8:20.
She went to Joey's room. He and Pete were sitting on the floor, playing Old Maid.
"Hey, Mom, I'm winning," Joey said.
"He's a real card shark," Pete said." If this ever gets back to the guys in the office, I'll never live it down."
Chewbacca lay in the corner, watching his master, tongue lolling.
Christine could almost believe that Chewbacca was actually Brandy, that there had never been a decapitation, that Pete and Frank were just a couple of family friends, that this was merely an ordinary, quiet evening at home. Almost. But not quite.
She went into her study and sat at her desk, looking at the two covered windows, listening to the rain. It sounded like thousands of people chanting so far away that you couldn't make out their words but could hear only the soft, blended roar of many ardent voices.
She tried to work but couldn't concentrate. She took a book from the shelves, a light novel, but she couldn't even keep her attention focused on that.
For a moment she considered calling her mother. She needed a shoulder to cry on. But of course Evelyn wouldn't provide the comfort and commiseration she needed.
She wished her brother were still alive. She wished she could call him and ask him to come be with her. But Tony was gone forever. Her father was gone forever, too, and although she had barely known him, she missed him now in a way she never had before.
If only Charlie were here.
In spite of Frank and Pete and the unnamed man watching the house from the camper outside, she felt terribly alone.
She stared at the tracer phone on her desk. She wished the crazy old woman would call and threaten Joey. At I&ast they would have sufficient evidence to interest the police.
But the phone didn't ring.
The only sounds were those of the storm.
At 8:40, Frank Reuther came into the study, smiled at her, and said,
"Don't mind me. Just making the rounds."
He went to the first window, held the drape aside, checked the lock, peered into the darkness for a second, then let the drape fall back into place.
Like Pete Lockburn, Frank had taken off his jacket and had rolled up his shirt sleeves. His shoulder holster hung under his left arm. The butt of his revolver caught the light for an instant and gleamed blackly.
For a moment Christine felt as if, through some inexplicable interchange of fantasy and reality, she was trapped in a '30s gangster movie.
Frank pulled aside the drape at the second window-and cried out in surprise.
The shotgun blast was louder than the clashing armies of the thunder storm.
The window exploded inward.
Christine leaped up as a shower of glass and blood cascaded over her.
Before he had time to reach for his own gun, Frank was lifted off his feet by the force of the blast and pitched backward.
Christine's chair fell over with a bang.
The bodyguard collapsed across the desk in front of her. His face was gone. The shotgun pellets had hammered his skull into bloody ruin.
Outside, the gunman fired again.
Stray pellets found the ceiling light, pulverizing it, bringing down more glass, some plaster, and darkness. The desk lamp already had been knocked to the floor when Frank Reuther had fallen against it. The room was in darkness except for what little light came through the open doorway from the hall.
The pellet-shredded draperies were seized by an intrusive gust of wind.
Tattered fragments lashed at one another, fluttered and whirled in the air, like the rotted burial garments of an animated corpse in a carnival funhouse.
Christine heard someone screaming, thought it was Joey, realized it was a woman, then discovered it was her own voice.
A squall of rain burst through the ribboned drapes. But the rain wasn't the only thing trying to get inside. Frank Reuther's killer was also clambering through the shattered window.
Christine ran.
In an adrenaline-hot, fear-scorched, dreamlike fever, with the urgent yet weirdly slow-motion time sense of a nightmare, Christine ran from her study to the living room. The short journey required only a few seconds, but it seemed as if the distance from one end of her house to the other was a hundred miles and that hours passed during her panicky progress from one room to another. She knew she was awake, yet she felt as if she were asleep. This was reality yet unreal.
When she reached the living room, Pete Lockbum and Joey were just entering from the direction of the boy's bedroom.
Lockburn's revolver was in his hand.
Chewbacca came behind them, ears flattened, tail down, barking loudly.
A shotgun blast tore the lock out of the front door. Even as the wood chips were still flying, a man burst into the house. He crouched in the foyer that opened into the living room, holding a shotgun in front of him, eyes wide, face white with anger or terror or both, an incongruously ordinary-looking man, short and husky, with a thick black beard jeweled with raindrops. He saw Christine first and leveled his weapon at her.
Joey screamed.
A hard, ear-shattering explosion rocked the room, and Christine was certain that she was in the last milliseconds of her life.
But it was the intruder who was hit. His shirt blossomed with an ugly red flower of blood.
Pete Lockburn had fired first. Now he fired again.
A spray of blood erupted from the intruder's shoulder. The stranger's shotgun spun out of his hands, and he stumbled backwards. Lockburn's third shot caught him in the neck, catapulting him off his feet. Already dead, he was pitched into a small foyer table; his head slammed backwards, striking a mirror above the table, cracking it, and then he collapsed in a gory heap.
As Joey bolted into Christine's arms, she shouted to Lockbum: "There's another man! The study-"
Too late. The gunman who had killed Frank Reuther was already in the living room.
Lockbum whirled. Fast but not fast enough. The shotgun roared. Pete Lockburn was blown away.
Although he had been their dog less than a day, Chewbacca knew where his loyalties ought to lie. Snarling, teeth bared, he leapt at the gunman, bit the intruder's left leg, sank his fangs in deep and held on tight.
The man cried out, raised the shotgun, slammed the heavy butt down on top of the retriever's golden head. The dog.yelped and crumpled in a heap.
"No!" Joey said, as if the loss of a second pet was worse than the prospect of his own slaughter.
Sobbing in pain, obviously frightened, the gunman said, "God help me, God help me, God help me," and he turned the 20gauge on Christine and Joey.
She saw that he, like the bearded man, did not really appear to be mad or degenerate or evil. The ferocity of the terror that gripped him was the most unusual thing about him. Otherwise, he was quite ordinary.
Young, in his early twenties. Slightly overweight. Fair-skinned, with a few freckles and rain-soaked reddish hair that was plastered to his head. His ordinariness was the very thing that made him so scary; if this man could become a mindless killer under the influence of Grace Spivey, then the old woman could corrupt anyone; no one could be trusted; anyone might be an assassin in her thrall.
He pulled the trigger.
There was only a dry click.
He had forgotten that both barrels were empty.
Whimpering and squealing as if he were the one in danger, the killer fumbled in his jacket pocket and withdrew a pair of shotgun shells.
With a strength and agility born of terror, Christine scooped Joey up and ran, not toward the front door and the street beyond, for they would surely die out there, but toward the stairs and the master bedroom, where she had left her purse-the purse in which she'd been carrying her own pistol. Joey clung desperately to her, and he seemed to weigh nothing at all; she was briefly possessed with a more-than-human power, and the stairs succumbed to her pumping legs. Then, almost at the top, she stumbled, nearly fell, grabbed at the banister, cried out in despair.