rang.
She almost started to cry again, in fear this time, but she had to be
tough for Em. At a time like this a big sister had to think about her
responsibilities .
BAM!
Even as the second shot boomed a heartbeat after the first, Charlotte
knew the fake daddy had been hit because he squealed with pain and
cursed, spitting out the S-word over and over. He was still in good
enough shape to drive, and the car leaped forward.
They seemed out of control, swinging to the left, going very fast, then
turning sharply back to the right.
Charlotte sensed they were going to crash into something. If they
weren’t smashed to smithereens in the wreck, she and Em had to be ready
to move fast when they came to a stop, get out of the car, and out of
the way so Daddy could deal with the fake.
She had no doubt Daddy could handle the other man. Though she wasn’t
old enough to have read any of his novels, she knew he wrote about
killers and guns and car chases, just this sort of thing, so he would
know exactly what to do. The fake would be real sorry he had messed
with Daddy, he would wind up in prison for a long, long time.
The car swerved back to the left, and in the front seat the fake made
small bleating sounds of pain that reminded her of the cries of wayne
the Gerbil that time when somehow he’d gotten one small foot stuck in
the mechanism of his exercise wheel. But wayne never cursed, of course,
and this man was cursing more angrily than ever, not just using the
S-word but God’s name in vain, plus all sorts of words she had never
heard before but knew were unquestionably bad language of the worst
kind.
Keeping a grip on Em, Charlotte felt along her seatbelt with her free
hand, seeking the release button, found it, and held her thumb lightly
on it.
The car jolted over something, and the driver hit the brakes.
They slid sideways on the wet street. The back end of the car swung
around to the left, and her tummy turned over as if they were on an
amusement-park ride.
The driver’s side of the car slammed hard into something, but not hard
enough to kill them. She jammed her thumb on the release button, and
her safety belt retracted. Fumbling at Em’s waist–“Your belt, get your
belt off!”–she found her sisters release button in a second or two.
Em’s door was jammed against whatever they had hit. They had to go out
Charlotte’s side.
She pulled Em across her. Pushed open the door. Shoved Em through it.
At the same time, Em was pulling her, as if Em herself was the one doing
the rescuing, and Charlotte wanted to say, Hey, who’s the big sister
here?
The fake daddy saw or heard them getting out. He lunged for them across
the back of the front seat–“Little bitch!”–and grabbed Charlotte’s
floppy rain hat.
She scooted out from under the hat, through the door, into the night and
rain, tumbling onto her hands and knees on the blacktop.
Looking up, she saw that Em was already tottering across the street
toward the far sidewalk, wobbling like a baby that had just learned to
walk. Charlotte scrambled up and ran after her sister.
Somebody was shouting their names.
Daddy.
Their real Daddy.
Three-quarters of a block away, the speeding Buick hit a broken tree
branch in a huge puddle and slid on a churning foam of water.
Marty was heartened by the chance to close the gap but horrified by the
thought of what might happen to his daughters. The mental film clip of
a car crash didn’t just play through his mind again, it had never
stopped playing. Now it seemed about to be translated out of his
imagination, the way scenes were translated from mental images into
words on the page, except that this time he was taking it one large step
further, leaping over typescript, translating directly from imagination
into reality. He had the crazy idea that the Buick wouldn’t have gone