went to shut off the alarm and get the morning paper. When I opened the door, a FedEx envelope fell inward, onto my bare feet. I picked it up and there wasn’t an address tag on it, just the envelope. It didn’t feel like there was anything inside.
I got the paper, brought it and the envelope back to the table. I pulled the tab and tore it open. The contents refused to dump out when I shook it, and I had to reach in to free them. There were two items, a piece of paper, and a thicker sheet, a little tacky on one side.
It took a moment for me to realize that the tacky sheet was a photograph. I’d never seen one like it. It was eight by ten, and it felt fresh, as if it had just come from some one-hour place. The image was in shades of red, popping out of a black background. People seen in red.
I was looking at my bedroom. I was looking at myself, asleep, in bed.
With a man, standing beside me, and holding a thing that wasn’t as red as I was, or as he was, in his hand. Pointing it at my head.
A man pointing a gun at my head.
I dropped the coffee and the cigarette and the photograph all at once, felt the scald as the liquid splattered from the mug to my leg. The cigarette died with a sizzle in the spill.
The other piece, the paper, was a typed photocopy, with toner streaks across its face. It read:
GO ASK TOMMY WHY I’M HOLDING A GUN TO YOUR HEAD.
I dropped that one, too.
In my chest I could feel my heart beating so savagely and so hard, I imagined bruises rising on my skin.
I had to get out of this house. It wasn’t a safe place, it wasn’t my place, it had become someone else’s. I picked up the photograph and the paper, each of them now stained with spilled coffee, and stuffed them back in the envelope, panicked trying to find my keys and my coat.
And I went.
All portals secure.
Bullshit.
CHAPTER 24
Maybe there’s a lower brain, or a higher one, or something, a part that understands before the conscious kicks in.
Maybe I was just so worked up, I didn’t even realize that I was thinking.
I was racing in the Jeep, and I wasn’t trying to think at all, but I was realizing shit left and right. By the time I’d hit Broadway I understood my nightmare on a whole different level, knew that at least one of the cameras had been literal.
The man with the gun, he was alone, I was sure he was alone, because the angle, it was from the bureau, and that was where he had set the camera holding his fancy film. Working in the dark, without the light, and he had set the auto feature or whatever it was, and gone and posed with his gun and my head, and the camera had snapped, and in my dream last night, that was the noise that had registered.
I was crossing the Broadway bridge, passing people illegally, and I had to brake hard at the curve, where the road turns unexpectedly north-south. I passed the post office, turned west again, heading up Flanders. I ran the lights at Eighteenth and Nineteenth, over the freeway, not even realizing I had done it until the sound of horns penetrated my shell. I didn’t slow down, climbing the hill, and I was sure that was where Tommy would be. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Mikel’s.
Parked on the street, out of the car holding the envelope so tight it hurt, bending the cardboard in my fist, and with my other fist, I pounded on the door. Mikel’s Land Rover was still in its spot, and there was another car in the berth next to it, an older Ford SUV, dingy and dinged. I was trying to remember if I had seen it before when I heard the door open.
I turned, starting to say “Tommy—” and then I didn’t say anything else, because it wasn’t Tommy I was looking at.
The man standing there was about six or seven inches taller than me, wide, but how wide I couldn’t tell, because he was wearing a big black Columbia rain parka, the kind with flaps and pockets and an oversized hood, and it hid a lot of his shape. The hood was up, and in that frozen instant when the door opened and I took it all in, I remember thinking he didn’t have a face inside that hood, that it was just darkness, nothing more.
Both of his hands came up, gloved in black leather, but in one of them was a gun, maybe the same gun from the photograph. I tried to react, to step back and shout and escape, but he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me inside. I fell coming over the threshold, hitting the wall, and I dropped the envelope and brought my hands up to protect my face.
The door slammed, and I felt a hand against my back, felt the palm between my shoulder blades, and the Parka Man shoved me, and I twisted to keep from getting my nose smashed against the wall. He held me upright, pressed against the wall, and he put the gun against my neck. The emptiness in the hood leaned closer, and I saw his eyes and his mouth through narrow holes in the mask.
“You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man said in my ear.
The hand on my back bunched into a fist, taking my coat, and he yanked hard, pulling me off my feet. He was probably twice as heavy as I was, and it seemed like he was twice as strong, and I felt like a straw doll when he forced me down the hall, the gun still biting into my neck. When we reached the entrance to the living room, his fist opened, and he shoved forward, hard, and I staggered, lost my balance, and went sprawling onto the carpet.
Tommy was on the floor in the center of the living room, not quite where Mikel had fallen only four days before. His knees were drawn up to his belly, and his arms were bent behind his back, and his face was bleeding a new stain into the carpet. His mouth and brow looked like a mess of torn skin, and I saw froth at his lips as he struggled to breathe. I saw something white shine in all of that red and pink, a broken tooth or an exposed bone.
Parka Man grabbed my arm, and I was twisted around, and I saw the gun coming up at me again, and he hit me with it. There was a gap, jarring like a bad edit, and then I was on my back, still on the floor, and pain was blossoming from my forehead, making the world tumble, making everything so very much brighter.
The Parka Man leaned down and reached for me again, and I tried to fend him off, screaming and kicking. He shoved his gun against my cheek and his other hand into my throat, forcing my head back down. The barrel of the gun on my skin was sharp and wet. I couldn’t breathe.
“Scream again and I write this off here and now,” Parka Man said softly. His mouth was close to mine, and his breath hit my lips and ran up my nose, and if I’d had the air, I would have gagged. “Scream, I do you both right here.”
I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t even nod. The terror was so complete that it felt like I had no body, that I was just a form of fear, lying on my dead brother’s floor. I tried to make some kind of noise of understanding or assent or surrender, but the flat pressure on my throat grew as Parka Man pushed the barrel of his gun a little harder into my skin, his gloved hand a little harder on my throat. Then both were suddenly gone, and he was backing away. I started coughing, rolled onto my side, trying to stop it, terrified that even that would be too much noise, and I saw Tommy again, and he hadn’t moved.
“Get up,” Parka Man said.
I tried, had turned onto all fours in an attempt to rise, but it still wasn’t quick enough for him. He came back and grabbed me by my hair, and I started to shriek but stopped myself, even though I felt roots tearing. He shoved me at the easy chair by the foot of the couch, and I went into it headfirst, twisting. When I completed the turn, he was standing by Tommy, holding the gun on me.
“Sit. Still.”
I felt blood running from my forehead, catching in my right eyebrow. It felt like it would start dripping into my eye. I didn’t move.
Parka Man backed out of the room, into the entry hall, out of sight. There was a cordless phone on the wall
