Big Boned

But the smile doesn’t go all the way up to her eyes. It’s like her lips are just frozen that way.

“I can’t believe,” she says, through that cold, creepy smile, “you’re on his side.”

I stare at her. “Whose side?”

“You know whose,” she says. “Owen’s. You worked with him. Every day—in the same office! You saw what he was like. Like a robot, with his agendas and itineraries and appointment calendars. The man was inhuman!”

I blink at her. The smile is finally gone. The bright spots of color on either of her cheeks have spread, and now her whole face is red. Her eyes—once a soft hazel—are begi

I take a step backward. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“Uh,” I say. “You’re the one who married him.”

“Yes, I married him,” Pam spits. “I met him in college, back when I was an art major, a real wild child, into drugs and partying and sexual experimentation, and he was my resident assistant, and straight as an arrow, and I felt like I needed a little of that to calm me down. What I didn’t need, however, was to be smothered! To be creatively stifled for twenty years! Except that that’s what happened… until I finally got the guts to leave him. And, yes, you’re right—he did insist on taking the china—my beautiful china. Not because he cared about it. But because he knew I loved it. To punish me for leaving him! Well, I got it in the end, didn’t I?”

But I’m already shaking my head.

“No,” I say. “No, you won’t. Because it’s wrong, and you know it, Pam. I’m not letting you take it. Give me the keys.”

She’s weeping openly now, tears spilling out of those hazel eyes, and dropping down onto the fabric aprons the rag dolls are wearing.

“I… I… ” is all she seems able to say.

I hold out my hand. “Come on, Pam,” I say, in my most soothing tone. “Give me the keys. I’m sure we can work something out with the DA. Battered wife syndrome, or something. Maybe they can send you to the same place they sent Martha Stewart. She got to do a lot of crafts in there. You could still do your pottery.”

Pam lets out a sigh, and turns toward a chest of drawers.

“That’s it,” I say encouragingly, speaking to her in the same gentle but firm tone I use with the anorexics we get periodically down in the office, and whom I have to urge to eat the special, highly caloric muffins the nutritionists send over to fatten them up enough for what we’re saying to make some sort of sense to their vitamin-deprived little brains. “You’re doing the right thing—”

But when Pam turns around, I see to my dismay that it’s not a set of keys she’s holding in her hand.

It’s a handgun.

And she’s pointing it right at me.

“You didn’t really think,” she says—and I see, with a lurch of my entrails, that the smile is back—“that I only had the one gun, did you, Heather? I’m a country girl, you know. I grew up around guns. I know how to use them—even if I think they’re entirely too easy to procure for most people.”

I can’t believe this. What a phony she is! Her sweatshirt is totally lying! She doesn’t believe in interracial harmony at all!

Well, okay, maybe she does.

But she doesn’t seem to have a problem with killing people. Including completely i

“Pam,” I say, holding up both my hands. “You do not want to do this.”

“Actually,” Pam says, taking a step toward me. “I really do. Because by the time anyone finds your body, I’ll be long gone. So killing you really isn’t a problem for me.”

I take an instinctive step back. But for every step I take away from her, Pam takes another one forward. I’m looking around, wondering frantically what on earth I’m going to do. Owen kept his apartment as fastidiously neat as he kept his office. Unlike my own place, there are no stray objects lying randomly around that I can pick up and try to throw at my would-be assassin—no whimsical lamp shaped like a mermaid, purchased at the local flea market for a song, that would make a handy missile. No terrariums filled with sea-shells that I can heave in her direction…

Not that I’d be likely to hit her. But it’s better than nothing.

The worst thing is, no one even knows I’m here, except for the moron with the toothpick at the desk downstairs. And he doesn’t even work for the college. He works for Rosetti, and is about as likely to notice the sound of a gunshot upstairs as he is likely to notice that his multiple gold neck chains clashed with his many bracelets.

I’m basically a dead woman.

And for what? For Owen.

And I didn’t even like him!

Still, I have to try.

“This isn’t Iowa, Pam,” I inform her. “Someone’s going to hear a gun go off, and call the cops.”

“I’m from Illinois,” Pam says. “And already thought of that.”

And she reaches down, picks up the phone that’s sitting next to the couch I’ve bumped into (I’ve backed up as far as I can go), and dials 911.

“Hello, operator?” she says, in a breathless, panicky voice quite unlike her own, when someone on the other end picks up. “Send the police right away! I’m calling from apartment six—J at twenty-one Washington Square West. Former teen pop sensation Heather Wells has gone crazy and broken into my apartment and is trying to kill me! She’s got a gun! Ah!”

Then she hangs up.

I stare at her in total astonishment.

“That,” I say, “was a big mistake.”

Pam shrugs. “This is New York City,” she says. “Do you know how long it’s going to take them to get here? By the time they do, I’ll be long gone. And you’ll have bled to death.”

Pam obviously doesn’t realize what’s happening in the park approximately a hundred yards from the entrance to her ex-husband’s apartment building.

And how many cops are out there as a consequence.

On the other hand, it won’t matter if two dozen cops storm apartment 6–J in the next twenty seconds if she manages to put a bullet in my brain the way she did Owen’s.

Which is exactly what I realize she’s about to do when she raises the pistol she’s holding and points it at my head.

“Good-bye, Heather,” she says. “Owen was right about you, you know. You really aren’t that good of an administrator.”

Owen said that? Geez! Talk about ungrateful! And I was really helpful when he first started, showing him the ropes and the best place to get a bagel (outside of the café, of course), and everything. And he said I wasn’t a good administrator? What was he even talking about? Has he seen the binders I created at the reception desk, making the kids responsible for keeping their own time sheets, so I don’t have to bother with it? And what about my i

Well?Was he?

But I don’t have a chance to process how I feel about this betrayal, because I’m busy ducking the bullet Owen’s ex-wife has just fired at me. Ducking and, I’d like to add, diving over the side of the couch and grabbing the one thing in the apartment I think might actually give me half a chance to survive the next two minutes until the boys (and girls) in blue can get up here and save my cellulite-ridden butt.

And that’s Garfield.

Who isn’t too happy about being snatched from his resting place on the sofa cushion, by the way.

But then, the sound of a handgun going off at close proximity hadn’t made him particularly happy, either.

Snarling and snapping, the great big orange tabby is doing his best to get away from me. But I have him by the scruff of his neck with one hand, his sizable belly with the other. His unsheathed and flailing claws are, fortunately, facing away from me. So there’s virtually no way he can escape.