Judd's fingers started to slip off the valve. He was going to be pulled into the pipeline with DeMarco. He gave a quick, last prayer, and in that instant he felt DeMarco's hands slip away from his throat. There was a loud, reverberating scream, and then only the roar from the pipeline. DeMarco had vanished.
Judd stood there, bone weary, unable to move, waiting for the shot from Vaccaro.
A moment later it rang out.
He stood there, wondering why Vaccaro had missed. Through the dull haze of pain, he heard more shots, and the sound of feet running, and then his name being called. And then someone had an arm around him and McGreavy's voice was saying, "Mother of God! Look at his face!"
Strong hands gripped his arm and pulled him away from the awful roaring tug of the pipeline. Something wet was running down his cheeks and he did not know whether it was blood or rain or tears, and he did not care.
It was over.
He forced one puffed eye open and through a narrow, blood-red slit, he could dimly see McGreavy. "Anne's at the house," Judd said. "DeMarco's wife. We've got to go to her."
McGreavy was looking at him strangely, not moving, and Judd realized that no words had come out. He lifted his mouth up to McGreavy's ear and spoke slowly, in a hoarse, broken croak. "Anne DeMarco... She's at the...house...help."
McGreavy walked over to the police car, picked up the radio transmitter, and issued instructions. Judd stood there, unsteady, still rocking back and forth from DeMarco's blows, letting the cold, biting wind wash over him. In front of him he could see a body lying on the ground, and he knew it was Rocky Vaccaro.
We've won, he thought. We've won. He kept saying the phrase over and over in his mind. And even as he said it, he knew it was meaningless. What kind of victory was it? He had thought of himself as a decent, civilized human being - a doctor, a healer - and he had turned into a savage animal filled with the lust to kill. He had sent a sick man over the brink of insanity and then murdered him. It was a terrible burden he would have to live with always. Because even though he could tell himself it was in self-defense, he knew - God help him - that he had enjoyed doing it. And for that he could never forgive himself. He was no better than DeMarco, or the Vaccaro brothers, or any of the others. Civilization was a thin, dangerously fragile veneer, and when that veneer cracked, man became one with the beasts again, falling back into the slime of the primeval abyss he prided himself on having climbed up from.
Judd was too weary to think about it any longer. Now he wanted only to see that Anne was safe.
McGreavy was standing there, his manner strangely gentle.
"There's a police car on the way to her house, Dr. Stevens. OK?"
Judd nodded gratefully.
McGreavy took his arm and guided him toward a car. As he moved slowly, painfully, across the courtyard, he realized that it had stopped raining. On the far horizon the thunderheads had been swept away by the raw December wind, and the sky was clearing. In the west a small ray of light appeared as the sun began to fight its way through, growing brighter and brighter.
It was going to be a beautiful Christmas.