Page 84 of The Perils of Paulie
“That’s why I insist we get them medical aid. Honestly, Paulie, for a woman who made such a big fuss about helping a man who robbed us, you are being particularly unfeeling toward actually wounded men.”
The sound of crashing furniture and breaking ceramics emerged from the room, followed by the knife man, bleeding from his nose and holding one shoulder higher than the other. He also held the knife, and snarled viciously when he saw us.
“You’re adorable when you’re noble, but I’d really rather not be kidnapped for real. Come on!” She dashed off toward the exterior staircase.
“Hell!” I swore, and ran after her.
“It’s like we’re in a James Bond movie!” Paulie cried when I jammed a trash can under the door to the exterior stairs, hoping to slow down the knife thug. Paulie streaked down the stairs, her skirts held high in her hands and the back of her blouse flapping open.
“I am not even close to being James Bond,” I replied, leaping down the stairs two and three at a time. Aboveus, an ugly grating noise, followed by the sound of something large and metal being thrown down the stairs, gave our feet wings.
“Do you have the key?” I asked when Paulie reached the bottom of the stairs and dashed outside, skidding when she made a sharp ninety-degree turn to head for the entrance to the parking area.
“Yes. Thank god we don’t have to crank these cars to get them started.”
“Meet me here,” I said, taking up a stand at the entrance of the underground car park.
She glanced over her back, pausing to shout back at me, “What are you doing?”
“Making sure we aren’t followed.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I have no bloody idea,” I said softly, and shouted for her to go on and fetch the car.
She disappeared into the darkness, and I looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing other than a kiosk where a bored-looking teenager sat with a cigarette clinging to his lower lip, the yellow-and-black-striped barrier that rose when cars were allowed to leave, another trash barrel, and a couple of orange traffic cones.
“Why didn’t I watch thatMacGyvershow that Elliott loved?” I growled to myself as I picked up the cones and wondered if they could be considered lethal weapons. “I bet he’d have no trouble making nuclear warheads out of these.”
The teen, a boy of probably seventeen or eighteen, watched me with an unmoving expression, his cigarette never wavering from where it hung off his lip.
“I don’t suppose you have a gun?” I asked him.
He didn’t even blink, just watched me with a look that said he was utterly bored by me, the parking lot, andprobably everything in the world. A tiny bit of ash fell off the end of his cigarette.
Footsteps sounded loudly right ahead of the thug, who skidded to a halt at the sight of me. He was breathing heavily, his mouth, chin, and shirt bloody, and he still held that damned knife. I waved my cones at him. “Now, see here. We are not your enemies. Yes, I disabled you, but that is because you and your friend tried to kidnap us. Or pretended to. So really, you have no one but yourself to bla—”
He lunged before I finished speaking, and I swung first one cone, then the other, and finished up with a kick to his left knee.
“Well, what do you know?” I asked, eyeing him when he rolled around on the pavement, alternately clutching his knee and his shoulder. “Theyareweapons.”
A roar sounded from within the garage. The Thomas Flyer raced up the incline to the exit, like some great white beast surging forward to consume its prey. Paulie was at the wheel, her hat jammed on her head crookedly, her goggles glinting in the dull yellow sodium lights, and her white veil streaming backward a good fifteen feet.
“Get in!” she yelled, waving one arm frantically.
“You’d better open it up,” I said loudly to the parking lot attendant, but he stared dully first at me, then at the man on the ground, then finally to the Thomas Flyer as she roared up to me.
“Jump!” Paulie shouted, clearly not intending on waiting for the barrier to be raised. I thought of pointing that out to her, realized there was no time, and swung myself up onto the sideboard when she passed me, throwing myself into the backseat just as she hit the barrier and drove off into the night.
The last sight I had of the parking lot attendant was him leaning out of his window, watching us, the cigarette still dangling from his lip.
Paulina Rostakova’s Adventures
AUGUST 9
5:55 a.m.
Warsaw, Poland
