Fired Up

self-defense class the hospital had offered to its staff. The small jagged bits of metal protruded between her fingers like claws.
    Should never have agreed to take the night shift, she thought. But the extra pay had been too tantalizing to resist. Six months from now she would have enough saved up to buy a used car. No more lonely late-night rides on the bus.
    She was a block and a half from her apartment house when she heard the footsteps behind her. She thought her heart would stop. She fought her instincts and forced herself to turn around and look. A man emerged from a nearly empty parking lot. For a few seconds the streetlight gleamed on his shaved head. He had the bulky frame of a bodybuilder on steroids. She relaxed a little. She did not know him, but she knew where he was going.
    The big man disappeared through the glass doors of the gym. The small neon sign in the window announced that it was open twenty-four hours a day. It was the only establishment on the street that was still illuminated. The bookstore, with its window full of occult books and Goth jewelry, the pawnshop, the tiny hair salon and the payday loan operation had been closed for hours.
    The gym was not one of those upscale fitness clubs that catered to the spandex-and-yoga crowd; it was the kind of facility frequented by dedicated bodybuilders. The beefy men who came and went from the premises did not know it, but she sometimes thought of them as her guardian angels. If anything ever happened to her on the long walk home, her only hope was that someone inside the gym would hear her scream and come to help.
    She was almost at the intersection when she caught the shift of shadows in a doorway across the street. A man waited there. Was he watching her? Something about the way he moved told her that he was not one of the men from the gym. He wasn’t pumped up on steroids and weights. There was, instead, a lean, sleek, almost predatory air about him.
    Her pulse, already beating much too quickly, started to pound as the fight-or-flight response kicked in. There was a terrible prickling on the nape of her neck. The urge to run was almost overwhelming, but she could hardly breathe now. In any event, she had no hope of outrunning a man. The only refuge was the gym, but the dark silhouette on the other side of the street stood between her and the entrance. Maybe she should scream. But what if her imagination had gotten the better of her? The man across the street did not seem to be paying any attention to her. He was intent on the entrance of the gym.
    She froze, unable to make a decision. She watched the figure on the other side of the street the way a baby rabbit watches a snake.
    She never heard the killer come out of the shadows behind her. A sweaty, masculine hand clamped across her mouth. A sharp blade pricked her throat. She heard a clatter of metal on the sidewalk and realized that she had just dropped her only weapon, the keys.
    “Quiet or you die now,” a hoarse voice muttered in her ear. “Be a shame if we didn’t have time to play.”
    She was going to die, anyway, she thought. She had nothing to lose. She dropped her purse and tried to struggle but it was useless. The man had an arm around her throat. He dragged her into the alley, choking her. She reached up and managed to rake her fingernails across the back of his hand. She would not survive the night but she could damn well collect some of the bastard’s DNA for the cops.
    “I warned you, bitch. I’m really going to take my time with you. I want to hear you beg.”
    She could not breathe, and the hand across her mouth made it impossible to scream. To think that her fallback plan had always been to yell for help from the gym.
    The alley was drenched in night, but there was another kind of darkness enveloping her. With luck she would suffocate from the pressure of his arm on her throat before he could use the knife, she thought. She’d worked in the trauma center at Harborview. She knew what knives could do.
    A figure loomed at the entrance of the alley, silhouetted by the weak streetlight behind him. She knew it was the man she had seen in the doorway across the street. Two killers working as a team? She was so sunk into panic and despair that she wondered if she was hallucinating.
    “Let her go,” the newcomer said, coming down the alley. His voice promised death as clearly as the knife at her throat.
    Her captor stopped. “Get out of here or I’ll slit her throat. I swear