nuclear blasts–if he just did not let them out of his sight.
His last glimpse of the BMW was through a sudden veil of hot tears that
he barely managed to repress.
Disturbed by the intensity of his emotional reaction to his family’s
departure, he turned away from the window and said savagely, “What the
hell’s the matter with me?”
After all, the girls were merely going to school and Paige to her
office, where they went more days than not. They were following a
routine that had never been dangerous before, and he had no logical
reason to believe it was going to be dangerous today–or ever.
He looked at his wristwatch. 7,48.
His appointment with Dr. Guthridge was only slightly more than five
hours away, but that seemed an interminable length of time.
Anything could happen in five hours.
Needles to Ludlow to Daggett.
Move, move, move.
9,04 Pacific Standard Time.
Barstow. Dry bleached town in a hard dry land. Stagecoaches stopped
here long ago. Railroad yards. Waterless rivers. Cracked stucco,
peeling paint. Green of trees faded by a perpetual layer of dust on the
leaves. Motels, fast-food restaurants, more motels.
A service station. Gasoline. Men’s room. Candy bars. Two cans of
cold Coke.
Attendant too friendly. Chatty. Slow to make change. Little pig eyes.
Fat cheeks. Hate him. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Should shoot him. Should blow his head off. Satisfying. Can’t risk
it. Too many people around.
On the road again. Interstate 15. West. Candy bars and Coke at eighty
miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale.
Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.
As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its
eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking
sun.
Marty owned five guns.
He was not a hunter or collector. He didn’t shoot skeet or take target
practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn’t
armed himself out of fear of social collapse though sometimes he saw
signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but
he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.
He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a
mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a
was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all
of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched,
minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more
comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.
In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth .38 revolver and a box of
cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality,
produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The
Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.
Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting
range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for
the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach
them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than
the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance.
In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm
to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal
and tragic accidents extremely rare.
He removed the .38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the
garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car,
a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his
one-o’clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols–a
Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904–were stored in their
original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the
garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required.
He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being
put away, and loaded it.
He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove,
in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not