they'd killed him, hoping this would be the end of it.
But people were that stupid only in movies. These six were not about to assume anything, were not about to walk away without checking whether their attempts to kill him had been effective, and as he lay there bleeding and in agony, trying to feign lifelessness, he was yanked out of the shower by his leg. His head hit the edge of the stall, and bleeding erupted from a new fissure behind his ear. He opened his eyes, but his vision was strobing and he could not see.
There was only a moving blackness against a pale blurred background:
the robed figures of the board encircling him.
Other hands grabbed his arms. He was pulled into a modified standing position and dragged out of the bathroom, into the hallway, into the kitchen. On the way, he was unceremoniously slammed against doorjambs and table edges and countertops.
The battering seemed to restore some of the clarity to his vision. He could now see where he was, and he both saw! and felt the vice president grab his right wrist and use it to J swat the wall phone. Pain flared up his arm, and the receiver was knocked off the hook.
He was dragged out to the living room, his right knee forced into the corner of the coffee table, drawing blood, his shoulder shoved against a potted palm stand, knocking the plant over.
The vice president opened the door to the deck.
He realized what was happening now, he understood what they were doing.
They were making it appear as though he'd slipped in the shower and hit his head. Suffering from a disorienting head wound, he'd then staggered out of the bathroom, made his way to the kitchen where he attempted to dial 911, but, baffled and confused, he wandered into the living room, then onto the deck.
Where he fell over the railing and died.
It would look like an accident, he realized. No one would know that he'd been murdered.
As much as he hated himself for it, he began to scream, and to his horror his screams were the high-pitched yelps of a frightened woman.
The board members were laughing and joking about his manhood as they pressed his right palm against the sliding glass door and rammed his genitals against the metal door frame. He kept screaming, and there was no thought behind it. He was not trying to frighten them off or attract attention from possible passersby, he was screaming because he had to. It was an instinctive reaction, an innate response.
They pulled him onto the deck.
He wanted to remain cool; disdainful toward them to the end. He wanted to make cutting remarks that would wound and hurt them, that they would think about after he was dead, but he could not do that. He simply screamed those girlish screams as the men held his body and smashed it repeatedly against the railing until a just-painted two-by-four came loose.
He could feel nothing below the waist, but his arms were working and he could still see through the blood, and he attempted to break his fall as he flew through the air and landed with a bone-crushing thud on the rocky soil of the wooded sloping hillside.
He was still alive.
The realization filled him not only with hope and an insane glee but with the unshakable desire for revenge. Despite their best efforts, the board had been unable to eradicate him, and their ineffectiveness would be their downfall. He did not know if he could move, if he was paralyzed or simply badly injured, but he knew enough to remain still.
They were no doubt watching from above, and it would be best to play dead for a while. He could check his vital signs later.
But there was no later.
He must have drifted into unconsciousness because in what seemed like seconds, he was squinting through half closed lids and drying blood at the feet of the board members. They were implacable, and more than anything else it was their relentlessness that finally sapped the last of his will and hope. Ray opened his eyes, not caring if they knew.
He saw the president accept a large rock from one of the other board members, place it on the sloping ground inches from his face, then methodically repeat the procedure.
He felt several sets of hands lift the top half of his body, and he understood what they were going to do.
Please, he thought. Let it be quick and painless.
But no death was quick, he realized, no death was painless. And in a second that seemed to last an hour, that realization was brought home to him in a very profound and personal way.
After the funeral, they all went back to Liz's, where even with the large gathering of people, the house seemed curiously empty. Maureen, along with Audrey Hodges and Tina Stewart, had made the food and organized the informal social. The three women were gamely trying to get Liz involved, to keep her occupied with small details and thus prevent her from dwelling obsessively on her husband's death, but even amid the low buzz of multiple conversations, Ray's loss was acutely felt, and Barry could not help thinking how lonely this house would seem once all the people were gone and Liz was by herself.
He stood with Frank and Mike, and the three men watched their wives shunt a zombified Liz across the living room to refill an hors-d'oeuvre plate. They were talking about road construction on the highway that had narrowed the route to Interstate 15 down to two lanes. They had been talking about baseball... and the weather ... gas prices...
anything except Ray. They didn't know each other well enough to open up, to be emotionally truthful and share their feelings, and the three of them had been assiduously avoiding the one subject they'd each been thinking about. Ray had been the catalyst between them, the one who enabled them to speak honestly in front of one another, and with him gone there was a stiltedness to their interaction. He felt the way he had when Todd Ingalls , his best Mend from kindergarten through third grade, had moved away and he'd been forced to play with John Wakeman , a casual friend, a backup friend, someone with whom he eventually found out he had almost nothing in common. Now Frank and Mike were his backup friends, and while they seemed like good guys, it was not the same, not the same at all.
He hadn't realized how much he had come to rely on Ray, how close the two of them had become. There was deep sorrow within him when he thought about the old man, and as he looked out the windows at the crowded deck, it hit him that they would never again sit out there barbecuing and discussing the Big Issues. Or just shooting the breeze.
It was as though a huge chunk of his life had simply been cut out and discarded, and what was left behind was a painful emptiness.
Along with the sadness, however, there was anger. He had not yet figured out how, but he knew in his gut that the association had been involved in Ray's death. Not directly, that's not the way they worked, but in a circumspect, roundabout way, not doing the deed themselves but bringing about the circumstances that allowed it to happen. From across the room, he caught the eye of Greg Davidson, who nodded a weary hello. Greg and Wynona, he knew, were moving out this week, priced out of their own home by Bonita Vista's gate. That's how the association operated. They were facilitators.
He thought aboutDekeMeldrum , lying dead in the ditch as a crowd gathered in the darkness.
Sometimes they were direct, though. Sometimes they did the dirty work themselves.
There's no telling what they're capable of.
Maureen and the other wives brought Liz by to say hello and accept condolences, and the three men reiterated what they'd said at the funeral, how sorry they were for her loss, how much they'd miss Ray, he was a great friend. Barry kept his words short and sweet. He was unnerved by the listlessness of Liz's gaze. It was like looking at a completely different woman than the one he knew, and he glanced at her for only brief seconds before turning his attention back to Maureen. It was pathetic and heartless and selfish and self-centered, but he felt extremely uncomfortable. He was not one of those people who was good with the sick or the troubled or the dying. He could write about it, but in real life he was a complete washout when it came to offering others emotional support. Thank God there were people like Maureen, who always knew the right thing to do and who had the constitution to follow through.
'Can you help us in the kitchen for a moment?' Maureen asked.
