Devoted, page 17
55
Megan pulled the door open, let it arc under its own momentum, shielding behind it as it moved, and no one burst into the bedroom. She had both hands on the pistol as the door swung past her to reveal the hallway.
As she cleared the threshold, the spill of light issuing from her suite proved barely sufficient for her to see that the hall was deserted.
Woody’s quarters lay to her left, toward the front of the house. To her right were two guest rooms, a bath, and a hall closet. The intruder could be in any of them, door ajar, watching through the gap. Opposite Woody’s suite was a sewing room that she used for storage, and maybe the door stood ajar, maybe not. She didn’t dare turn her back on the guest wing, and she needed to keep an eye on that sewing room, so she put her back to the wall, just to the left of the door that she’d come through.
Before she began to move, she listened, trying to hear through the lamentations of the wind that, in their volume and quality of distress, might have been a threnody for the death of the world itself. But the rainless storm was a mask of sound behind which footsteps or any other telltale noises could not be heard.
Her heart knocking to the frantic tempo of the wind, she eased sideways, turning her head left and right, the one eye of the pistol tracking where her two eyes looked.
She came to Woody’s room without incident. As she stepped inside, she urgently whispered his name.
Before she could close the door behind her, she saw her son on the bed, lying on his left side, his back to her, a man kneeling in soft lamplight at bedside, face-to-face with her boy.
“Here comes Mommy,” the intruder said. “You know how hot your mommy is? Way too hot to waste her life with a dummy like you.”
56
The wind was a mad spirit, howling along the alleyway as though through the halls of Bedlam, flailing against the brick walls of the buildings.
The guy named Zellman, surely experienced in the handling of the dead, whether as an assistant medical examiner or otherwise, drove the morgue wagon with two cadavers aboard. Frawley the fixer followed in the Shelby Super Snake that had belonged to the late Painton Spader, which had been transferred to the custody of the state attorney general along with the bodies and other evidence. Both vehicles turned right into the town square and out of sight, taking their light with them.
In the wind-shaken gloom, Carson Conroy said, “This is so not right.”
Sheriff Eckman shrugged. “It is what it is.” He went to the side entrance out of which he’d come earlier and disappeared into his elected domain.
Carson heard that expression more often these days—It is what it is—and it nettled him every time someone spoke it. He wanted to say to Eckman, You are what you are, and now I know what that is. He held his tongue, because in the next election the voters might wise up and cast their ballots for a new sheriff. In the meantime, Carson didn’t want to be forced out of his job.
In spite of the late hour, he left the wind to its raging and returned to his office. At his computer, he accessed the National Crime Information Center website and went to the list of people for whom arrest warrants were outstanding. He sought the name Nathan Palmer—and began to make a list of curious facts.
57
For an instant, Megan didn’t recognize the intruder, but then she identified him by his voice, which she had heard earlier in the day, on the phone. Lee Shacket.
His hair was no longer blond, but brown. His neatly trimmed beard had been shaved off. Other changes in his appearance were too subtle to pinpoint, but he had about him a disturbing otherness.
Woody lay motionless, and when she spoke his name louder than before, he didn’t respond with any movement. Her thundering heart pounded faster, and she thought, What have you done to him, you sonofabitch?
Shacket’s right hand was on Woody’s head. On Woody’s face.
Megan had the Heckler in a two-hand grip, just like she’d been taught, the front sight fixed on Shacket’s face, the only thing she could see of him as he knelt at the other side of the bed, the boy between them, but her knocking heart shook her arms, something that never happened on a shooting range. At twenty-some feet, even when you were ready steady, a head shot was a tricky deal, a chest shot always better.
“Mommy wants to shoot the hundred-million-dollar man,” Shacket said. “Your mommy doesn’t know what’s good for her, but she’ll learn soon enough.”
She gave voice to her fear. “What have you done to him?”
His smile was wolfish. “Just touched him. Being touched seems to traumatize the little dummy. He’s stiff as a board, petrified. He doesn’t like being touched, at least not by me.”
As Shacket stroked Woody’s face with one hand, Megan said, “Get away, get away from him.”
“He doesn’t like being touched by me,” Shacket repeated, continuing to touch the boy. “The little freak is a big snob, just like his mommy. Mommy Megan thinks she’s so much better than other people. Even a hundred-million-dollar man isn’t good enough to touch her.”
She dared to take a step closer to him, another step, but she couldn’t yet keep the front sight where it needed to be, her heart beating so loud in her ears that she could no longer hear the windstorm if it still raged. Even in her paranoid days, when she’d first moved here and imagined a hundred scenarios in which nothing but a gun would save her and Woody, she hadn’t foreseen a situation like this, with the boy intervening between her and a threat, the only possible shot too dangerous to take.
“I called the police,” she lied.
“That would be too bad if you did. That would be a big mistake. We all make mistakes though, don’t we, Megan? I made one when I left my pistol in your kitchen earlier, after I ate that hot bitch’s tits.” He snickered and shook his head. “No, that’s not right, it was a steak. In your kitchen, it was a steak, and it wasn’t as good as Justine’s breasts.”
Maybe drugs fueled Shacket, but he was also inarguably insane. He began to lose control of his face, features failing to cooperate in a coherent expression. Twitches and ticks and squints and crooked grins and ill-formed frowns contested ceaselessly.
His increasing instability and his claim of cannibalism were force magnifiers for Megan’s fear. Her chest became tight, and she drew breath in ragged inhalations.
He said, “There would be no future for any of us if you really did call the police. But you’re a terrible liar, Megan. I smell the deception as surely as I smell your twat. Now let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to have my fantasy, after all. You and me, just like it always should have been. You know where my right hand is?”
“Get away from him.”
“Do you know where my right hand is?” he shouted, the lamplight lending an eerie glow to his eyes.
“Your hand’s on his face,” she said.
“But you can’t see precisely how it’s placed. The dummy’s eyes are closed, Megan. My thumb is on his right lid, my forefinger on his left. Can you picture that, Megan? I could press hard, dig deep, take out his eyes in two seconds. Then he’d be mute, blind, stupid, three times useless.” He put his left hand to the back of Woody’s head, to prevent him from pulling away. “You want me to gouge out his eyes, or you want to stop where you are and discuss options?”
“You fucking creep. You’re dead if you hurt him.”
“Megan, Megan, Megan. You’re in no position to be so rude. Get off your high horse for once.”
She didn’t dare take another step, still didn’t have the shot she needed. Blood sang in her ears as shrill as tinnitus.
“You want to take a shot, Megan? Go ahead and take a shot.”
He thought the pistol wasn’t loaded. If she took a shot and missed, he would blind Woody.
“Do you feel lucky, Megan?”
“No.”
“Do you still think you’re better than me?”
“I never said I was better than you.”
“But you thought it. Don’t lie to me. I smell your lies. Be truthful with me, or the dummy pays.”
“All right. Yes. I thought I was better than you.”
“But now. Now I’ve been in your cozy house all afternoon, all evening, doing what I please, and you were clueless. Do you still think you’re better than me, smarter than me?”
“No.”
“Say it.”
“I don’t think I’m better than you. Or smarter.”
“I hope that’s true. For the dummy’s sake, I hope that’s true, Megan. I hope you’ve learned and you’re chastened. I feel his eyes moving under the lids, like when a dreamer dreams and there’s rapid eye movement. So there are three things I want you to do, Megan. Are you with me?”
“Yes. I’m with you.”
“First, I want you to put down the gun. Second, I want you to take off what you’re wearing. Third, I want you to lie down on the bed and spread those long lovely legs for me.”
“Here?”
“Of course here. Are you worried about corrupting a minor?” That juvenile snicker again. “The dummy won’t even understand what we’re doing. He’ll lie here sucking his thumb while we make a better baby than him, a baby for the new world becoming.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
“Don’t make me hurt him, Jason’s little freak. You understand how much I would like to hurt him, Megan?”
“I think so, yes.”
“For you, just for you, I’m not hurting the little dummy. We’re making a bargain here. You’re not as smart as you think you are. You don’t know what you think you know.”
By that he probably meant that she didn’t know he had taken the ammunition out of her pistol. He was taunting her. He wanted her to pull the trigger, experience the shock of its failure to fire.
“Where do you want me to put down the gun?”
“On the bed. Be very, very careful, Megan. If you try anything, you’ll be surprised how badly it works out for you and him. You try anything, and it doesn’t work out, I’ll take his eyes, and that will be on you, his blindness on you forever.”
The moment had come. The boy was his shield, even though he didn’t believe he needed a shield. He had an animal cunning. She wasn’t going to get a clearer shot than the one the next minute might offer.
As she approached him, she didn’t lower the pistol, hoping he would tempt her by rising up just a little, putting slightly more space between his head and Woody.
Fear of what might happen abruptly became an abhorrence of allowing it to happen, and in an instant her tremors stopped, her aim steadied, the front sight fixed on his face, and as she reached the bed, she squeezed off a shot.
Maybe he smelled her deception. He juked as she was about to fire, and the bullet tore his left ear. He howled like an animal, didn’t blind the boy, but instead, as fast as a skink, inhumanly fast, he swept Woody off the bed, into his arms, using him as a shield. She didn’t dare another shot. The bathroom door stood just three steps away, and Shacket was through it, slamming it behind him—Sweet Jesus, so crazy fast—so supernaturally fast she knew in an instant he hadn’t been warning her just that her pistol might be empty when he had said You don’t know what you think you know. Something else must be going on with him, something beyond easy comprehension.
She tried the door, it was locked, he was going to blind Woody, she fired two rounds into the latch, shouldered the door, crashed through into a tumult of wind rattling the medicine cabinet door, flapping the towels on the rack.
Woody on the floor, in the corner by the shower, his beautiful eyes wider than they’d ever been, staring at something far beyond this room.
To her right, the lower sash of the tall double-hung window open, Shacket going through, no alarm wailing because no porch roof beyond. A fleeting glimpse of him, hunched and troll-like on the sill, under the sash, looking over his shoulder, his eyes wild and shot with light, hissing at her through clenched teeth, hissing like some reptile, then dropping away into the dark.
She stepped to the window, saw he’d landed on all fours maybe fifteen feet below, like a cat, clad in black in the black night, looking up at her, his face a pale oval, as ghostly as that of a spirit wandering between worlds. Then quick across the lawn, toward the front of the property, the highway, and out of sight.
She put her pistol down on the vanity, slammed the window, gasping for breath as if she’d been running for her life. She went to Woody, knelt before him on the cold bathroom tile. Blood. Oh God. Spatters of blood. Yes, but not his. Blood from Shacket’s torn ear. She touched Woody’s face, smoothed his hair, picked up his hands and kissed them, all the while telling him it was all right, they were safe, the bad man was gone, she was so sorry, sorry this happened, but it was over.
Woody wasn’t here with her. Sometimes he withdrew and there was no reaching him, no indication that he saw her or heard her. He went away somewhere when he was badly stressed, although she seldom knew what stressed him, couldn’t get in his mind to learn the source of his upset, though of course she knew this time.
She sat on the floor and put her arms around Woody, pulling him into her lap as best she could, rocking him. “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s okay now.”
Glass shattered in a downstairs room and a glass-break sensor set off the security alarm. Shacket had returned.
58
One lane of highway 89 was finally cleared, and the highway patrol allowed southbound and northbound traffic to get past the remaining wreckage in alternating waves. The heavy fog began to lift as Rosa Leon drove inland from the lake, toward Tahoe City. By the time she found herself two miles from Olympic Village, the last rags of mist raveled into the darkness behind her, and the night ahead lay clear but starless under an overcast.
She had dozed off twice during the hours she’d waited in line for the overturned eighteen-wheeler to be moved to one side of the highway, and now she yawned extravagantly. This had been a long day, wearying not just because of its length but because of the sadness attendant to it. But the wonder of Kipp and her responsibility for him kept her in motion.
A couple miles short of Olympic Village, she consulted the Pied Finder app again. She was dismayed to see that, after remaining for hours in the same location, Kipp had gone on the move once more. His blinking signifier placed him on Interstate 80, west of Truckee, heading toward Donner Summit. The speed at which he moved meant he must be aboard a vehicle.
Perhaps he was in the company of a good person, or maybe someone not so good. Whoever his companion might be, that person couldn’t know that Kipp was more than a dog, that he was a treasure. Anyway, this wasn’t anyone whom Dorothy had chosen for the role of caregiver, and Rosa would, by God, not fail Dorothy.
Although she was already doing the speed limit, she pressed down on the accelerator.
59
Pistol in hand, seven rounds remaining in the magazine, Megan hurried barefoot across Woody’s bedroom, into the upstairs hallway, as Shacket threw open the front door with such force that it banged hard against its stop. He had shattered the sidelight and reached through to twist the thumb turn on the deadbolt.
Wind seethed into the house, huffing and wailing, and the alarm shrilled, and Megan reached the head of the front stairs in time to see Shacket snatch a large vase from the foyer sideboard and throw it against the wall in a rage before he disappeared panther-quick into the hallway, heading toward the back of the house.
He was insane, but he was something stranger than crazy: wild and weird and powerful and unpredictable. If he had charged up the front stairs, she would have shot him repeatedly. But as bold as he might be, he wasn’t improvident.
She recalled something that he’d said: We all make mistakes though, don’t we? I made one when I left my pistol in your kitchen earlier . . .
He’d returned to get his gun. He could ascend one set of stairs or another, probably from the kitchen, firing as he reached the top.
She went back into Woody’s room, pushed the button in the doorknob to engage the privacy latch. A hard kick would spring that flimsy lock. Brace the door. No straight-backed chair. Just Woody’s wheeled desk chair and an armchair.
Shacket was coming, and coming fast.
Left of the door, a seven-drawer highboy stood on four legs, too heavy to drag across the carpet. She tipped it, and it crashed onto its side, blocking the door to the height of the knob.
The phone ringing. Alarm shrieking, wind jamming the house, and the phone ringing. She snatched the handset off the cradle, knowing it must be the alarm company, and didn’t even listen, just shouted, “Man with a gun, in the house, now, now, now!”
She didn’t hang up but dropped the phone and moved to the bathroom doorway.
Woody was where she had left him, but on his side now, in the fetal position.
She turned her back to the boy and faced the hallway door, on the farther side of the room, wanting to kill Shacket for what he’d already done to Woody, for terrorizing the boy, for touching him. If the bastard suddenly had a come-to-Jesus moment and threw down his gun and begged forgiveness, she’d shoot him anyway, shoot him again and again, kill him with great satisfaction.
He should have been here by now. The howling wind, the creaks and rattles and thumps it raised, the insistent bleating of the alarm, again her heart thundering, but she heard no gunshots, no pounding on the braced door.
