attack might be. With apologies to poets and diplomats and gentle
persons everywhere, I pulled the trigger.
I was hoping to hit him in the shoulder or arm, though I suspect it’s
only in movies that you can confidently calculate to wound a man rather
than kill him. In real life, panic and physics and fate screw things up.
Most likely, more often than not, in spite of the best intentions, the
polite wounding shot drills through the guy’s brain or bounces among his
ribs, off his sternum, and ends up dead-center in his heart or kills a
kindly grandmother baking cookies six blocks away.
This time, though I wasn’t firing another warning shot, I missed his
shoulder, arm, heart, brain, and everything else that would have bled.
Panic, physics, fate. The bullet tore into the club, spraying his face
with splinters and larger fragments of wood.
Suddenly convinced of his own mortality and perhaps recognizing the
incomparable danger of confronting a marksman as poor as I am, the
weasel pitched his makeshift cudgel, turned, and ran back toward the
elevator alcove.
I juked when I saw he was going to throw the club, but my Big Bag of
Really Smooth Moves was empty. Instead of ducking away from the club, I
cunningly dodged straight into it, got rapped across the chest, and
fell.
I was getting up even as I was going down, but by the time I made it to
my feet again, my assailant was nearing the end of the hall. My legs
were longer than his, but I wasn’t going to be able to catch up with him
easily.
If you’re looking for someone to shoot a man in the back, I’m not your
guy, regardless of the circumstances. My attacker safely turned the
corner into the elevator alcove where he switched on a flashlight of his
own.
Although I needed to nail this creep, finding Jimmy Wing was an even
higher priority. The boy might have been hurt and left to die.
Besides, when the kidnapper arrived at the top of the ladder, a toothy
surprise would be waiting for him. Orson wouldn’t let the guy get out of
the elevator shaft.
I scooped up the flashlight and hurried to the third in the line of
doors along the hall. It was ajar, and I pushed it all the way open.
Of the three chambers I’d thus far explored, this was the smallest, less
than half the size of the other two, so the light swept from wall to
wall. Jimmy was not here.
The only item of interest was a balled-up yellow cloth about ten feet
beyond the threshold. I almost ignored it, eager to try the next door
along the corridor, but then I ventured inside and, with the same hand
that held the gun, I plucked the rag off the floor.
It wasn’t a rag, after all, but the soft cotton top from a pair of
pajamas. A crew-neck pullover. About the right size for a five-year-old.
Across the chest, in red and black letters, were the words Jedi Knight.
A sudden foreboding made my mouth go dry.
When I’d followed Orson away from Lilly Wing’s house, I had already
reluctantly decided that her little boy was beyond saving, but
subsequently, against my better judgment, I had allowed myself to hope
too much. In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially
here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as
we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to
remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it’s not a steel and
concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter
future.
Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of
spider web, and it alone can’t long support the terrible weight of an
anguished mind and a tortured heart. Because I had loved Lilly for so
many years now as a friend, in other days, more deeply than one loves
even the dearest friend i had wanted to spare her from this worst of all
calamities, from the loss of a child. I had wanted this more desperately