‘We’re having some work done on the gymnasium,’ the nurse said. ‘I’m sure one of the workers accidentally-’
Mike hurried Kat off the playground, through the stunned-silent front office, and around his crash-parked truck to the passenger door.
Tires screeched as a vehicle barreled into them. Mike swept Kat behind him out of the way and met the lurching hood with a spread hand, Superman holding back a bullet train. The acrid scent of burning tire. The metal grille of a van, hot against his palm. Two feet more and he’d have been under the carriage.
The color of the van – white – dawned slowly. With a slow-burning terror, Mike lifted his gaze to the windshield. William at the wheel, his pupils jittering, a slash of a grin breaking the sallow oval of his face. In the passenger seat, his eyes fixed on Mike, Dodge raised two forked fingers to his throat and jabbed them into the pale skin above his trachea.
The engine revved, and Mike strong-armed Kat all the way up onto the curb. As the grille shoved forward, he rolled off the side, catching a glimpse of Dodge’s face, staring out at him, expressionless.
‘Holy crap, Dad, that guy almost killed us.’
Hidden behind his back, Kat hadn’t registered who was driving.
‘Buckle in,’ he said. ‘We gotta go.’
‘It’s just a knee, Dad. I don’t have to go home.’
‘We’re gonna take the day off, honey.’
‘Is this more of what-’ ‘I need you to trust me right now. I’ll explain everything to you later.’
He sped out of the parking lot, dialing home. Voice mail.
In the mirror he watched Kat’s expression as she worked through her worries and moved on to other matters. ‘So today in class, Kyle Safranski wouldn’t be quiet during reading group, and he kept talking, and finally Bahar was like, “Shut up, Safartski!”’
Redial. Voice mail. Hearing Annabel’s calm voice on the recording, he was hit with a flood of remorse for venting about her decision on the previous message – Goddamn it I knew we should’ve kept her out of school.
‘I got her,’ he said into the phone. ‘She’s okay. We’re coming home.’
‘Like Safranski, but with fart.’
He scanned the road ahead, checked the mirrors, but the white van was long gone. ‘Yeah, I got that honey.’
The image kept flashing in his mind: Dodge pressing two fingers into his neck, indenting the flesh, those shark eyes black and inscrutable. It was a prison sign, its meaning obvious: You are marked.
He adjusted the rearview, checked the oncoming traffic. He couldn’t wait to get home, behind locked doors, calling in Shep, shoring up their defenses.
‘-spilled her grape juice all over Sage’s leg. Shouldn’t she?’
He dug in the center console, reached back with the headphones. ‘Honey, do you want to watch a show?’
‘Out of school early and I get to watch Hannah Montana?’ She pulled the headphones on and settled back contentedly.
His hands drummed the steering wheel at the stoplight. Finally he was turning onto their street, pulling in to their driveway. Annabel’s car was there in the garage. She must’ve just gotten home, was probably listening to his messages now.
He waited for the garage door to close safely behind them, then turned to face Kat in the backseat. ‘You want to stay and watch till your show is over?’ He didn’t want her to get scared when he explained to Annabel.
‘What?’
He leaned over, lifted a headphone away from her ear, and asked again. She nodded and slipped back into a TV-induced haze.
He stepped out into the garage, wiping his palms on the thighs of his jeans, working out how to tell Annabel. The door from garage to kitchen swung open on well-greased hinges.
He gulped in the scene at once, undigested.
His wife’s purse and satchel bag, dumped on the kitchen counter beside the omelet pan. Way across on the family-room hearth, a man crouched, unaware, his bowed back facing Mike. A blood-streaked knife jittering in a fist at his side. A horrible wheezing from beyond. A pale feminine leg poking into view around the man’s left haunch, a familiar tan sandal strapped to the foot.
Annabel, bleeding out on the family-room floor.
Chapter 28
Noises filtered through the shock.
Annabel, wheezing. A ragged sound that seemed to come not from her mouth but directly from her body.
The agitated murmur of the man’s voice. ‘Shit oh shit. Look what you made me do.’
The faintest creak of the doorknob, clenched in Mike’s frozen fist.
And then smells.
Dish soap.
Men’s deodorant.
Cordite.
Mike’s.357 lay in view, nestled in the carpet by the fireplace rocks. The man, facing away, was rocking slightly, agitated, cursing. Still, Mike couldn’t see Annabel’s head and upper torso. His angle was offset so he could make out only the faintest edge of the man’s profile. The guy’s cheek was raked open, fingernail gouges so deep they looked like claw marks. He was William and not William. The features seemed too even, the musculature too formidable. His arm looked to have been nicked by a bullet, a pencil-thick groove of skin bored from the curve of his biceps where presumably Annabel’s shot had skimmed him.
Bunched on the floor to the side of them was, surreally, a plastic drop cloth. Mike’s spinning brain couldn’t yet attach meaning to it, couldn’t fasten onto the ramifications. He remained motionless a half step into the house, one hand still behind him on the doorknob, his hip a few inches off the kitchen counter, the handle of the omelet pan poking his forearm.
The man fell to his knees, the jolt shuddering his shoulders, and Mike caught a glimpse of Annabel’s blanched face above his shoulder. Then the man shifted, and only her arm and hip were in view, her sleeveless shirt hiked up from her fall, bra strap misaligned. Ink gurgled from a slit in her left side, just below the ribs.
‘You couldn’t just listen and sit on the couch and wait for him to get here.’ At first it seemed the guy was whispering like a lover, but then Mike caught the tension – no, fear – in his voice. The man reached forward, working the bra strap like a rosary, his skin wet and shiny, stress popping out of his pores. ‘This is too messy, too messy. We were supposed to wait. I wasn’t supposed to… What am I gonna…? What am I gonna tell…?’ Eyes squeezed shut, he twisted his head back and forth, a child’s vehement no.
In total, maybe three seconds had passed.
Surreally, the silence was split by a Muzak version of ‘The Blue Danube.’ The man dug a shitty plastic phone from his pocket, the ringtone ceasing when he clicked to answer. ‘Hello?’
His voice jarred Mike from his stunned suspension. Grabbing the protruding handle of the omelet pan, he closed the distance in four or five massive strides and tomahawked the disk of stainless steel at the man’s head. The guy registered Mike’s footsteps late, his head craning around to look over his shoulder, his eyes flying open a second before impact. He emitted a terrified noise like a whinny.
Mike caught him at the corner of his jaw with all his force, the momentum twisting his head back around his neck the wrong way, the brutal sound like the snap of a stick wrapped in wet cotton amplified ten times over. The guy toppled over, body hitting carpet as a single rigid piece and giving off a deadweight vibration.
Sobs flashed across Annabel’s face – downturned lips, then normal, a strobelight of pain. Her mouth came open, but there was no sound. Air moved through the hole in her side. Mike clamped both hands over the wound. She pawed at his shoulder, missing, missing, and then hooked his neck. He leaned over, pressed his forehead to hers.