bumped into the table while walking by: It had clearly been lifted and turned fully upside down so that all of its contents tumbled out and splayed across the dirty floor. Thank goodness my phone and wallet had been in my belt bag. My poor shattered makeup compact and wireless headphones and 100 percent organic Sea Island cotton tampons. I left those behind, but stooped for my pepper spray.
I didn’t feel like I could take a full breath until we made it outside, and it was not a very enjoyable full breath, considering that downtown in summer smells like urine-soaked garbage baking in the sun. Vienna was hanging up the phone, having described the situation to the operator. “What now?” she panted. Her pixie cut was no longer as sleek as it had been before, little strands of hair raising around her face as if she’d been electrocuted.
I glanced around. Our building was on a residential side street of brownstones, which meant that foot traffic was minimal, especially considering that most of their owners would be off summering somewhere that didn’t smell like urine-soaked garbage baking in the sun. “We need to be close enough to talk to the police when they show up, but I also don’t want to be right here in case he manages to get out of the basement and he’s even angrier that we hit him in the head and got away.”
“How would he get out of the basement?”
“I don’t know.” I chewed my lower lip. “But he got in. Maybe he could bust out.”
“I think there’s a coffee shop a couple of blocks down.”
