“No.”
“You really want to live?” Gare asked, as if he was truly surprised.
“Of course I do,” the man answered earnestly. “You think ’cause you’re younger and stronger the world’s yours. My family and I have a right to live, too.”
“But live what kind of life?” Gare shot back. “Look at us — a month ago Earl and I did a job near Poughkeepsie and getting away we were driving down the Taconic at a hundred fifteen miles an hour. See, that was being totally alive. You ever done that? ’Course not. You’re just a goddamn salesman—”
“I’m not a salesman. I own a big—”
Gare wrinkled his face up. “You ever do anything crazy? Skydive? Ski?”
“No, but—”
“No, but,” he mocked. “How ’bout when you were young? You do anything ballsy then?”
“I guess.” He looked at the kitchen as if Jude would testify on his behalf. “I had a souped-up car. I—”
“But then,” Gare continued, “you got old, right? You got scared.”
“I had a family to support!” Martin snapped back. “I had my business. Employees to take care of. I couldn’t afford to screw around like you.”
“Pitiful,” Gare whispered, shaking his head. “Pitiful.”
Runyer lay on his side, bloody, a bullet deep in his body. But it seemed to him that Martin was wounded a lot deeper — by this cold taunting.
“You don’t understand,” Martin blurted.
“Oh, yeah, I do. I understand perfectly.”
Jude and Earl brought the burgers in and she put the dishes on the table. Even across the room Runyer could see her shaking hands.
“Soup’s on,” she said with fake cheer.
Gare stared at Martin for a moment longer, then went to the table and sat down.
Runyer caught Jude’s eye and glanced at Earl, then pantomimed drinking a glass of water. Jude seemed to understand and turned toward the kitchen.
“Where you going, grandma?” Gare snapped.
“To get some water for the sheriff.”
“Earl, you do it.”
“But—”
“Do it!”
Thank you, Runyer thought. Yes!
Earl fetched the water. As he bent down to set it on the floor, his pistol pointed at Runyer’s head, the sheriff whispered quickly, “Let’s work out something, Earl. You give him up, and I’ll testify for you at trial. About the shooting. That it was an accident. You got my word.”
Earl froze, looked at him for a moment. He just about dropped the glass when Gare called, “Earl!”
The young man swiveled around.
“S’ getting cold,” Gare said. “Come on and eat.”
Earl stared at Runyer for a moment, set the glass down, and returned to the table without a word.
Gare put his napkin in his lap carefully, then picked up his utensils with precise gestures. Runyer was surprised at his behavior until he realized he’d seen this before — Gare had learned his manners in reform school.
He and Earl began conversing in whispers.
“Your daughter?” Runyer asked the couple. “She is coming here tonight, isn’t she?”
Martin’s eyes met Jude’s. She nodded. And Runyer now understood why Martin was so upset.
“She drove up from Boston this afternoon. She went shopping and was going to meet us tonight for a little party. Stay the weekend.”
“When’s she due?”
An elaborately carved clock — with a weird grinning face, like the old man in the moon — showed the time. 7:10.
“Ten minutes ago.”
The pain stretched luxuriously through Hal Runyer and dripped into his bowels. He gasped and thought of Lisa Lee’s aunt, dying of cancer. When they’d talked about the woman — friends, family, and doctors — nobody ever talked about the cancer itself, or about her coming death. They’d talked about pain.
He gasped and closed his eyes. Then risked a look at his belly. The blood had spread in a huge slick. He knew he didn’t have much time left. Runyer looked over at the table and once again caught Earl’s eye. The man looked away fast, continued to poke at his burger. He nodded as Gare said something to him and went right on nodding.
“What’re they talking about?” Martin asked in his nervous lilt.
“Whether or not to kill us,” Runyer answered.
Martin lowered his head to his wife’s and they huddled, an armless embrace.
Runyer floated away somewhere momentarily — because of the drugs, or the pain, or the despair — and he gazed at the couple as if he were looking down at them from above, saw them with startling clarity. And if maybe they were a little too L. L. Bean for Runyer’s taste, if they were spooked as deer at the moment, if they didn’t have the inclination, or backbone, to approach life the way Gare thought was important, still they were good people — and brave in their own way. Martin was somebody who’d provided for his family and for the people who worked for him. Jude had raised a child and nursed patients. Which is what real courage was, Runyer reckoned. Not driving fast or sticking up banks. So where their captors felt contempt for these folks, Runyer couldn’t. He felt only an overwhelming desire to save them, to salvage what he could of their lives.
The sheriff had pinned his hopes on Earl but it was obvious that wasn’t going to work out. So he now eased close to Jude. “Listen. I’ve been thinking. Your daughter’s due here any minute, right?”
Martin nodded.
“Your legs’re free. What if you two were to go through that window there? Run down the driveway and hide in the pine trees for her? When she shows up, you all hightail it outa here. You’ll probably get a little cut and bruised but that’ll be the worst of it.”
“How?” Jude asked. “They’d come after us.”
“I’ll hold ’em off. With that scattergun on the mantel.”
“It’s not loaded,” Martin whispered. “I checked when we got here.”
Runyer’d figured. Vermont wasn’t NRA territory but people knew guns and nobody’d ever mount a loaded double-barrel within a child’s reach.
“But they don’t know that.”
“Don’t!” Martin rasped. “Let’s just do what they want.”
Jude added, “If you don’t shoot them outright they’ll figure out the gun’s empty.”
“Don’t think they’d want to take that kind of chance with a ten-gauge goose gun. Besides, they’d figure with me being a cop it’d make sense to give ’em a chance to surrender. ‘Put your hands up.’ That kind of thing.”
Then Jude was smiling kindly. “I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “I appreciate it, Sheriff. But... how old’re you?”
“Thirty.” It had been his birthday, too — just last week. He didn’t mention this.
“And you’re a married man and probably’ve got kids.”
“This’s my job,” he continued. “I get paid—”
“You don’t get paid to sacrifice your life for a couple of stodgy old tourists like us. That’s what you’d be doing. And you know it.”
“I’m thinking of your daughter, too,” he said. “’Sides, if there’s any way I’m surviving this it’s if somebody brings some help. Soon.”
Martin said, “You’re wrong, Sheriff. I don’t think they really want to hurt us. Let’s just wait.”
“We can’t!” Runyer whispered urgently. “Gare’s going to kill us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because of blame. Weren’t you listening to him? He’s got this talent for pitching blame like horseshoes. Everything that happens is somebody else’s fault. That lets him do whatever he wants. Murder included.”
Martin looked at the window Runyer wanted them to leap through. He gazed at it the way a man accustomed to losing foot races looks at a cinder track.