“. . . take them across the street to Vic and Kathy’s . . .”
And seconds later, there had been a name more useful still:
“. . . over to the Delorios’ place . . .”
Although they are his neighbors, he can’t remember Vic and Kathy Delorio or which house is theirs. That knowledge was stolen from him with the rest of his life. However, if they have a listed phone, he will be able to find them.
A service station. A blue Pacific Bell sign.
Even as he drives up beside the Plexiglas-walled phone booth, he can dimly see the thick directory secured by a chain.
Leaving the Buick engine running, he sloshes through a puddle into the booth. He closes the door to turn on the overhead light, and flips frantically through the White Pages.
Luck is with him. Victor W. Delorio. The only listing under that name. Mission Viejo. His own street. Bingo. He memorizes the address.
He runs into the service station to buy candy bars. Twenty of them. Hershey’s bars with almonds, 3 Musketeers, Mounds, Nestle’s white chocolate Crunch. His appetite is sated for the time being; he does not want the candy now—but the need will soon arise.
He pays with some of the cash that belongs to the dead man in the trunk of the Buick.
“You sure have a sweet tooth,” says the attendant.
In the Buick again, pulling out of the service station into traffic, he is afraid for his family, which remains unwittingly under the thrall of the imposter. They might be taken away to a far place where he won’t be able to find them. They might be harmed. Or even killed. Anything can happen. He has just seen their photograph and has only begun to re-acquaint himself with them, yet he might lose them before he ever has a chance to kiss them again or tell them how much he loves them. So unfair. Cruel. His heart pounds fiercely, re-igniting some of the pain that had been recently extinguished in his steadily knitting wounds.
Oh God, he
needs
his family. He needs to hold them in his arms and be held in return. He needs to comfort them and be comforted and hear them say his name. Hearing them say his name, he once and for all
will be
somebody.
Accelerating through a traffic light as it turns from yellow to red, he speaks aloud to his children in a voice that quavers with emotion: “Charlotte, Emily, I’m coming. Be brave. Daddy’s coming. Daddy’s coming. Daddy. Is. Coming.”
8
Lieutenant Lowbock was the last cop out of the house.
On the front stoop, as the doors of squad cars slammed in the street behind him and engines started, he turned to Paige and Marty to favor them with one more short-lived and barely perceptible smile. He was evidently loath to be remembered for the tightly controlled anger they had finally stirred in him. “I’ll be seeing you as soon as we have the lab results.”
“Can’t be too soon,” Paige said. “We’ve had such a
charming
visit, we simply can’t wait for the next time.”
Lowbock said, “Good evening, Mrs. Stillwater.” He turned to Marty. “Good evening, Mr. Murder.”
Marty knew it was childish to close the door in the detective’s face, but it was also satisfying.
Sliding the security chain into place as Marty engaged the dead-bolt lock, Paige said, “Mr. Murder?”
“That’s what they call me in the
People
article.”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“Right in the headline. Oh, wait’ll you read it. It makes me look ridiculous, spooky-old-scary-old Marty Stillwater, book hustler extraordinary. Jesus, if he happened to read that article today, I don’t half blame Lowbock for thinking this was all a publicity scam of some kind.”
She said, “He’s an idiot.”
“It
is
an unlikely damn story.”
“I believed it.”
“I know. And I love you for that.”
He kissed her. She clung to him but briefly.
“How’s your throat?” she asked.
“I’ll live.”
“That idiot thinks you choked
yourself.”
“I didn’t. But it’s possible, I suppose.”
“Stop seeing his side of it. You’re making me mad. What now? Shouldn’t we get out of here?”
“Fast as we can,” he agreed. “And not come back until we can figure out what the hell this is all about. Can you throw a couple of suitcases together, basics for all of us for a few days?”
“Sure,” she said, already heading for the stairs.
“I’ll go call Vic and Kathy, make sure everything’s all right over there, then I’ll come help you. And Paige—the Mossberg is under the bed in our room.”
Starting up the stairs, stepping over the splintery debris, she said, “Okay.”
“Get it out, put it on top of the bed while you pack.”
“I will,” she said, already a third of the way up the stairs.
He didn’t think he had sufficiently impressed her with the need for uncommon caution. “Take it with you to the girls’ room.”
“All right.”
Speaking sharply enough to halt her, pain encircling his neck when he tilted his head back to stare up at her, he said, “Damn it, I mean it, Paige.”
She looked down, surprised because he never used that tone of voice. “Okay. I’ll keep it close.”
“Good.”
He headed for the telephone in the kitchen and made it as far as the dining room when he heard Paige cry out from the second floor. Heart pounding so hard he could draw only shallow staccato breaths, Marty raced back into the foyer, expecting to see her in The Other’s grasp.
She was standing at the head of the stairs, horrified by the gruesome stains on the carpet, which she was seeing for the first time. “Hearing about it, I still didn’t think . . .” She looked down at Marty. “So
much
blood. How could he just . . . just walk away?”
“He couldn’t if he was . . . just a man. That’s why I’m sure he’ll be back. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for a month, but he’ll be back.”
“Marty, this is crazy.”
“I know.”
“Sweet Jesus,” she said, less in any profane sense than as a prayer, and hurried into the master bedroom.
Marty returned to the kitchen and took the Beretta out of the cabinet. Although he had loaded the pistol himself, he popped out the magazine, checked it, slammed it back into place, and jacked a round into the chamber.
He noticed scores of overlapping dirty footprints all across the Mexican-tile floor. Many were still wet. During the past two hours, the police had tramped in and out of the rain, and evidently not all of them had been thoughtful enough to wipe their feet at the door.
Though he knew the cops had been busy and that they had better things to do than worry about tracking up the house, the footprints—and the thoughtlessness they represented—seemed to be nearly as profound a violation as the assault by The Other. A surprisingly intense resentment uncoiled in Marty.
While sociopaths stalked the modern world, the judicial system operated on the premise that evil was spawned primarily by societal injustice. Thugs were considered victims of society as surely as the people they robbed or killed were
their
victims. Recently a man had been released from a California prison after serving six years for raping and murdering an eleven-year-old girl. Six years. The girl, of course, was still as dead as she had ever been. Such outrages were now so common that the story got only minor press coverage. If the courts would not protect eleven-year-old innocents, and if the House and Senate wouldn’t write laws to force the courts to do so, then judges and politicians couldn’t be counted on to protect anyone, anywhere, at any time.
But, damn it, at least you expected the
cops
to protect you because cops were on the street every day, in the thick of it, and they knew what the world was really like. The grand poobahs in Washington and smug eminences in courtrooms had isolated themselves from reality with high salaries, endless perks, and lush pensions; they lived in gate-guarded neighborhoods with private security, sent their kids to private schools—and lost touch with the damage they perpetrated. But not cops. Cops were blue-collar. Working men and women. In their work they saw evil every day; they knew it was as widespread among the privileged as among the middle-class and the poor, that society was less at fault than the flawed nature of the human species.
The police were supposed to be the last line of defense against barbarity. But if they became cynical about the system they were asked to uphold, if they believed they were the only ones who cared about justice any more, they would cease caring. When you needed them, they would conduct their forensic tests, fill out thick files of paperwork to please the bureaucracy, track dirt across your once-clean floors, and leave you without even sympathy.
Standing in his kitchen, holding the loaded Beretta, Marty knew that he and Paige now constituted their own last line of defense. No one else. No greater authority. No guardian of the public welfare.
He needed courage but also the free-wheeling imagination that he brought to the writing of his books. Suddenly he seemed to be living in a
noir
novel, in that amoral realm where stories by James M. Cain or Elmore Leonard took place. Survival in such a dark world depended upon quick thinking, fast action, utter ruthlessness. Most of all it hinged on the ability to imagine the worst that life could come up with next and, by imagining, be ready for it rather than surprised.
His mind was blank.
He had no idea where to go, what to do. Pack up and get out of the house, yes. But then what?
He just stared at the gun in his hand.
Although he loved the works of Cain and Leonard, his own books were not that dark. They celebrated reason, logic, virtue, and the triumph of social order. His imagination did not lead him toward vigilante solutions, situational ethics, or anarchism.
Blank.
Worried about his ability to cope when so much was riding on him, Marty picked up the kitchen phone and called the Delorios. When Kathy answered on the first ring, he said, “It’s Marty.”
“Marty, are you okay? We saw all the police leaving, and then the officer over here left, too, but nobody’s made the situation clear to us. I mean, is everything all right? What in the world is going on?”
Kathy was a good neighbor and genuinely concerned, but Marty had no intention of wasting time in a full recounting of what he’d been through with either the would-be killer or the police. “Where are Charlotte and Emily?”
“Watching TV.”
“Where?”
“Well, in the family room.”
“Are your doors locked?”
“Yes, of course, I think so.”
“Be sure. Check them. Do you have a gun?”
“A gun? Marty, what is this?”
“Do you have a gun?” he insisted.
“I don’t believe in guns. But Vic has one.”
“Is he carrying it now?”
“No. He’s—”
“Tell him to load it and carry it until Paige and I can get there to pick up the girls.”
“Marty, I don’t like this. I don’t—”
“Ten minutes, Kathy. I’ll pick up the girls in ten minutes or less, fast as I can.”
He hung up before she was able to respond.
He hurried upstairs to the guest room that doubled as Paige’s home office. She did the family bookkeeping, balanced the checkbook, and looked after the rest of their financial affairs.
In the right-hand bottom drawer of the pine desk were files of receipts, invoices, and canceled checks. The drawer also contained their checkbook and savings-account passbook, which Marty retrieved fixed together with a rubberband. He stuffed them into one pocket of his chinos.
His mind wasn’t blank any more. He’d thought of some precautions he ought to take, though they were too feeble to be considered a plan of action.
In his office he went to the walk-in storage closet and hastily selected four cardboard cartons from stacks of thirty to forty boxes of the same size and shape. Each held twenty hardcover books. He could only carry two at a time to the garage. He put them in the trunk of the BMW, wincing from the pain in his neck, which the effort exacerbated.
Entering the master bedroom after his second hasty trip to the car, he was brought up short just past the threshold by the sight of Paige snatching up the shotgun and whipping around to confront him.
“Sorry,” she said, when she saw who it was.
“You did it right,” he said. “Have you gotten the girls’ things together?”
“No, I’m just finishing here.”
“I’ll get started on theirs,” he said.
Following the blood trail to Charlotte and Emily’s room, passing the broken-out section of gallery railing, Marty glanced at the foyer floor below. He still expected to see a dead man sprawled on the cracked tiles.
9
Charlotte and Emily were slumped on the Delorios’ family -room sofa, heads close together. They were pretending to be deeply involved in a stupid television comedy show about a stupid family with stupid kids and stupid parents doing stupid things to resolve a stupid problem. As long as they appeared to be caught up in the program, Mrs. Delorio stayed in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Mr. Delorio either paced through the house or stood at the front windows watching the cops outside. Ignored, the girls had a chance to whisper to each other and try to figure out what was happening at home.
“Maybe Daddy’s been shot,” Charlotte worried.
“I told you already a million times he wasn’t.”
“What do you know? You’re only seven.”
Emily sighed. “He told us he was okay, in the kitchen, when Mommy thought he was hurt.”
“He was covered with blood,” Charlotte fretted.
“He said it wasn’t his.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do,” Emily said emphatically.
“If Daddy wasn’t shot, then who was?”
“Maybe a burglar,” Emily said.
“We’re not rich, Em. What would a burglar want in our place? Hey, maybe Daddy had to shoot Mrs. Sanchez.”