At almost the same time, in the new Four Days Mall on Fountain Square West, Marshall Willis and his fiancée Dawn Priennik were leaning over the counter at Newman's Jewelry, trying to decide which wedding bands to buy.
Marshall favored a wide band with diamond-shaped facets on it, "so it kind of catches the light," while Dawn preferred a thinner band with alternating twists of yellow and white gold.
"There's no law that stipulates that a married couple are obliged to wear matching bands," said the jewelry store assistant, his bald head gleaming under the spot-lights. "After all, sir's fingers are very generously sized. Compared to madam's, that is."
It wasn't only Marshall's fingers that were generously sized. He was generously sized all over-six feet three inches tall with a rugged head that looked as if it had been hacked in a hurry out of hardwood, a massive neck, and a chest as deep as a bison's.
Dawn, on the other hand, was tiny-only five feet two inches tall, with long shiny chestnut hair and a round, Kewpie-doll face. She had long black eyelashes that blinked like hummingbird wings, especially when she was excited. Her two most prominent features were her breasts, which filled her little pink vest to the bursting point. Marshall had paid for her breast enlargement last April, as a birthday gift. Dawn's mother, disgusted, had said that it was a gift for himself, rather than her.
"I'm pretty much set on matching bands," said Marshall. "When you have matching bands, it shows people, like, we totally belong to each other."
"But we know we totally belong to each other. Why do we need to prove it to anybody else?"
Marshall slowly shook his head. Now he was showing his dark, possessive side. He had given Dawn much bigger breasts, but if he caught any man ogling her, he would instantly confront him. You checking out my girl? Well, take a good look, dude, because that's the last thing on this earth you're ever going to see. And if Dawn even smiled at anybody else, he would slap her when he took her home and accuse her of acting like a "two-bit back-alley whore." He would always apologize afterward. He would always bring her flowers. But he would always do it again.
"Maybe we should go for a latte or something and talk it over," Dawn suggested. She could see that Marshall was working himself up into one of his gnarly moods-moods that he always blamed on everybody else. Now look what you fricking made me do! he always used to protest, after he had kicked over the television or thrown his supper up against the wall or grabbed Dawn so hard that he bruised her upper arms.
Dawn's mother said that Dawn was crazy to marry him-crazy. He was a brute. Worse than that, he was a childish brute. But Dawn loved him and knew how gentle and thoughtful he could be. He was childish, yes. But that made her all the more determined to protect him. It wasn't his fault that the world was so much against him.
They left the jewelry store and walked across the balcony toward the elevators. The Four Days Mall was only eighteen months old. It was shiny and marble clad and smelled of women's perfume and new leather belts, and the aroma of freshly ground coffee. The central atrium rose five stories to a clear glass ceiling, so that the center was flooded in brilliant natural sunlight, and everything sparkled. Four floors below them, a stainless-steel fountain represented the Orleans, the first steamboat to sail up the Ohio River to Cincinnati, in 1811.
Four glass-walled elevators slid up and down the outside of the building, giving their occupants vertiginous views down to Race Street and Seventh Street. From the top floor, they could even see the river, which glittered in the morning sun, and Covington, Kentucky, on the opposite side.
The doors of the nearest elevator opened, and Marshall and Dawn stepped onto it. Dawn immediately went to the rail and peered down at the traffic below. "Look! They're like little toy cars!"
"Oh, really?" said Marshall. He had never liked heights, and he stayed well back.
For a few seconds they had the elevator to themselves, but just before the doors closed, a crowd of eight or nine noisy teenagers piled their way into it, hooting and laughing and jostling each other.
One of the boys had a pale spotty face and a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap with the long black brim turned sideways. He produced a pink girl's thong from out of his sweatshirt pocket and whirled it in the air. It still had the price labels attached. "Hey-see what I just boosted!"
"Oh, Mikey!" shrilled one of the girls. "Aren't you going to try it on for us?"
Another boy wrapped his arm around his shoulders and said, "You never told us you were a cross-dresser, Mikey! I woulda bought you a peephole bra for your birthday, instead of that T-shirt!"
"Get outta here, Tyler, it's a present for Linda."
"Oh, sure-Linda! I'll bet she got tired of you wearing her pan ties, that's all, so you had to buy some of your own!"
"Hey, cool it, guys," said Marshall. "We got a lady in here."
The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap swiveled his head around, mouth open, blinking. "Lady? Where? Where? I don't see no lady."
Marshall grabbed hold of the front of the boy's sweatshirt and almost lifted him off his feet. "Don't get funny with me, punk. This lady is my fiancée, okay? And you treat her with respect."
The other teenagers, far from being intimidated, started to jeer. "You hear dat, punk? Dis lady is my fyance!"
Marshall swiveled around to confront them, still gripping the boy's sweatshirt. "You want trouble, you dick-weed? Is that what you want? Believe me, I can give you trouble."
"Woooooooo!" the teenagers howled at him.
Dawn said, "Come on, Marshall, leave the kid alone. He didn't do nothing."
"Yeah, Marshall!" said the boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap. "Leave the kid alone. I mean who do you think you are, Marshall? The Incredible Bulk?"
Marshall shoved the boy so that he lost his balance and slammed against the opposite wall of the elevator car.
"Hey, you psycho!" yelled one of the teenagers.
Marshall shoved him, too, and he staggered back against the rest of the teenagers, and one of the girls fell against the window, bruising her shoulder.
"Marshall!" Dawn pleaded, frantically tugging at his arm. "Marshall, leave them alone!"
The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap pointed his finger at Marshall and shouted, in his half-broken voice, "That's it, man! I'm going to call the zoo, man, and have you put back where you belong! In with the god-damned gorillas!"
Marshall gripped the boy's sweatshirt again and shook him. As he did so, the elevator reached the third floor, and the doors opened. A crowd of shoppers was waiting to get on, fathers and mothers and children carrying balloons. But when they saw Marshall and the boy struggling together, they all held back.
One of the teenage boys shouted, "Let's get out of here, man!" and a girl screamed, "Call the cops! Somebody call the cops! This guy's gone crazy!"
Before any of them could move, however, a bulky man in a black suit shouldered his way through the crowd of shoppers and stepped onto the elevator, pushing the button for the first floor. A smart young woman, emboldened, tried to follow him, but the man held his arm out to keep her back. "Hey!" she said, but the doors closed, and the elevator continued on its way downward.
The man looked at Marshall, and then at Dawn, and then at each of the teenagers very deliberately, as if he were sizing them up. His face was so red that it looked sunburned, or varnished, and he had bristly red hair. His eyes and his mouth were like slits cut into a Japanese mask. He was shorter than Marshall, and not so bulky, but he had an almost tangible aura of menace about him. Marshall relinquished his hold on the spotty boy's sweatshirt and took a cautious step back, with his hands held up in surrender.
"Just a little disagreement, man. Nothing to get worked up about."
"He attacked me!" put in the spotty boy. "He was going to frigging kill me!"
The man stared at Marshall, expressionless.
"And you're-what?" Marshall asked him. "Security or something?"
"Security?" asked the man, in a hoarse, foggy whisper. "You should be so lucky."
"Then what? These kids were disrespecting my fiancée, and I was teaching them a lesson, that's all. Not only that, they've been shoplifting. You don't believe me? Make them turn out their pockets."
"Do you think I care?"
One of the teenage boys pointed at Marshall and said, "This guy's a nut! You going to arrest him? He started pushing us around for no reason at all!"
But Marshall was confused. "I don't get it, man. If you're not security, who the hell are you?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
Dawn was clinging to Marshall's arm and she wasn't going to let him go. She had suddenly realized where she had seen the man's face before-on the TV news.
"Marshall!" she breathed. "It's him!"
Marshall wasn't listening to her. He was too busy challenging the red-faced man. "What? Come on, man. What the two-toned hell is going down here?"
"It's the Red Mask guy!" Dawn hissed at him, but Marshall still wasn't giving her his full attention.
"You want to know what's going down?" grinned the red-faced man. "More of the same. More of the same! That's what's going down."
"More of the same frigging what?"
"You should lock him up!" said one of the girls. "You should lock him up and throw away the key!"
"Hey-what's done is done," the red-faced man interrupted her. "But that doesn't mean we can't seek retribution, does it? You make your bed, you gotta lie in it. No rest for the wicked. Not ever. No forgiveness for the innocent, neither."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Marshall challenged him.
Dawn said, "Please…we don't want to make any trouble. None of us. Let's all get out of the elevator and forget it, what do you think?"
"What do I think?" said the red-faced man. "What do I think? I'll tell you what I think. Now is the time for a little natural justice. Now is the time and today is the day for the settling of old scores. Wouldn't you agree?"
"I don't understand what you mean," Dawn told him. "I'm sorry, but I just don't. What justice? What old scores? We don't even know you!"
With a sharp squeal, the elevator came to a halt, halfway between the fourth and third floors.
"Hey!" Marshall protested. "We want to get the hell out of here, that's all."
"Come on, man," said the boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap. "If this guy is willing to forget it, then we will, okay? Just let us out."
The red-faced man said, "Sorry, folks. This is the end of the ride. For you, anyhow."
He crossed his arms, reaching inside the left-hand side of his coat with his right hand, and the right-hand side of his coat with his left. There was a moment in which all of time seemed to stand still, and even sound was suspended, too. Marshall suddenly thought, Cross-draw, like an old-time gunslinger.
With a harsh metallic zhhinnggg! the red-faced man drew out of his coat two huge triangular-bladed knives and held them high above his head.
"Come on, man," said Marshall. "This has stopped being amusing, okay?" He took a step toward the red-faced man, with one hand lifted.
Dawn screamed out, "Marshall! No! He's the Red Mask guy!"
But she was a fraction of a second too late. As Marshall turned his head, the red-faced man stabbed him straight through the middle of his upraised palm. Then, without hesitation, he stabbed him in the shoulder.
The teenagers shouted out, "Whoa!" and "Jesus!" and one of the girls let out such a high-pitched scream that it was almost beyond the range of human hearing. Dawn clung to Marshall's arm and said "Marshall? Marshall!" but then the right side of her face was suddenly sprayed in blood.
The red-faced man stabbed Marshall again and again-his hands, his arms, his shoulders. Marshall grunted with every stab, but although he was so badly wounded, he lunged forward with his head down and football-tackled the red-faced man around the hips, hugging him tight.
The red-faced man didn't hesitate. He stabbed Marshall in the back of the neck, between the atlas and the axis vertebrae, with an audible chop that severed his spinal cord. Marshall dropped heavily onto the floor, and the red-faced man turned around to face the rest of them, whirling his knives in both hands.
The teenagers were going mad with panic, shouting and beating on the doors and climbing up onto the handrail. Dawn backed away from the red-faced man, shuddering with fear, until she was pressed up against the window. He stepped over Marshall's body and approached her, with both knives raised.
"Don't hurt me," she begged him.
"What? Couldn't quite hear you, darling, what with all these squealing piglets in here."
"Please don't hurt me. I only came here to choose my wedding band."
The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap was trying to edge his way round behind the red-faced man, but the red-faced man quickly turned and jabbed at him with one of his knives. "Going someplace, kid? Weren't thinking of jumping me, were you, by any chance?"
"No! No. We just want to get out of here, sir! We don't want to die!"