She walked to the kitchen door and peeked around the frame, feeling both stupid and not stupid at all. She sighed, blowing back her bangs. The kitchen was empty. She started across the room to turn off the stove light, then stopped. There were supposed to be four chairs at the kitchen table, three for the family and the one they called the guest chair. But now there were only three.
“Don’t move,” someone said. “If you move, I’ll kill you. If you scream, I’ll kill you.”
She stopped, pulse hammering, the hair on the back of her neck lifting. If she hadn’t done her business before coming down, urine would be running down her legs and puddling on the floor. The man, the intruder, was sitting on the guest chair in their living room, just far enough back from the archway that she could only see him from the knees down. He was wearing faded jeans and moccasins with no socks. His ankles were riddled with red blotches that might have been psoriasis. His upper body was just a vague silhouette. All she could tell was that his shoulders were broad and a little slumped—not as if he was tired, but as if they were so crammed with workout muscle that he couldn’t square them. It was funny, all you could see at a moment like this. Terror had frozen her brain’s usual sorting ability, and everything flowed in without prejudice. This was the man who had killed Frank Peterson. The man who bit into him like a wild animal and raped him with a tree branch. That man was in her house, and here she stood in her shortie pajamas, with her nipples no doubt sticking out like headlights.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” Jeannie whispered, but she had begun to sway, on the edge of a faint, and she was afraid she might pass out before he could say what he had come to say. If that happened, he would kill her. After that he might leave, or he might go upstairs to kill Ralph. He’d do it before Ralph’s mind cleared enough to know what was going on.
And leave Derek to come home from camp an orphan.
No. No. No.
“W-What do you want?”
“Tell your husband it’s done here in Flint City. Tell him he has to stop. Tell him that if he does that, things go back to normal. Tell him if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him. I’ll kill them all.”
His hand emerged from the shadows of the living room and into the dim light cast by the single-bar fluorescent. It was a big hand. He closed it into a fist.
“What does it say on my fingers? Read it to me.”
She stared at the faded blue letters. She tried to speak and couldn’t. Her tongue was nothing but a lump clinging to the roof of her mouth.
He leaned forward. She saw eyes under a broad shelf of forehead. Black hair, short enough to bristle. Black eyes, not just on her but in her, searching her heart and mind.
“It says MUST,” he told her. “You see that, don’t you?”
“Y-Y-Y—”
“And what you must do is tell him to stop.” Red lips moving inside a black goatee. “Tell him if he or any of them tries to find me, I’ll kill them and leave their guts in the desert for the buzzards. Do you understand me?”
Yes, she tried to tell him, but her tongue wouldn’t move and her knees were unlocking and she put her arms out to break her fall and she didn’t know if she succeeded in that or not because she was gone into darkness before she hit the floor.
3
Jack woke up at seven o’clock with bright summer sun shining through the window and across his bed. Birds were twittering outside. He sat bolt upright, staring wildly around, only faintly aware that his head was throbbing from last night’s vodka.
He got out of bed fast, opened the drawer of his bedside table, and took out the .38 Pathfinder he kept there for home protection. He high-stepped across the bedroom with the gun held beside his right cheek and the short barrel pointing at the ceiling. He kicked his boxers aside, and when he got to the door, which stood open, he paused next to it with his back to the wall. The smell wafting out was fading but familiar: the aftermath of last night’s enchilada adventures. He had gotten up to offload; that much, at least, hadn’t been a dream.
“Is anybody in there? If so, answer up. I’m armed and I will shoot.”
Nothing. Jack took a deep breath and pivoted around the doorframe, going low, sweeping the room from side to side with the barrel of the .38. He saw the toilet with the lid up and the ring down. He saw the newspaper on the floor, turned to the comics. He saw the tub, with its translucent flowered curtain pulled across. He saw shapes behind it, but those were the shower head, the grab handle, the back-scrubber.