shot.”
“If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there’s a cop over
there too.”
“If this bastard knew where the girls were, he’d waste that cop, Vic,
and Kathy in about a minute flat.”
“You handled him.”
– “I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a
gun in the desk drawer or that I’d use one if I had it. I took him by
surprise. He won’t let that happen again. He’ll have all the surprise
on his side.”
He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his
tongue.
“Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load
them?”
Speaking around the ice cube, he said, “I saw how that jolted you. I
did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge.”
“Why?”
As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he’d had that
something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he
even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling
intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns
to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.
He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded
unbalanced–if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and
precautions.
“And something was coming,” she said. “This dead-ringer. You sensed
him coming.”
“Yeah. I guess so. Somehow.”
“Psychic.”
He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t call it that. Not if you mean a
psychic vision. There wasn’t any vision. I didn’t see what was coming,
didn’t have a clear premonition. Just this . . . this awful sense of
pressure, gravity . . . like on one of those whip rides at an amusement
park, when it swings you around real fast and you’re pinned to the seat,
feel a weight on your chest. You know, you’ve been on rides like that,
Charlotte always loves them.”
“Yeah. I understand . . . I guess.”
“This started out like that . . . and got a hundred times worse, until
I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving
for the doctor’s office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch
was here, but I didn’t feel anything when I walked into the house.”
They were silent for a moment.
Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.
Paige said, “How could he look exactly like you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would he say you stole his life?”
“I don’t know, I just don’t know.”
“I’m scared, Marty. I mean, it’s all so weird. What’re we going to
“Past tonight, I don’t know. But tonight, at least, we’re not staying
here. We’ll go to a hotel.”
“But if the police don’t find him dead somewhere, then there’s tomorrow
. . . and the day after tomorrow.”
“I’m battered and tired and not thinking straight. For now I can only
concentrate on tonight, Paige. I’ll just have to worry about tomorrow
when tomorrow gets here.”
Her lovely face was lined with anxiety. He had not seen her even half
this distraught since Charlotte’s illness five years ago.
“I love you,” he said, laying his hand gently against the side of her
head.
Putting her hand over his, she said, “Oh, God, I love you, too, Marty,
you and the girls, more than anything, more than life itself. We can’t
let anything happen to us, to what we all have together. We just
can’t.”
“We won’t,” he said, but his words sounded as hollow and false as a
young boy’s braggadocio.
He was aware that neither of them had expressed the slightest hope that
the police would protect them. He could not repress his anger over the
fact they were not accorded anything resembling the service, courtesy,
and consideration that the characters in his novels always received from
the authorities.
At the core, mystery novels were about good and evil, about the triumph
of the former over the latter, and about the reliability of the justice
system in a modern democracy. They were popular because they reassured
the reader that the system worked far more often than not, even if the