alarming hen- but to no purpose. Maybe there would be no trouble. He
might never again come face-to-face with whatever presence he had been
aware of in the cemetery. One such episode in a lifetime was more
contact with the supernatural than most people ever experienced. Wait
for developments. Hope there were none. But if there were, and if he
obtained concrete proof of danger, then he would have to let her know
that maybe, just maybe, their year of tumult was not yet at an end.
The Micro Uzi had two magazines welded at right angles, giving it a
forty-round capacity. The heft of it was reassuring. More than two
kilos of death waiting to be dispensed. He couldn’t imagine any
enemy–wild creature or man–that the Uzi couldn’t handle. He put the
Korth in the top right-hand desk drawer, toward the back. He closed
the drawer and left the study with the other two weapons. Before
slipping past the living room, Jack waited until he heard Toby
laughing, then glanced around the corner of the archway. The boy was
focused on the TV, Falstaff at his side. Jack hurried to the kitchen
at the end of the hall, where he put the Uzi in the pantry, behind
extra boxes of cornflakes, Cheerios, and shredded wheat that wouldn’t
be opened for at least a week.
Upstairs in the master bedroom, breezy music played behind the closed
door to the adjoining bathroom. Soaking in the tub, Heather had turned
the radio to a goldenoldies station. “Dreamin’ ” by Johnny Burnette
was just winding down. Jack pushed the Mossberg under the bed, far
enough back so she wouldn’t notice it when they made the bed in the
morning but not so far back that he couldn’t get hold of it in a
hurry.
“Poetry in Motion.” Johnny Tillotson. Music from an innocent age.
Jack hadn’t even been born yet when that record had been made. He sat
on the edge of the bed, listening to the music, feeling mildly guilty
about not sharing his fears with Heather. But he just didn’t want to
upset her needlessly.
She’d been through so much. In some ways, his being wounded and
hospitalized had been harder on her than him. because she’d been
required to bear alone the pressures of day-to-day existence while he’d
recuperated. She needed a reprieve from tension. Probably nothing to
worry about, anyway. few sick raccoons. A bold little crow. A
strange experience in a cemetery which was suitably creepy itial for
some television show like Unsolved Mysteries but hadn’t been as
threatening to life and limb as of a hundred things that could happen
in the average police officer’s workday.
Loading and secreting the guns would most likely prove to have been an
overreaction. .. Well, he’d done what a cop should do. Prepared
himself to serve and protect.
On the radio in the bathroom, Bobby Vee was singing
“The Night Has a
Thousand Eyes.”
Beyond the bedroom windows, snow was falling harder than before. The
flakes, previously fluffy and wet, were now small, more numerous, and
dry. The ..wind had accelerated again. Sheer curtains of snow rippkd
and billowed across the black night. After his mom warned him against
allowing Falstaff to sleep on the bed, after good-nigh kisses, after
his dad told him to keep the dog on the floor, after the lights were
turned out–except for the red night-light– after his mom warned him
again about Falstaff, after the hall door was pulled half shut, after
enough time had passed to be sure neither his mom nor his dad was going
to sneak back to check on the retriever, Toby sat up in his alcove bed,
patted the mattress invitingly, and whispered, “Here, Falstaff. Come
on, fella.”
The dog was busily sniffing along the base of the door at the head of
the back stairs. He whined softly, unhappily. “Falstaff,” Toby said,
louder than before.
“Here, boy, come here, hurry.” Falstaff glanced at him, then put his
snout to the doorsill again, snuffling and whimpering at the same
time.
“Come here–we’ll play covered wagon or spaceship or anything you
want,” Toby wheedled. Suddenly getting a whiff of something that