He turned away from the glass, letting the draperies fall back into
place, and he looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Three
o’clock in the morning.
He had been asleep about five hours. Not long enough, but it would have
to do.
His neck ached intolerably, and his throat was mildly sore.
He went into the bathroom, eased the door shut, and snapped on the
light. From his travel kit he took a bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin.
The label advised a dosage of no more than two tablets at a time and no
more than eight in twenty-four hours. The moment seemed made for living
dangerously, however, so he washed down four of them with a glass of
water drawn from the sink tap, then popped a sore-throat lozenge in his
mouth and sucked on it.
After returning to the bedroom and picking up the short-barreled shotgun
from beside the bed, he went through the open connecting door to the
girls’ room. They were asleep, burrowed in their covers like turtles in
shells to avoid the annoying light of the nightstand lamp.
He looked out their windows. Nothing.
Earlier, he had returned the reading chair to the corner, but now he
moved it farther out into the room, where light would reach it.
He didn’t want to alarm Charlotte and Emily if they woke before dawn and
saw an unidentifiable man in the shadows.
He sat with his knees apart, the shotgun across his thighs.
Although he owned five weapons–three of them now in the hands of the
police although he was a good shot with all of them, although he had
written many stories in which policemen and other characters handled
weapons with the ease of familiarity, Marty was surprised by how
unhesitatingly he had resorted to guns when trouble arose. After all,
he was neither a man of action nor experienced in killing.
His own life and then his family had been in jeopardy, but he would have
thought, before learning differently, that he’d have reservations when
his finger first curled around the trigger. He would have expected to
experience at least a flicker of regret after shooting a man in the
chest even if the bastard deserved shooting.
He clearly remembered the dark glee with which he had emptied the
Beretta at the fleeing Buick. The savage lurking in the human genetic
heritage was as accessible to him as to any man, regardless of how
educated, well-read, and civilized he was.
What he had discovered about himself did not displease him as much as
perhaps it should. Hell, it didn’t displease him at all.
He knew that he was capable of killing any number of men to save his own
life, Paige’s life, or the lives of his children. And although he swam
in a society where it was intellectually correct to embrace pacifism as
the only hope of civilization’s survival, he didn’t see himself as a
hopeless reactionary or an evolutionary throwback or a degenerate but
merely as a man acting precisely as nature intended.
Civilization began with the family, with children protected by mothers
and fathers willing to sacrifice and even die for them.
If the family wasn’t safe any more, if the government couldn’t or
wouldn’t protect the family from the depredations of rapists and child
molesters and killers, if homicidal sociopaths were released from prison
after serving less time than fraudulent evangelists who embezzled from
their churches and greedy hotel-rich millionairesses who underpaid their
taxes, then civilization had ceased to exist.
If children were fair game–as any issue of a daily paper would confirm
they were–then the world had devolved into savagery. Civilization
existed only in tiny units, within the walls of those houses where the
members of a family shared a love strong enough to make them willing to
put their lives on the line in the defense of one another.
What a day they’d been through. A terrible day. The only good thing
about it was–he had discovered that his fugue, nightmares, and other
symptoms didn’t result from either physical or mental illness. The
trouble was not within him, after all. The boogeyman was real.
But he could take minimal satisfaction from that diagnosis. Although