Relentless (34 page)

Once committed, keep moving, no hesitation. Breathless, pistol in both hands and arms extended, I stepped into the archway.

Truman Walbert was at the den door, facing away from me. One of the men, probably Booth, held a gun to the sheriff’s head, and his back was toward me.

Oswald stood behind Booth and Walbert, also presenting his back to me. He had a pistol in his right hand, a big damn thing, pointed at the floor.

Two steps brought me to Oswald. Forgetting everything I knew about the Weaver stance and the Isosceles stance with its several variations, I said “Drop it” on an explosive exhale, as I jammed my gun to the back of his head.

Oswald twitched and froze when the muzzle of the .45 Champion pressed cold against his skull.

Booth looked over his shoulder. Shaved head, gaunt hard face, mouth as tight as a soldered seam, thin nose with more bone than flesh, eyes narrowed to coin slots: a death-vending machine.

I thought we were stalemated, everyone would have to back off slowly, stand down from this impasse, but Booth believed otherwise. He shot Truman Walbert.

Plinking vegetation at a distance doesn’t prepare you for the necessity of putting a bullet in a man’s head at point-blank range. As a theoretical target, even from only two steps away, Oswald was entirely plausible to me, but when I was standing so close to him that I could smell his cologne and see the mole on the back of his neck, he was not just an easy target but also a man, a man different from me in many respects but certain to be like me in some ways. I hesitated to do to him what Booth had done to Walbert.

An obvious professional who read my inexperience in an instant, Booth swiveled toward me, pivoting like a dancer, his weapon coming around, even as the late sheriff went to his knees and began to topple sideways.

Oswald failed to throw down his pistol, not as impressed by a gun to his head as I would have been in his position. My heart hammered, the rush of blood loud in my ears, and I knew Oswald was thinking faster about all of this than I could, plotting faster than any writer who had ever penned a page, just as Booth was moving with animal ruthlessness, with cold certainty. Oswald turned his head to the right, as if trying to see me, even though the muzzle of the .45 gouged his scalp.

Booth had already rotated sideways to me, a narrow profile, his weapon rising into position. A fraction of a second before I would have been looking down the bore of the barrel, two shots thundered in the hallway, and bullets rocked him, neck and shoulder. He started his fall just as the sheriff fully landed.

At the far end of the hall: a curl of smoke in the air and a thrusting .45 and Penny in the Isosceles stance.

Oswald was bringing his pistol up not because he hoped to turn it back on me in some trick shot, but because he intended to bring down Penny, avenging Booth.

I shot him in the head.

Either Oswald pitched away from me or I shoved him in disgust, but as he went, he fired one shot reflexively before the gun dropped from his hand.

The round missed Penny and shattered chunks of wood from the frame of the kitchen doorway.

My ears were ringing, deafened by the gun blasts in the enclosed space, and I backed up against the wall next to the archway, needing something to lean against for a moment, keeping an eye on Booth, the only one who might still be alive, the other two with broken-melon heads.

Another house full of bodies, twenty-eight years down the time stream from the first, one good man dead but also two very bad ones, nobody invisible to anyone else, no miracle here, my covenant with Death revoked: Now anything could happen.

Thou shalt not murder, but killing is a whole different thing from murder. Self-defense isn’t a transgression, defense of the innocent is required, they give medals for defense of the innocent. A brass taste filled my mouth, a hot-copper odor burned in my nose, and a gorge rose but I choked it down.

Booth remained sprawled and still on the floor, but Penny kept a two-hand grip on her pistol as she approached him. She kicked his weapon out of his reach, circled him, trying not to step in blood or on various scraps of tissue, and confirmed he was dead.

I holstered my pistol. My hand ached.

“Stay there, Milo,” she shouted toward the kitchen. “We’re all right. Just stay there.”

My ears were still ringing, but I was no longer deaf when she came to me. We held each other.

“You okay?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t want to do it, not that, not ever.”

“Kill or be murdered,” I said. “You did well, exactly what you should’ve done.”

“You too. My God. I’m shaking head to foot, head to foot.”

“I wasn’t fast enough,” I said.

“Fast enough,” she disagreed. “Walbert was dead one way or the other, you couldn’t change that. They came here to kill him. And then to lie in wait for us.”

She must have been right, but I said, “How did they know we’d come here?”

“How do they know anything? Think about it later. We have to get out of here. Lock the front door, close any living-room draperies that might give someone a line of view through the archway into the hall. I’ll wipe off the coffee mugs, anything we might have touched in the kitchen.”

As she hurried along the hallway, I negotiated the remains of the three men, striving not to think about the nature of the wet debris, and went to the front door.

My sweat-damp fingers slipped on the deadbolt thumb-turn as I tried to twist it the wrong way. Then I engaged the lock and rubbed my sleeve over it to blur the thumbprint I might have left.

I half remembered that after Walbert admitted us, he closed the door. None of us touched the knob, but I rubbed it with my sleeve, anyway.

As the ringing in my ears subsided, I heard a sound rising outside. An approaching engine.

Sidelights flanked the front door. I lifted the edge of a lace curtain, and looked out.

A dark green sedan in the driveway, near the front porch, must have belonged to Booth and Oswald.

Looming out of the mist, a black Hummer appeared to be more of a war machine than one of the full-scale Humvees that were used by the military. It parked behind the sedan, towering over it, and the driver left the engine running, headlights and fog lights blazing.

Doors opened like spaceship portals, and three men stepped down and out of the huge vehicle. Even in the mist, I could see that one of them was Shearman Waxx.

We were up against an organization, all right, and it was not the National Society of Book and Art Critics.

Waxx was holding a cell phone to his left ear, and behind me in the hallway, a phone in one of Booth’s pockets played a few bars of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

I turned away from the front door, executed some broken-field running to quick-step through the horror on the hallway floor, and raced toward the back of the house as Booth’s phone rang again.

   In the kitchen, Penny was polishing a coffee mug with a dishtowel, and Milo used a paper towel to buff prints off his juice glass.

Maybe this was only my perception, subjective and not true, but Milo appeared to have changed in minutes, as if the events in the hallway, which he could imagine without seeing, had been an immersion in a baptistery that bleached out a measure of his innocence and left in him a sediment of experience that could never be washed away.

When he looked at me, his beautiful blue eyes seemed to contain shadows that had never before veiled them. His face was pale, his lips paler, his hands dove-white, as if all the blood had rushed to his heart, to fortify it after the blow that it had taken as he stood listening to his parents kill and nearly be killed.

I wanted to sweep him off the floor, hug him tight, kiss him, and talk him through this terrible moment, but to do so would be to
ensure his death and mine, so completely had our lives spiraled out of our control.

“Waxx is here,” I said, “and he’s not alone.”

Penny dropped the dishtowel, put down the mug, drew her pistol, and I discovered my gun already in my hand, although I did not recall having withdrawn it from the holster as I raced along the hallway.

The doorbell rang.

The chimes conflicted with a final burst of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” before Waxx’s call went to voice mail.

Snatching open the back door, I said, “Not south across the meadow. They might spot us before we’re hidden by the fog.”

They preceded me onto the back porch, and I pulled the door shut behind us.

“Straight east,” I urged, “across the backyard, find the forest. We’ll stay in the trees around the meadow to the Mountaineer.”

We were at the head of the porch steps when the sudden swelling roar of an engine froze us.

Around the south side of the house came the Hummer, speeding across the lawn, wide tires unfazed by the wet grass. That it was black like a hearse seemed appropriate.

Instead of turning right and parking athwart the porch steps, blocking our escape, the Hummer continued east without hesitation. Failing to glance our way, the driver had not seen us.

The enormous vehicle vanished into the morning fog, and its crisp beams diffused, becoming an unearthly glow, goblin light.

Apparently, he intended to park beyond view of the house so that if we came visiting, as they hoped, we would think the place deserted. They would move the sedan for the same reason.

Out in the murk, the Hummer stopped. The driver killed the engine and the lights.

If he meant to walk back to the house, we could no longer go east toward the woods because we would risk encountering him. The slam of the driver’s door carried clearly in the moist air. He was returning on foot.

The only route left to us was north, away from the house, then west and across the state route, thereafter south and finally east across the road again to the Mountaineer.

I indicated north, and Penny nodded, and the three of us took one step off the porch before we heard the voices: two men, coming around the north side of the house, evidently to try the back door.

We could get out of sight quickly enough only if we retreated to the kitchen.

Understandably, Penny was averse to going into the house again, and she hesitated. In an instant, however, she realized we couldn’t attempt to take these two men by surprise and shoot them dead because that still left one out front plus the driver, who would be alerted by gunfire. Our luck wouldn’t hold through so many confrontations.

Besides, here in the open, we couldn’t protect Milo from return fire if we drew any.

Crossing the porch, I feared the back door had locked when we closed it behind us, but that was not the case. Holding Milo’s hand, Penny ducked inside, and I followed.

I almost closed the door and engaged the deadbolt. Instead, I left it ajar, suggesting we had successfully escaped by this route.

The second floor didn’t appeal. We might go through a window, onto a porch roof, drop to a lawn, but doing so quietly and with Milo required the Fates to be in a better mood than lately possessed them.

When Penny opened an interior door, I glimpsed a steep flight of concrete stairs descending into gloom. This seemed to be the worst of all possible options.

Voices outside. Footfalls on the back-porch steps.

The cellar was no longer merely an option. It was the only place we could go.

I followed Milo and Penny onto the descending stairs and quietly closed the door behind us.

   The chamber below was not a black pit. A pale radiance suggested that part of the cellar was aboveground, with a few narrow windows near the ceiling.

Nevertheless, darkness dominated. If we tried to proceed in it, inevitably we would blunder into something and make a lot of noise.

At the top of the stairs, I felt the wall, found the switch, and risked the lights.

Penny and Milo hurried down the concrete steps.

As I followed them, I heard voices in the kitchen.

Stepping away from the bottom of the stairs, I counted three casement windows in the north wall and three in the south, which were the sides of the house lacking porches. Set just under the ceiling, these openings probably measured eighteen inches wide by a foot high. The windows were hinged and were primarily intended to provide periodic ventilation.