Mr. Murder

“Right in the headline. Oh, wait’ll you read it. It makes me look ridiculous, spooky-old-scary-old Marty Stillwater, book hustler extraordinary. Jesus, if he happened to read that article today, I don’t half blame Lowbock for thinking this was all a publicity scam of some kind.”

She said, “He’s an idiot.”

“It is an unlikely damn story.”

“I believed it.”

“I know. And I love you for that.”

He kissed her. She clung to him but briefly.

“How’s your throat?” she asked.

“I’ll live.”

“That idiot thinks you choked yourself.”

“I didn’t. But it’s possible, I suppose.”

“Stop seeing his side of it. You’re making me mad. What now? Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

“Fast as we can,” he agreed. “And not come back until we can figure out what the hell this is all about. Can you throw a couple of suitcases together, basics for all of us for a few days?”

“Sure,” she said, already heading for the stairs.

“I’ll go call Vic and Kathy, make sure everything’s all right over there, then I’ll come help you. And Paige—the Mossberg is under the bed in our room.”

Starting up the stairs, stepping over the splintery debris, she said, “Okay.”

“Get it out, put it on top of the bed while you pack.”

“I will,” she said, already a third of the way up the stairs.

He didn’t think he had sufficiently impressed her with the need for uncommon caution. “Take it with you to the girls’ room.”

“All right.”

Speaking sharply enough to halt her, pain encircling his neck when he tilted his head back to stare up at her, he said, “Damn it, I mean it, Paige.”

She looked down, surprised because he never used that tone of voice. “Okay. I’ll keep it close.”

“Good.”

He headed for the telephone in the kitchen and made it as far as the dining room when he heard Paige cry out from the second floor. Heart pounding so hard he could draw only shallow staccato breaths, Marty raced back into the foyer, expecting to see her in The Other’s grasp.

She was standing at the head of the stairs, horrified by the gruesome stains on the carpet, which she was seeing for the first time. “Hearing about it, I still didn’t think . . .” She looked down at Marty. “So much blood. How could he just . . . just walk away?”

“He couldn’t if he was . . . just a man. That’s why I’m sure he’ll be back. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for a month, but he’ll be back.”

“Marty, this is crazy.”

“I know.”

“Sweet Jesus,” she said, less in any profane sense than as a prayer, and hurried into the master bedroom.

Marty returned to the kitchen and took the Beretta out of the cabinet. Although he had loaded the pistol himself, he popped out the magazine, checked it, slammed it back into place, and jacked a round into the chamber.

He noticed scores of overlapping dirty footprints all across the Mexican-tile floor. Many were still wet. During the past two hours, the police had tramped in and out of the rain, and evidently not all of them had been thoughtful enough to wipe their feet at the door.

Though he knew the cops had been busy and that they had better things to do than worry about tracking up the house, the footprints—and the thoughtlessness they represented—seemed to be nearly as profound a violation as the assault by The Other. A surprisingly intense resentment uncoiled in Marty.

While sociopaths stalked the modern world, the judicial system operated on the premise that evil was spawned primarily by societal injustice. Thugs were considered victims of society as surely as the people they robbed or killed were their victims. Recently a man had been released from a California prison after serving six years for raping and murdering an eleven-year-old girl. Six years. The girl, of course, was still as dead as she had ever been. Such outrages were now so common that the story got only minor press coverage. If the courts would not protect eleven-year-old innocents, and if the House and Senate wouldn’t write laws to force the courts to do so, then judges and politicians couldn’t be counted on to protect anyone, anywhere, at any time.

But, damn it, at least you expected the cops to protect you because cops were on the street every day, in the thick of it, and they knew what the world was really like. The grand poobahs in Washington and smug eminences in courtrooms had isolated themselves from reality with high salaries, endless perks, and lush pensions; they lived in gate-guarded neighborhoods with private security, sent their kids to private schools—and lost touch with the damage they perpetrated. But not cops. Cops were blue-collar. Working men and women. In their work they saw evil every day; they knew it was as widespread among the privileged as among the middle-class and the poor, that society was less at fault than the flawed nature of the human species.

The police were supposed to be the last line of defense against barbarity. But if they became cynical about the system they were asked to uphold, if they believed they were the only ones who cared about justice any more, they would cease caring. When you needed them, they would conduct their forensic tests, fill out thick files of paperwork to please the bureaucracy, track dirt across your once-clean floors, and leave you without even sympathy.

Standing in his kitchen, holding the loaded Beretta, Marty knew that he and Paige now constituted their own last line of defense. No one else. No greater authority. No guardian of the public welfare.

He needed courage but also the free-wheeling imagination that he brought to the writing of his books. Suddenly he seemed to be living in a noir novel, in that amoral realm where stories by James M. Cain or Elmore Leonard took place. Survival in such a dark world depended upon quick thinking, fast action, utter ruthlessness. Most of all it hinged on the ability to imagine the worst that life could come up with next and, by imagining, be ready for it rather than surprised.

His mind was blank.

He had no idea where to go, what to do. Pack up and get out of the house, yes. But then what?

He just stared at the gun in his hand.

Although he loved the works of Cain and Leonard, his own books were not that dark. They celebrated reason, logic, virtue, and the triumph of social order. His imagination did not lead him toward vigilante solutions, situational ethics, or anarchism.

Blank.

Worried about his ability to cope when so much was riding on him, Marty picked up the kitchen phone and called the Delorios. When Kathy answered on the first ring, he said, “It’s Marty.”

“Marty, are you okay? We saw all the police leaving, and then the officer over here left, too, but nobody’s made the situation clear to us. I mean, is everything all right? What in the world is going on?”

Kathy was a good neighbor and genuinely concerned, but Marty had no intention of wasting time in a full recounting of what he’d been through with either the would-be killer or the police. “Where are Charlotte and Emily?”

“Watching TV.”

“Where?”

“Well, in the family room.”

“Are your doors locked?”

“Yes, of course, I think so.”

“Be sure. Check them. Do you have a gun?”

“A gun? Marty, what is this?”

“Do you have a gun?” he insisted.

“I don’t believe in guns. But Vic has one.”