I tried to scream. I really did. But his hand was crushing my larynx. I couldn’t even breathe, let alone utter a sound.
I would like to add that Randy? He smelled extremely ripe, a combination of body odor, Calvin For Men, and what I was pretty sure was tequila. My eyes started to water, and not just from lack of oxygen, either.
“I wasn’t hurting anybody,” he hissed raggedly in my ear. “Those girls wanted it. Theywanted it. And now my mom says I’m a disgrace, and my dad says—you know what my dad says?”
I was clawing at his hands, trying to get them off my neck. I’d tried kicking him, but being barefoot, I didn’t seem to be doing much damage. I tried kneeing him in the groin, but he kept moving out of the way. It was hard to get much leverage, anyway, considering the fact that he was holding me a couple of inches off the ground.
“My dad says if I kill you, to keep you from telling my mom about Eric, he might even forgive me for being such a screwup someday.” Randy’s breath was as ripe as the rest of him. It had been a while since he’d hit the mints. “So that’s why I’m here. I was hoping you’d come out of the house and get on that bike of yours, and I could just wait till no one else was around, and knock you off it and into a ditch or something. But you know what? I like this better. Because take a look. No one else is around. Just you. And me.”
It was hard to tell, over the roaring in my ears. But I thought I could hear Chigger barking. Yes. Chigger was definitely barking. And hurling himself angrily against the screen door, right behind. I could feel his claws. That ought to wake Mom and Dad up.Good boy, Chigger. Good boy.
“I’ll tell you what, though,” Randy said. “I’ll let you go if you tellme who Eric is. Because I really, really want to know.”
And he loosened his hold on my throat—just a little—so that I could tell him. I choked down a lungful of air. And croaked, “Bite me.”
Wham!The hands went right back around my neck.
“That’s not very polite,” Randy commented. “Jesus, why won’t that dog shut the hellup ?”
On the wordup , something happened to Randy’s head. It disappeared.
Or at least, that’s how it seemed from my angle. It wasn’t until his hands suddenly left my throat again—and I was falling to the porch floor, gasping for breath—that I realized Randy’s head was still very much attached to Randy’s body. It had just seemed to disappear, due to the force of the blow Rob had delivered to his jaw.
Collapsed against the screen door, I was in the perfect position to watch Rob pummel the life out of Randy Whitehead Junior. I got to see some bloody bits of capped tooth fly by—very gratifying—and was able to explain to my startled parents, who’d finally been roused from bed, that the reason Rob was killing Randy Whitehead was that Randy had been trying to kill me.
Still, it wasn’t my dad who broke up the fight—though, to his credit, he tried, which was an almost comical sight, this middle-aged man in boxers and an undershirt, trying to pull Rob off the drunk pornographer who’d taken advantage of his sister, and then tried to kill his fiancée.
No, it was the man who strode into my yard right after that, gun drawn, and shouted, “All of you! Freeze, or I’ll shoot! FBI!”
“Oh,” my mother said from where she’d been helping me up from the porch floor. “Good morning, Dr. Krantz.”
Keeping his pistol trained on Randy—who really didn’t look as if he was too eager to go anywhere, anyway—Cyrus Krantz said, “Good morning, Toni. I was hoping I wasn’t too early to stop by for coffee. I can see now that I came just in time. Up to your old tricks again, eh, Jessica?”
By that time, my dad had managed to pry Rob off Randy. Now Rob reached up to dab at his bloody lower lip with the back of a hand, before glancing at me and saying with a grin, “I told you it was time you let someone rescueyou for a change.”
“Good one,” I croaked. It hurt to talk. “What brought you back here?”
He held up a bare wrist. “I forgot my watch.”
“Aw,” I said. “Of course. It’s on my nightstand.”
“What,” my mom wanted to know, “is going on here? Jessica, why was this man trying to kill you? And why is Rob here? And what’s his watch doing on your nightstand?”
“Oh,” I said, holding up my left hand to show her Rob’s grandmother’s ring. “It’s all right. We’re engaged.”
“Mazel tov,” said Dr. Krantz. He hadn’t stopped pointing his gun at Randy Whitehead Junior, who was still moaning on the porch floor.
“You’rewhat ?” Mom yelled. Then, to my dad, she shrieked, “Will you shut that dog of yours up?”
“Chigger! Down,” Dad yelled. And the dog stopped barking. “Toni. I think you should go inside and call the police.”
“Already done,” Dr. Krantz said, hanging up his cell phone. “I asked for an ambulance, too. That young man’s nose appears to be broken.”
My mom stayed where she was. “You’reengaged ?” she asked me, looking astonished.
“Oh, yeah,” Rob said, running a hand through his dark hair and making it stand up even more wildly on end. “This probably isn’t a good time to ask, but Mr. and Mrs. Mastriani, I’d like to marry your daughter, if that’s all right with you. Well, I’m going to even if it isn’t all right. But I’d prefer to have your blessing.”
“She has to finish college first,” my dad said with a grunt, from where he was examining the bloodstains on the porch floor. “I’m gonna need to hit those with the hose before they dry or they’ll never come out.”
“Joe!” My mother’s eyes were filled with tears. “Is that all you have to say about this?”
“Well, whadduya want me to say?” Dad asked. “He’s a good guy. Look what he just did. He saved our daughter’s life.”
“Yeah,” I said to her hoarsely. “Skip never did that.”
“I need coffee,” Mom whimpered, just as the wail of a police siren filled the air.
“Mom.” It was hard to talk, since my throat still hurt pretty badly. But I put my arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “Don’t think of it as losing a daughter. Think of it as finally getting her back.”
My mom looked down at me. She tried to smile, though the result was a bit watery.
“I don’t understand a single thing that’s happening right now,” she said. “But…” She looked over at Rob, who was carefully watching her. “Welcome to the family, Rob.”
A relieved grin broke out over Rob’s face. “Thanks, Mrs. Mastriani,” he said.
“Oh, what the heck,” Mom said, as the first of the police cruisers came screaming up in front of the house. “Call me Ma.”
Twenty-one
It wasn’t until the ambulance had taken Randy away—in police custody, for the second time in twenty-four hours—and I’d given my statement (this time they let me write it in my own dining room. I didn’t have to go down to the station house, for a change), and Rob and my dad had gone off to work, and my mom had retired to her bedroom with a migraine, that I finally got to shower and dress, then sit down with the man who had, after all, come all the way from Washington, DC, to see me.
It was weird to find him sitting on my porch swing. Weird, and yet strangely not weird, too. There’d been a time when the sight of him had terrified me, because he’d represented everything I didn’t want—the glare of the media spotlight that had, once upon a time, so upset Douglas; working for a government I didn’t trust, with an agency I wasn’t sure I believed in.
Then I’d gotten to know him—Cyrus—better and realized he actually really did mean well. And that the truth is, he’s just a huge nerd with a secret liking for peanut M&M’s. He was even dressed in the height of nerd summer chic, in a short-sleeved dress shirt with a clip-on tie, khakis, and pocket protector, which is what he’d worn almost daily in Afghanistan, as well. The only difference was that here in the U.S., he preferred an ankle holster for his service piece. Over there, it had been a shoulder holster.