and spit on the front lawn, I’ll come after all of you, take my time,
catch you at just the right moment.” She cocked the hammer on the
Korth, and their gazes all dropped from her eyes to the gun. “Bigger
gun than this, higher-caliber ammunition, something with a hollow
point, shoot you in the leg and it shatters the bone so bad they have
to amputate. Shoot you in both legs, you’re in a wheelchair the rest
of your life. Maybe one of you gets it in the balls, so you can’t
bring any more like you into the world.”
The moon slid behind clouds.
The night was deep.
From the backyard came the coarse singing of toads.
The three boys stared at her, not sure that she meant for them to go.
They had expected to be turned over to the police.
That, of course, was. out of the question. She had hurt two of
them.
Each of the injured still had a hand cupped tenderly over his crotch,
and both were grimacing with pain. Furthermore, she had threatened
them with a gun outside her home. The argument against her would be
that they had represented no real threat because they hadn’t crossed
her threshold. Although they had spraypainted her house with hateful
and obscene graffiti on three separate occasions, though they had done
financial and emotional damage to her and her child, she knew that
being the wife of a heroic cop was no guarantee against prosecution on
a variety of charges that inevitably would result in her imprisonment
instead of theirs.
“Get out of here,” she said.
They rose to their feet but then hesitated as if afraid she would shoot
them in the back.
“Go,” she said. “Now.”
At last they hurried past her, along the side of the house, and she
followed at a distance to be sure they actually cleared out. They kept
glancing back at her.
On the front lawn, standing in the dew-damp grass, she got a good look
at what they had done to at least two and possibly three sides of the
house. The red, yellow, and sour-apple-green paint seemed to glow in
the light of the streetlamps. They had scrawled their personal tagger
symbols everywhere, and they had favored the F-word with and without a
variety of suffixes, as noun and verb and adjective. But the central
message was as it had been the previous two times they’d struck: KILLER
COP.
The three boys–two of them limping–reached their car, which was
parked nearly a block to the north. A black Infinity. They took off
with a squeal of spinning tires, leaving clouds of blue smoke in their
wake.
KILLER COP.
WIDOWMAKER.
ORPHANMAKER.
Heather was more deeply disturbed by the irrationality of the graffiti
than by the confrontation with the three taggers. Jack had not been to
blame. He’d been doing his duty. How was he supposed to have taken a
machine gun from a homicidal maniac without resorting to lethal
force?
She was overcome with a feeling that civilization was sinking in a sea
of mindless hatred.
ANSON OLIVER LIVES!
Anson Oliver was the maniac with the Micro Uzi, a promising young film
director with three features released in the past four years. Not
surprisingly, he made angry movies about angry people. Since the
shootout, Heather had seen all three films. Oliver had made excellent
use of the camera and had had a powerful narrative style. Some of his
scenes were dazzling. He might even have been a genius and, in time,
might have been honored with Oscars and other awards. But there was a
disquieting moral arrogance in his work, a smugness and bullying, that
now appeared to have been an early sign of much deeper problems
exacerbated by too many drugs.
ASSASSIN .
She wished that Toby didn’t have to see his father labeled a
murderer.
Well, he’d seen it before. Twice before, all over his own house. He
had heard it at school, as well, and had been in two fights because of
it. He was a little guy, but he had guts. Though he’d lost both of
the fights, he would no doubt disregard her advice to turn the other