Relentless (13 page)

Waxx was not merely a homicidal sociopath but also, in the fullest sense, a terrorist.

In the doomed house, in the sparkling laundry room that would soon be filthy rubble, in the kitchen that momentarily would itself be cooked, in response to my ever more frantic shouts, Milo finally called out—“Yo, Dad!”—and entered at a run from the downstairs hall.

He carried Lassie’s favorite toy, which we had inadvertently left behind: a plush purple bunny with huge startled eyes and floppy ears and a white puffball tail. It was cute, and it had a squeaker in its tummy, and the dog adored it, but it wasn’t a toy worth dying for.

With more athletic grace than I had ever before exhibited, I scooped Milo off the kitchen floor and into my arms, swiveled toward the laundry room, and ran.

Giggling and exuberantly squeaking the bunny, Milo said, “What’s happening?”

“The place is gonna blow,” I said.

The squeaking alerted Penny. By the time we reached the garage, she stood by the open driver’s door of the Explorer.

Her eyes were even wider than those of the startled rabbit. “No time to belt him in, Cubby, hold him in your lap!”

Even though the door had rolled all the way up and offered no obstacle, I felt relieved that she would be driving. Two facts—that the SUV had a reverse gear, that the back wall of the garage remained intact—seemed to tempt Fate too much for me to drive.

Milo had wanted to ride shotgun, and now he shared that position with me. He sat in my lap, and I wrapped both arms around him.

Folding his arms around the bunny and holding it against his chest, the boy said to the toy, “Don’t worry. Dad won’t let anything happen to us.”

Geniuses, even six-year-old prodigies, don’t believe that toys live any kind of life. Milo talked not to the rabbit, but reassured himself.

I had left the key in the ignition. When Penny tried to start the engine, she got from it a cough, a cough, a groan.

She glanced at me as I glanced at her, and we didn’t need to be telepathic to know we shared the same thought: Waxx had sabotaged the vehicle.

   The stumpy, bow-tied, elbow-patched, Hush-Puppied, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, white-wine-sipping, pretentious, thick-necked, wide-assed intellectual fraud must have been in our house from at least midnight, planting explosives and tampering with the cars before at last venturing to our bedroom after four o’clock in the morning to torture us with a Taser.

For once, however, we had overestimated his capacity for villainy. On Penny’s third try, the engine of the Explorer turned over, roared.

Pressing back hard in my seat, bracing my feet against the floorboard, I cradled Milo as best I could, expecting to be blown out of the garage as if from a circus cannon, in a plume of fire and debris.

But Penny sped the length of the driveway and braked only slightly to make a left turn into the street. Morning traffic had not yet appeared. She drove half a block before letting up on the accelerator and coasting toward the curb.

Since exiting the garage, I searched the day, expecting to see Waxx
either in a parked car or standing at some vantage point along the street. He seemed to have decided against a ringside seat.

Penny looked at me. I nodded. She used the remaining momentum of the vehicle to turn crosswise in the street, where she came to a stop, angled back the way we had come.

A kind of masochistic need to know enraptured us.

Through the windshield, we had a view of the first house we ever owned. Slate roof. Stacked-stone and stucco walls. Imposing but not pretentious lines. Welcoming.

With us in residence, that house had known much laughter and love. Milo had been conceived there, and within those walls we had transformed ourselves from a couple into a family, which more than anything had been what Penny and I wanted; still wanted; would always want.

The first blast shook the street, rocked the Explorer, and fissured one corner of our house, casting off slate shingles, slabs of plaster, and a bright rain of shattered upstairs windowpanes.

Even as the shingles, the shed stucco, and the shards of glass became airborne, the second blast shuddered the entire structure, blew out first-floor windows, toppled a stone chimney toward the backyard, and distorted the shape of the garage.

Within me, distortions occurred as well: to my perception of my place in the world, to my expectations of social order and simple justice, to my vision of the future.

A third explosion followed in maybe three seconds, not as loud and sharp as the first two but even more profoundly destructive: a heavy
whump
, as if Satan had fired up a burner on the biggest gas stove in Hell. The house seemed to swell, then twist, then shrink, and in an instant was engulfed in flames from end to end, flames more blue than yellow, not orange at all, seething and insatiable, leaping eagerly to the forty-foot-wide crowns of the matched phoenix palms.

Before neighbors rushed into the street, Penny wheeled from the burning house and drove away.

I saw tears standing unshed in her eyes, and I could have cried or cursed, but I kept my silence as she kept hers.

We had gone perhaps a block when in my arms Milo said shakily, “We didn’t blow up our house, did we?”

“No, we didn’t,” I said.

“Who blew it up?” he asked.

Penny said, “A man I want to have a talk with someday.”

“A very bad man,” I added.

“I think I know him,” said Milo.

“I think you do.”

“I really liked our house,” Milo said. “Now all our stuff is burned up.”

“Not all of it,” I said. “We seem to have like three tons of it here in the Explorer.”

“A house is just a house,” Penny said. “Stuff is just stuff. All that matters is the three of us are together.”

In the backseat, Lassie growled.

“The four of us,” Penny corrected. “The four of us are nicer, smarter, and tougher than Shearman Waxx. We’ll settle this, we’ll set things right again.”

That we were nicer than Waxx, not even Waxx himself would have denied. He did not seem to value niceness.

With Milo on our side, we were more intelligent than the critic, although not more cunning. Like Mozart, Einstein, and other brainiacs, Milo had every kind of smarts in abundance, except for the one most important in this instance: street smarts.

I did not have a clue why Penny thought we were
tougher
than Waxx. Because she did not say such things lightly, I credited the possibility that, in us, Waxx had met his match, as absurd as that concept might appear to be.

Of course, she didn’t have all the information that I possessed. Events had unfolded so quickly that I’d had no opportunity to tell her about John Clitherow.

As I watched her repress her tears and find a reassuring smile for Milo, I dreaded having to tell her about John’s murdered family. But I had only twice ever deceived her by omission, and the second time— withholding the fact that Waxx would be at lunch at Roxie’s when I took Milo there—had been a mistake of epic proportions.

In 1933, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “The disintegration of rational society started in the drift from hearth and family; the solution must be a drift back.”

I had a disturbing feeling that getting back to where we had been would require more than drifting. We would need to swim with all the strength and perseverance we possessed, and the journey was likely to be upstream all the way.

I Am My Brothers’ Reaper

   Even miles from our burning house, Penny repeatedly frowned at the rearview mirror.

“Someone following us?” I asked.

“No.”

The lead-gray sky of the previous afternoon, which had looked as flat and uniform as a freshly painted surface, was deteriorating. Curls of clouds peeled back, revealing darker masses, and beards of mist hung like tattered cobwebs from a crumbling ceiling.

She glanced at the mirror again.

“Someone?” I asked.

“No.”

“It makes me nervous, the way you keep checking the mirror.”

In my lap, Milo said, “It makes
me
nervous the way you keep asking Mom is someone behind us.”

When she frowned at the mirror again, I could not help asking: “Anything?”

“If I see something,” she said, “I’ll tell you.”

“Even if you think it’s nothing, it might be something,” I said, “so if it’s nothing or something, tell me either way.”

“Good grief,” said Milo.

“Okay,” I admitted, “that didn’t make any sense.”

Barely escaping our house before it blew up had left us in a state of shock. But as writers and readers, Penny and I were drunk on words, and we needed conversation as much as we needed air and water. Not much short of death could shut us up. Even Milo, when he wasn’t lost in an electromagnetic-field-theory reverie, could be garrulous. The shock of our loss did not reduce us to a brooding silence; in fact, the opposite was true.

In the Greenwich-Boom family, conversation was not just talk but also a way we helped one another heal from the abrasions and contusions of the day. We started with practicalities and progressed swiftly to absurdities, which was not surprising, considering our conversations expressed our philosophies and experiences.

Penny thought we would be staying at a hotel, but I nixed that. “They’ll want a credit card, at least for ID. We don’t want to be using our credit cards right now.”

As she braked to a stop at a red traffic light, she said, “We don’t? Why wouldn’t we?”

“John Clitherow called while you were packing. He gave me some advice. Credit cards were part of it.”

“Clitherow—the writer?”

“Yeah. He read the review. He has some experience of this … of Waxx.”

“What experience?”

Because I didn’t want to talk about the murder of Clitherow’s family in front of Milo, I said, “John wants me to tell you his three favorite
children’s stories are
Dumbo
, Kate DiCamillo’s
The Tale of Despereaux
, and your first Purple Bunny book.”

“That’s nice. But you said ‘experience.’ What’s he know about Waxx?”

“John especially likes the funny physiology in those books.”

In my usually savvy wife’s defense: Having been Tasered, having seen her house blown up minutes earlier, she urgently wanted to hear anything that I might have learned about the critic, and she was not in a state of mind that allowed her to pick up on kid-evading code.

Holding Milo with one arm, I grimaced at Penny, tugged on my left ear, and pointed at the boy.

She looked at me as if I were suffering delayed spasms from the Tasering.

I said, “Dumbo, Despereaux, Pistachio,” because the last was the name of her bunny character.

The driver behind us tapped his horn to encourage us to notice that the traffic light had turned green.

As she drove through the intersection, Penny said, “I guess I misunderstood. I thought he called about Waxx.”

In my lap, Milo said, “The little elephant, the little mouse, and the little bunny all had really big ears.”

“Did they?” I asked. “Hey, yes, they did. How about that?”

“Mom,” the boy said, “Dad’s trying to tell you that I’m little but I’ve got big ears, and there’s something Mr. Clitherow told him that I guess I’m too young to hear.”