Ashley almost panicked at the word dictating as she glanced down at her script. What if he’d somehow seen everything, somehow managed to learn everything?
“No, Michael. No. A million times, no. You’ve got it wrong. You’ve gotten it wrong from the very start. We are not going to be together.”
“It’s destiny, Ashley. It was meant to be.”
“No. How can you think that?”
“You don’t understand love. True love. Complete love. Love never ends,” he continued coldly, letting every word echo across the line. “Love never stops. Love never leaves. It is always right inside. You should know that. You imagine yourself to be an artist, but you cannot understand the simplest thing. What’s wrong with you, Ashley?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said sharply.
“Yes, there is.” O’Connell rocked in his seat. “Sometimes I think you’re really sick, Ashley. Diseased. There’s got to be something wrong with someone who can’t understand the truth. Who refuses to listen to their heart. But you shouldn’t be worried, Ashley, because I can fix you. I’m going to be there for you. No matter what happens, no matter what bad things take place, you need to know, I will always be there for you.”
Ashley could feel tears welling up in her eyes. She felt utterly helpless.
“Please, Michael.”
“You don’t need to be afraid of anything.” His voice was filled with dark anger that lay right below the words he spoke. “I will protect you.”
Everything he said, she thought, was the exact opposite. Protect meant hurt. Don’t be afraid meant Be scared of everything.
The hopelessness of her situation nearly overcame her. She felt a wave of nausea, and a flood of heat on her forehead. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall, as if she could stop the room from spinning around her. It will never end.
Ashley opened her eyes and looked wildly at Catherine.
Catherine could only hear one-half of the conversation, but she knew it was going poorly. She thrust her index finger down hard on the script, jabbing at the words as hard as she could. “Say it! Say it, Ashley!” she whispered frantically.
Ashley lifted her hand and wiped away the tears. She inhaled deeply. She did not know what she was setting in motion, but she knew it was something terrible.
“Michael,” she said slowly, “I’ve really, really tried. I’ve tried to say no to you in every way I could. I don’t know why you can’t understand it. Really, I don’t. There’s something inside of you I will never understand. So I’m going right now to speak with the only person I could think of who ever managed to get you to do what they tell you to. Someone who might be able to tell me what I need to say to you to make you understand. Someone who will know how I can get you out of my life. Someone I’m absolutely one hundred percent certain will help me get rid of you. Someone I can trust to help me.”
Everything she said, she knew, was designed to provoke every ounce of rage he held.
O’Connell didn’t reply, and Ashley thought perhaps for the first time that he might be listening to her.
“There’s only one person in the world I think you’re really scared of. So I’m going to see him tonight.”
“What are you saying?” O’Connell asked abruptly. “Who are you talking about? Someone who can help you? No one can help you, Ashley. No one except me.”
“You’re wrong about that. There is one man.”
“Who?” O’Connell’s shout leaped across the line.
“Do you know where I am, Michael?”
“No.”
“I’m a short ways from your home, Michael. Not the apartment where you live, but the home where you grew up. I’m on my way right now to see your father,” Ashley lied as coldly as she could, pausing slightly between each word. “He can help me.” And then she hung up. And when the phone started to ring within seconds, she ignored it.
Sally looked up from behind the wheel and felt a current of electricity surge through her entire body. Michael O’Connell, moving furiously quickly, had exited the apartment building. He was jamming his arms into his overcoat as he took the steps in a single leap, then hurried down the block, almost sprinting. Sally reached down and grasped a cheap stopwatch from the passenger-side car seat. She punched the ON button when she saw O’Connell lurch into his car and rapidly pull out, tires complaining loudly.
She picked up the cell phone and hit the speed dial.
When she heard Scott’s voice on the other end, she replied, “On his way right now,” before hanging up.
Scott would start his own stopwatch.
She could not hesitate. There was so little time. Sally grabbed a backpack that contained several critical items and immediately exited her car, rapidly crossing the street toward O’Connell’s apartment. She kept her head lowered and pulled a ski cap down as low as she could. She was dressed in Salvation Army clothes: jeans, worn sneakers, and a man’s peacoat. She wore leather gloves over a skintight set of latex surgical gloves.
She told herself, The gun will be there.
There was no backup plan if it wasn’t. Only an agreement that they would abort the entire scheme, go back to western Massachusetts, and try to invent something new. She thought it possible that O’Connell might take the gun with him to visit his father. His sudden rage was one variable that she hadn’t been able to anticipate. In a way, she hoped he would take the gun with him. Perhaps he would use it in the way they had hoped to; that he would make the mistake that would solve all their problems.
Or, he might take the gun and use it on them.
Or, he might take the gun and use it on Ashley.
There was no plan except flight and panic if this one blew up.
Sally followed the same route that Hope had traveled a few days earlier. Within seconds, she found herself standing outside the apartment. She was alone, key in hand.
No neighbors. The only eyes that watched her belonged to the clutch of cats mewling in the hallway. Did he kill one of your number today? she wondered. She slipped the key into the lock and let herself in as quietly as she could.
Sally told herself not to look around. Not to examine the world where Michael O’Connell lived, because she knew it would only fuel her own terrors. And speed was critical to everything that she’d mapped out. Get the gun, she repeated to herself. Get it now.
She found the closet. She found the corner. She found the boot, with the dirty sock stuffed in the top.
Be there, she whispered to herself.
She lifted the sock, taking note as to how it was placed. Then she leaned in and reached inside the boot.
When her gloved fingers touched the steel of the barrel, she gasped out loud.
Gingerly she pulled the weapon free.
For a second, she hesitated. This is it, she thought. Go forward or go back.
She could see no option other than fear. Taking the gun terrified her. Leaving the gun terrified her.
Feeling as if someone else were guiding her hand, she carefully slipped the gun into a large plastic bag inside her backpack. She left the sock on the floor.
One more thing to do. She walked quickly into the small living room and stared at the battered desk where Michael O’Connell kept his laptop computer plugged in. He’d created a great deal of trouble for all of them while he was seated at that desk, she thought. And now it was time for her to do the same for him. As scared as she was, this next step gave her a nasty sense of satisfaction. She removed the similar-model computer from her backpack, then quickly replaced his computer with the one she had prepared for him. She didn’t know whether he would immediately see the difference, but he would, sooner or later. She was pleased with this. She had spent some hours in the past day downloading a variety of pornographic materials, and from extreme right-wing antigovernment websites, filling the computer’s memory with as much rage-filled, satanic-inspired, heavy-metal rock music as she could find. When she was persuaded that the computer was laden with enough incriminating items, she had used one of the word files to start writing an angry letter, one that started, Dear Dad, you son of a bitch, claiming that O’Connell now knew that he should never have lied on his father’s behalf years ago, and that he was now prepared to rectify that one big mistake in his life. He was the only person on this earth capable of dealing out the appropriate kind of justice to pay back his mother’s murder. Scott’s research of the O’Connell family history had helped her immensely.