Heart-shaped box (24 page)

T
he man on the radio said,
“What’s Florida’s number one export? You might say oranges—but if you did, you’d be mistaken.”

For a moment his was the only voice in the room. Marybeth had Angus by the collar again and was holding him back, no easy task. He strained forward with all his considerable will and muscle, and Marybeth had to keep both heels planted to prevent him going anywhere. Angus began to growl, a low, choked rumble, a wordless yet perfectly articulate message of threat. The sound of him got Bon barking again, one explosive yawp after another.

Marybeth was the first to speak. “You don’t need to use that. We’ll go. Come on, Jude. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get the dogs and go.”

“Watch ’em, Reese!” Jessica cried. “They came here to kill us!”

Jude met Marybeth’s gaze, tossed his head in the direction of the garage door. “Get out of here.” He rose, one knee popping—old joints—put a hand on the counter to steady himself. Then he looked at the girl, making good eye contact, staring right over the .45 pointed into his face.

“I just want to get my dog,” he said. “And we won’t trouble you anymore. Bon, come here.”

Bon barked, on and on, in the space between Jude and Reese. Jude took a step toward her to grab for Bon’s collar.

“Don’t let him get too close to you!” Jessica screamed. “He’ll try and take the gun!”

“Stay back,” the little girl said.

“Reese,” he said, using her name to soothe and to create trust. Jude was a man who knew a thing or two about psychological persuasion himself. “I’m putting this down.” He held up the tire iron so she could see it, then set it on the counter. “There. Now you have a gun and I’m unarmed. I just want my dog.”

“Let’s go, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Bonnie will follow us. Let’s just get out of here.”

Marybeth was in the garage now, staring back through the doorway. Angus barked for the first time. The sound of it rang off the concrete floor and high ceiling.

“Come to me, Bon,” Jude said, but Bon ignored him, actually made a nervous half jump at Reese instead.

Reese’s shoulders twitched in a startled shrug. She swung the gun toward the dog for a moment, then back to Jude.

Jude took another shuffling step toward Bon, was almost close enough to reach her collar.

“Get away from her!” Jessica screamed, and Jude saw a flash of movement at the edge of his vision.

Jessica was crawling across the floor, and when Jude turned, she shoved herself to her feet and fell upon him. He saw a gleam of something smooth and white in one hand, didn’t know what it was until it was in his face—a dagger of china, a wide shard of broken plate. She drove it at his eye, but he turned his head and she stabbed it into his cheek instead.

He brought his left arm up and clipped her across the jaw with one elbow. He pulled the spike of broken plate out of his face and threw it away. His other hand found the tire iron on the counter, and he swung it
into the side of Jessica’s neck, felt it connect with a solid, meaty thud, saw her eyes straining from their sockets.

“No, Jude, no!” Marybeth screamed.

He pivoted and ducked as she shouted. He had a glimpse of the girl, her face startled and her eyes wide and stricken, and then the cannon in her hands went off. The sound of it was deafening. A vase, filled with white pebbles and with a few waxy fake orchids sticking out of it, exploded on the kitchen counter. Splinters of glass and pieces of rock flailed through the air around him.

The little girl stumbled backward. Her heel caught on the edge of a carpet, and she almost fell. Bon jumped at her, but Reese righted herself, and as the dog hit her—crashing into her hard enough to sweep her off her feet—the gun went off again.

The bullet struck Bon low, in the abdomen, and flipped her rear end into the air, so she did a twisting, head-over-heels somersault. She slammed into the cabinet doors beneath the sink. Her eyes were turned up to show the whites, and her mouth lolled open, and then the black dog of smoke that was inside her leaped out from between her jaws, like a genie spilling from the spout of an Arabian lamp, and rushed across the room, past the little girl, out onto the porch.

The cat that was crouched on the table saw it coming and screeched, her gray hair spiking up along her spine. She dived to the right as the dog of black smoke bounded lightly onto the table. The shadow Bon took a playful snap at the cat’s tail, then leaped after her. As Bon’s spirit dropped toward the floor, she passed through a beam of intense, early-morning sunshine and winked out of being.

Jude stared at the place where the impossible dog of black shadow had vanished, too stunned for a moment to act, to do anything but feel. And what he felt was a thrill of wonder, so intense it was a kind of galvanic shock. He felt he had been honored with a glimpse of something beautiful and eternal.

And then he looked over at Bon’s dead, empty body. The wound in
her stomach was a horror show, a bloody maw, a blue knot of intestines spilling out of it. The long pink strip of her tongue hung obscenely from her mouth. It didn’t seem possible that she could be blown so completely open, so it seemed she had not been shot but eviscerated. The blood was everywhere, on the walls, the cabinets, on him, spreading out across the floor in a dark pool. Bon had been dead when she hit the ground. The sight of her was another kind of galvanic shock, a jolt to his nerve endings.

Jude returned his disbelieving gaze to the little girl. He wondered if she had seen the dog of black smoke when it ran past her. He almost wanted to ask but couldn’t speak, was momentarily at a loss for words. Reese sat up on her elbows, pointing the Colt .45 at him with one hand.

No one spoke or moved, and into the stillness came the droning voice on the radio: “Wild stallions in Yosemite Park are starving after months of drought, and experts fear many will die if there isn’t swift action. Your mother will die if you don’t shoot him. You will die.”

Reese gave no sign that she heard what the man on the radio was saying. Maybe she didn’t, not consciously. Jude glanced toward the radio. In the photograph next to the boom box, Craddock still stood with his hand on Reese’s shoulder, but now his eyes had been blotched out with death marks.

“Don’t let him get any closer. He’s here to kill you both,” said the radio voice. “Shoot him, Reese. Shoot him.”

He needed to silence the radio, should’ve followed his impulse to smash it earlier. He turned toward the counter, moving a little too quickly, and his heel shot out from under him, slipping in the blood underfoot with a high-pitched squeak. He tottered and took a lunging, off-balance step back in Reese’s direction. Her eyes widened in alarm as he lurched toward her. He raised his right hand, in a gesture he meant to calm, to reassure, then realized at the last instant that he was holding the tire iron and that it would look to her as if he were lifting it to swing.

She pulled the trigger, and the bullet struck the tire iron with a ringing
bong,
corkscrewed up, and took off his index finger. A hot spray of blood hit him in the face. He turned his head and gaped at his own hand, as stunned by the wonder of his vanishing finger as he’d been by the miracle of the vanishing black dog. The hand that made the chords. Almost the whole finger was gone. He was still gripping the tire iron with his remaining fingers. He let it go. It clanged to the floor.

Marybeth screamed his name, but her voice was so far away she might’ve been out on the street. He could barely hear it through the whine in his ears. He felt dangerously light in the head, needed to sit down. He did not sit down. He put his left hand on the kitchen counter and began backpedaling, retreating slowly in the direction of Marybeth and the garage.

The kitchen stank of burnt cordite, hot metal. He held his right hand up, pointing at the ceiling. The stump of his index finger wasn’t bleeding too badly. Blood wetted his palm, dribbled down the inside of his arm, but it was a slow dribble, and that surprised him. Nor was the pain so bad. What he felt was more an uncomfortable sensation of weight, of pressure concentrated in the stump. He could not feel his slashed face at all. He glanced at the floor and saw he was leaving a trail of fat drops of blood and red boot prints.

His vision seemed both magnified and distorted, as if he wore a fishbowl on his head. Jessica Price was on her knees, clutching her throat. Her face was crimson and swollen, as if she were suffering a severe allergic reaction. He almost laughed. Who wasn’t allergic to a pipe across the neck? Then he thought he’d managed to mutilate both hands in the space of barely three days and fought an almost convulsive need to giggle. He’d have to learn to play guitar with his feet.

Reese stared at him through the pall of filthy gunsmoke, her eyes wide and shocked—and somehow apologetic—the revolver on the floor next to her. He flapped his bandaged left hand at her, although what this gesture meant, even he wasn’t sure. He had an idea he was trying to reassure her he was okay. He was worried about how pale she looked.
The kid was never going to be right after this, and none of it was her fault.

Then Marybeth had him by the arm. They were in the garage. No, they were out of the garage and into the white blaze of the sun. Angus put his front paws on his chest, and Jude was almost knocked flat.

“Get off him!” Marybeth screamed, but she still sounded a long distance away.

Jude really did want to sit down—right here in the driveway, where he could have the sun on his face.

“Don’t,” Marybeth said as he began to sink to the concrete. “No. The car. Come on.” She hauled on his arm with both hands to keep him on his heels.

He swayed forward, staggered into her, got an arm over her shoulder, and the two of them reeled down the incline of the driveway, a pair of stoned teenagers at the prom, trying to dance to “Stairway.” He did laugh this time. Marybeth looked at him with fright.

“Jude. You have to help. I can’t carry you. We won’t make it if you fall.”

The need in her voice concerned him, made him want to do better. He drew a deep, steadying breath and stared at his Doc Martens. He concentrated on shuffling them forward. The blacktop underfoot was tricky stuff. He felt a little as if he were trying to walk across a trampoline while drunk. The ground seemed to flex and wobble beneath him, and the sky tilted dangerously.

“Hospital,” she said.

“No. You know why.”

“Got to—”

“Don’t have to. I’ll stop the bleeding.” Who was replying to her? It sounded like his own, surprisingly reasonable voice.

He looked up, saw the Mustang. The world wheeled around him, a kaleidoscope of too-bright green yards, flower gardens, Marybeth’s chalky, horrified face. She was so close that his nose was practically
stuck into the dark, floating swirl of her hair. He inhaled deeply, to breathe in her sweet, reassuring scent, then flinched at the stink of cordite and dead dog.

They went around the car, and she dumped him in on the passenger side. Then she hurried around the front of the Mustang, caught Angus by the collar, and began to haul him toward the driver’s-side door.

She was fumbling it open when Craddock’s pickup screamed out of the garage, tires spinning on concrete, greasy smoke roiling, and Craddock behind the wheel. The truck jumped the side of the driveway and thudded across the lawn. It hit the picket fence with a crack, swatted it flat, slammed over sidewalk, banged into the road.

Marybeth let go of Angus and threw herself across the hood of the car, sliding on her belly, just before Craddock’s truck nailed the side of the Mustang. The force of the impact threw Jude into the passenger-side door. The collision spun the Mustang, so the rear end swung into the road and the front was shoved up over the curb, with such suddenness that Marybeth was catapulted off the hood and thrown to earth. The pickup struck their car with a strangely plastic crunch, mixed with a piercing yelp.

Broken glass fell tinkling into the road. Jude looked and saw Jessica McDermott Price’s cherry convertible in the street next to the Mustang. The truck was gone. It had never been there in the first place. The white egg of the airbag had exploded from the steering wheel, and Jessica sat holding her head in both hands.

Jude knew he should be feeling something—some urgency, some alarm—but was instead dreamy and dull-witted. His ears were plugged up, and he swallowed a few times to clear them, make them pop.

He peeled himself off the passenger-side door, looked to see what had happened to Marybeth. She was sitting up on the sidewalk. There was no reason to worry. She was all right. She looked as dazed as Jude felt, blinking in the sunlight, a wide scrape on the point of her chin and her hair in her eyes. He glanced back at the convertible. The driver’s-side
window was down—or had fallen into the road—and Jessica’s hand hung limply out of it. The rest of her had slumped down out of sight.

Somewhere, someone began to scream. It sounded like a little girl. She was screaming for her mother.

Sweat, or maybe blood, dripped into Jude’s right eye and stung. He lifted his right hand, without thinking, to wipe at it and brushed the stump of his index finger across his brow. It felt as if he had stuck his hand against a hot grill. The pain shot all the way up his arm and into his chest, where it bloomed into something else, a shortness of breath and an icy tingling behind his breastbone—a sensation both dreadful and somehow fascinating.

Marybeth walked unsteadily around the front of the Mustang and pulled the driver’s-side door open with a screech of bent metal. She stood with what looked like a giant black duffel bag in her arms. The bag was dripping. No—not a duffel bag. Angus. She pulled the driver’s seat forward and slung him into the back before getting in.

Jude turned as she started the car, both needing and desperately not wanting to look back at his dog. Angus lifted his head to stare at him with wet, glazed, bloodshot eyes. He whined softly. His rear legs were smashed. A red bone stuck through the fur of one of them, just above the joint.