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Billy rolled his head, searching the hallway With his free hand, he felt the floor along his right side

The freak threw so e He shook his head to cast the photo off his face The picture flipped onto his chest, where suddenly he thought the freak would spike it

No Carrying the nail gun, the killer walked away along the hall, toward the kitchen One nail well placed His work here was done Get an iht Big in the shoulders or not? Wide or narrow in the hips?

Anything distinctive in the walk, graceful or not?

Pain, fear, swile of view--

Billy flat on his back; the killer on his feet--defeated an attempt to build a physical profile of the ht The freak disappeared into the kitchen HeDoing so

Billy spotted the crisp shine of machined steel on the dark hardwood floor of the foyer--the revolver The weapon lay behind hi been to the place of the skull, having consigned Lanny to the lava pipe, Billy had exhausted his capacity for dread, or thought that he had until he realized that he must test the nail to see how securely it fixed him to the floor He was loath to move his hand

The pain was constant but tolerable, bad but not as terrible as heto pry loose the spike, would be like chewing taffy with an abscessed tooth He wasn’t only loath to h he knew the ie conjured in his mind had to be worse than the reality, his stomach clenched as he turned his head and focused on his wound Except for an excess of fingers, the white latex surgical glove made his hand look like Mickey Mouse’s hand, like the cartoon hands taped to the walls and pointing the way to the chair where Lanny had been posed with one of his love even had a little roll to it A spidery crawling at his wrist proved to be a trickling thread of blood, which robbed theto be much worse than this The nail obstructed flow When he extracted it…

Holding his breath, Billy listened No noise in the kitchen Apparently the killer had gone

He didn’t want the freak to hear hiive him that satisfaction

The nail The head had not been driven flat to the flesh About threequarters of an inch of shank separated the nailhead froripper th of the nail Judging by its diameter, he estimated that itboth the portion that stood above his palh it, as ht be embedded in the floor After it penetrated the surface hardwood and the subflooring, little of the nail would re, however, itloose would be one inch nastier

Houses ell put together in the days when this one had been built Either two-by-fours or two-by-sixes, most likely set twelve inches center-tocenter, supported the subfloor Nevertheless, his odds were good In every fourteen inches of floor width, only four inches were underlaid by joists

Hammer ten nails into the floor at random, and three would find joists The other seven would penetrate the empty spaces between timbers When he tried to cup his left hand to test its flexibility, he throttled an involuntary howl of pain into a snarl He couldn’t choke it off entirely No laughter ca his suspicion that the freak had gone

Suddenly Billy wondered if, before leaving, the killer had dialed 911

Chapter 53

As still and attentive as only a corpse can be, Ralph Cottle sat sentinel on the sofa

The killer had crossed the dead ed his hands in his lap to give hi patiently for his host to appear with a tray of cocktails--or for Sergeants Napolitino and Sobieski

Although Cottle had not been ht of the ed with such care in Steve Zillis’s house

Zillis was tending bar Billy had seen his car there earlier, when he had stopped across the highway froiant mural

Cottle later Zillis later Now the nail

Carefully, Billy turned on his left side to face the pierced hand With the thuripped the head of the nail He tried gently to wiggle it back and forth, hoping to detect soid, deeply seated

If the head had been sht have tried to slide his hand up the shank and pull it loose, leaving the nail in the floor

The head was broad Even if he could have tolerated the pain of twisting it backward through his hand, he would have done unthinkable dae in the process

When he worked the nail round the pain between his teeth, ground it so hard that his molars creaked in his jaws

The nail did not creak in the wood, however, and it see that spike Then it er, the nail loosened, not much but perceptibly As it moved in the wood of the floor, it ht Like chain lightning, it flared within hiainst bone If the nail had cracked or chipped a bone, he would need h air-conditioned, the house had not previously seemed cold Noeat seemed to turn to ice on his skin

Billy worked the nail, and the light of pain inside hiht that he ht would be visible, shining forth froh the odds were against a rando a joist, this one had pierced notbut also hard tirim truth of desperation roulette: You play the red, and the black comes up

The nail cae, Billy al rooo find it because his blood was on the shank

He put it on the floor beside the hole that it hadeet to his feet

His left hand bled froush He had been pierced, after all, not drilled, and the wound was not wide Cupping his right hand under his left to avoid dripping blood on the hallway runner and the flanking wood floor, he hurried into the kitchen The killer had left the back door open He wasn’t on the porch, probably not in the yard, either

At the sink, Billy cranked a faucet and held his left hand under the spout until it grew half numb from the cold water

Soon the strea paper towels off a dispenser, he wound several layers around his hand

He stepped onto the back porch He held his breath, listening not for the killer but for approaching sirens

After a minute, he decided there had not been a 911 call this time The freak, the performer, prided himself on his cleverness; he would not repeat a trick

Billy returned to the front of the house He saw the photograph, which the killer had thrown in his face and which he had forgotten, and he plucked it off the hallway floor