'Got it,' Sloan called.

The other elevator was going up again and Sherrill, without thinking, punched the Up button, trying to get Up. The first one, the elevator that stopped at five, started down. But the other rose inexorably to twenty-seven before it stopped. She ran back to the stairway access and shouted after Sloan, 'The elevator's on twenty-seven…'

At that moment, the second elevator dinged in the lobby. She shouted at the frightened security guard, 'Turn off that elevator, Stop it. Can you stop it on this floor? Stop it!'

He ran to the elevator as the door opened, but then almost slumped, stopping outside of it: 'My, God, there's blood…'

Sherrill pushed him aside, saw a puddle of blood in the middle of the carpet.

'How do you stop it?' she asked.

'Pull the red emergency-stop button.'

She saw it, a red knob the size of her thumb, and pulled it out. 'That'll do it?'

'Yeah, that…'The security guard looked up at the numbers above the elevator doors. 'The other one's coming down.'

'Oh, fuck. Get out of the way.' She stood back from the elevator doors, her pistol level at gut level: remember the chant, two in the belly and one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead…

Then the elevator doors opened and she saw Lucas on the floor with his gun pointing at her chest and blood streaming into his eyes and Sherrill screamed,

'Lucas, Lucas, Jesus…'

The elevator seemed to move at a deliberate and insolent crawl; Carmel pushed herself up, realized that her arm was burning; looked, and saw more blood. Her body was on fire. She staggered into the hallway at five, out to the parking ramp. The stairwell came up just inside the parking ramp door, and somebody was on the stairs, coming up. 'Fuck you,' Carmel screamed down at the man. She could see his arm, still three flights down. He stopped and looked up at her, and she fired the gun, once, twice.

Sloan braced himself. He was only on three-and a-half, confused. Carmel? Two shots sailed past, and he aimed blindly up, and fired once.

Carmel, fearless now, the pain tightening her, fired another shot, then another, and then got a click. She'd used up the clip. 'Fuck you,' she screamed again, and lurched out into the ramp. A dozen steps, and she was at the bloody-murder red Jag, which was right there. Fumbling with her keys. On fire, she was on fire.

She backed out, aimed the Jag down the ramp, and stepped on it.

Sloan heard the parking-ramp door bang shut. He took another quick peek, then another, then ran up to the next landing. He heard the Jag start, screech away.

He was on four-and-a-half now. He ran back down, through the fourth-floor door, heard her coming all the way. Lifted the. 38, and as she turned the corner, fired a shot at the windshield. No effect, and the car's back end twitched out as Carmel gunned it again, and he fired another shot at the driver's side window as she passed him; but he was slow and the shot smashed through the back window and then she was down the ramp and around the corner.

Sloan ran back through the door and down to three, but at three, Carmel was already going by, and he ran down to two, and she was coming and he knew he was too late, so he kept going, and at one he burst into the lobby and screamed at Sherrill, 'She's coming down the ramp…'

As he ran toward the front door, he registered Lucas on his knees, the blood,

Sherrill with the gun, and then the red Jag blasting through the wooden guard arms at the exit and out into the street, wheels screaming, car sliding, going away from him and Sloan ran out into a street full of people and couldn't fire his gun…

Lucas had done an inventory and was shouting 'Not bad, not bad,' and was trying to get up, while Sherrill screamed, 'Lay down, you're hurt, lay down,' and Lucas finally pushed her roughly out of the way and hobbled toward the front of the building and saw Sloan running away down the street and Carmel's Jag just turning the corner at the far end…

'Didn't think of this,' he said, trying to grin at Sherrill. Blood trickled down at the corner of his mouth. 'That she'd do this. She cracked.'

'Lucas, ya gotta sit down, the ambulance…'

'Fuck a bunch of ambulances…' And they saw people at the other end of the block, turning to stare, and Sherrill shouted, 'She's coming back, she went around the block.'

Lucas started to run, half-hobbled, toward the end of the block, Sherrill finally leaving him to run on ahead, her pistol out, shouting at people,

'Police, get away, police…'

Lucas saw her stop at the curb, then raise her gun… and the Jag came from behind the building and Sherrill pointed her pistol at the sky as the Jag hurtled by and Lucas came up and said 'Jesus Christ, she's doing a hundred and twenty…'

Carmel wasn't feeling much: a kind of mute stubbornness, a will to do what she pleased. She turned the last corner, realized that she was going the wrong way on a one-way street: and the wrong way in any case – the hospital was behind her. Instead of trying to turn, she focused her eyes on the Target Center, the auditorium where the Minnesota Timberwolves played basketball. Focused on the building and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

She was going seventy at the end of the first block, a hundred when Davenport saw her, at the end of the second. The car topped out at the end of the fifth block, at about a hundred and thirty. She drove straight down the white line between two lanes, cars dodging away from her, white faces going by like faces on postage stamps, half-seen, half-realized, frozen in expression. She hit a stout black man carrying a grocery sack, in which he had milk and cookies and a dozen oranges. He never saw her as he crossed at a crosswalk, looking into the grocery bag, thinking about opening the cookies. He was too heavy, he shouldn't have bought them, his wife would kill him… He never saw Carmel coming and she hit him with the very center of the Jag and he flew over the car as though lifted by angels.

At a hundred and thirty miles an hour, Carmel hit the curb outside the Target

Center and the Jag went airborne, turning, tumbling…

Lucas and Sherrill watched, appalled, as the car hit first the black man and then the concrete wall.

The black man was dead in a tenth of a second; he'd felt nothing but a sudden apprehension. As for Carmel, the transition from life to death was so sudden that she never felt it.

In the silence following the shattering impact, an even dozen oranges bounced and rolled in the dirt along the street, bright and promising like the best parts of a broken life.

Charlie Ross and his yuppie flip-fone pals at the Merchants Bank in Portland,

Oregon, had invented a new classification system for women. One that went down, not up. One duckling was a woman who bordered on the acceptable. Ten ducklings was a truly ugly duckling.

Ross was hacking his way through the billing entries for that month's box rentals, and incidentally keeping his eye on the safety-deposit counter while the regular clerk was at lunch, when a six-duckling came to the counter. She was bad news. If you were even tempted to throw her a mercy fuck, you'd want to put a rug over her head first. All of that went through Ross's bottlecap-sized brain as he pushed himself up from the desk and dragged his lard-ass over to the counter.

The woman was small, dark-haired, olive-complected. She had a mole by the corner of her mouth, a notable mole, nearly black, and another one beside her nose. And she wore over-sized glasses, the kind that are supposed to turn dark in sunlight, but always made your eyes look yellow when you were indoors. She handed him a key and he took it, ran it through the file machine, found her card, and brought it to the counter for her to sign.