'Go inside now, Jacob,' I said. I didn't want him to get any blood on his clothes. I took a deep breath, then climbed up onto the porch. I was going to edge around him toward the doorway, so that I'd be facing the road when I shot him.
Jacob cracked open the door and slipped into the house.
Sonny watched him disappear, and then, as if suddenly intuiting what I was about to do, dropped his hands to his sides. He slid his underpants down off his legs.
Naked, he looked tiny, like a boy. His shoulders were hunched, skinny, his chest virtually hairless. He held his jeans over his crotch. I could tell just from his posture that I'd broken him. It was no longer a struggle for control: he was cowering, waiting to see what my next order might be.
'Drop them,' I said.
Sonny let his jeans and underpants fall to the ground. He kept one hand over his groin, the other on his lips. His mouth was beginning to bleed in earnest now. There was blood all over his chin, and some of it had dripped down onto his chest.
'Put your hands on your head.'
He put his hands on his head, exposing his groin. I pointed the shotgun at his chest.
'All right,' I said. 'Now turn around and open the door.'
Very slowly, he spun around. I stepped forward, over his little pile of clothes, and pressed the gun's barrel into his spine. I sensed him stiffen, his back muscles clenching at the cold touch of the metal against his naked skin. It was like the tightening of a knot.
'Don't panic when you open the door, Sonny,' I said. 'Just stay calm, and everything'll be okay.'
He dropped one of his hands, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.
After the darkness of the porch, there was something almost surreal about the brightly lit entranceway. It was like stepping up onto a stage. Lou's body was laid out across the tiles, his head thrown back, as if in laughter. The floor must've tilted a little toward the living room, because that's the way the blood had spread. It looked darker than it had before, almost black, and it glistened in the light.
The door swung away from Sonny, all the way around on its hinges until it banged into the wall. Jacob was standing off to the right, his rifle pointing down toward Lou's corpse; there was a startled expression on his face. He stared at us, waiting to see what we were going to do. Sonny didn't move, but I felt him inhale sharply, his back expanding against the barrel of the gun.
'Come on, Sonny,' I said. 'Just walk right by it.'
I pushed him with the gun, forcing him to step forward into the house, his bare foot slapping down against the tiled floor. He stopped like that -- one foot inside, one foot outside -- bucking a little, like a mule. I pushed him again, harder this time, and suddenly he wasn't there. Jacob blocked the route to the garage, and Lou's body lay in front of the living room, so there was really only one place for Sonny to go. He ran straight up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
I sprinted after him.
When he reached the top, he turned to the right, and we raced down the hallway toward the master bedroom. I have no idea what drew him in that direction, to the exact spot where I wanted him most -- perhaps he knew that they kept a pistol there, hidden away in the top drawer of the night table, or maybe it was simply the light seeping out through the half-open doorway, with its implication of refuge and protection -- but it must've been an awful shock when he burst into the room and saw the ruin there, saw the blood and the water and heard my footsteps pounding so close behind him. He must've known then -- if he still had any doubts after seeing Lou's body laid out across the entranceway -- that I'd brought him over here to kill him.
His momentum carried him into the room, right up to the foot of the bed. I didn't see him look down at Nancy's body, but he must've seen it, must've caught at least a glimpse of it before he turned, his hands raised in a pair of fists, as if to strike me. His nakedness made him seem savage, like a caveman. His face was contorted, a horrible mixture of terror and rage and confusion. His chin was smeared with blood.
I was in the doorway, blocking his escape. I pumped the gun, and it ejected an empty shell -- the one I'd killed Nancy with -- onto the floor at my feet. Then, without pausing to think, I fired into Sonny's chest.
There was a kick against my body, a loud explosion, and a fresh spray of blood slapped wetly across the blankets.
Sonny was knocked onto the bed. He landed with a splashing sound, throwing a little wave of water off the edge of the mattress. His chest was a ragged mass of red and pink and white, but he was still alive. His legs were kicking, and he was trying to lift his head. He was staring at me, his eyes bulging from his head, showing more white than anything else. His right hand was clutching at the covers, pulling them toward his side.
I pumped the gun again, the empty shell falling to the carpet. Then I stepped forward and aimed down at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I saw him shut his eyes. The mattress literally exploded, showering the headboard and the wall behind it with water. I had to jump back to keep from getting it on my clothes.
From the safety of the doorway, I fired the last two shells into the ceiling above the bed. Then I reached into my pocket, put five new shells into the gun, and fired these indiscriminately around the room -- at the armchairs off to the left, at the bathroom door, at the mirror above the dressing table.
I checked myself for spattered blood and reloaded the gun.
Descending the stairs, I fired once into the ceiling. When I got to the bottom, I turned and aimed out into the living room. I shot the leather couch, then the TV set, and finally the coffee table with our glasses on it.
I left one shell loaded in the gun.
I FOUND Jacob hiding in the bathroom. He was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His rifle was lying on the floor at his feet. Sonny's parka and boots were resting in his lap.
'All right,' I said. I was standing in the doorway.
'All right?' Jacob asked. He didn't look up at me.
I took a deep breath. I felt shaky, high, a little out of control. I had the vague suspicion that I might not be thinking very well, and I tried now to slow things down. The hard part was over, I told myself; the rest was just a matter of us acting out our parts.
'It's finished,' I said.
'He's dead?'
I nodded.
'Why'd you shoot so much?'
I didn't answer him. 'Come on, Jacob. We have to get going.'
'Did you have to shoot so much?'
'It's supposed to look like he's pissed. Like he's gone insane.' I wiped my face with my hand. My gloves smelled of gunpowder; I realized I'd have to remember to hide them in the truck before we called the police. A string of water began to drip from the ceiling in the corner. It fell onto the ceramic toilet lid, making a sound like the ticking of a clock. It was from the water bed: it had already started soaking through the plaster.
Jacob removed his glasses. His face seemed off balance without them -- the skin of his cheeks and jowls red and shiny, bloated to the point of distension, as if he were gout ridden, while up top his eyes seemed sunken, dim, weak looking.
'Aren't you afraid of later?' he asked.
'Later?'
'Guilt. Feeling bad.'
I sighed. 'We did it, Jacob. We had to do it, and we did it.'
'You shot Sonny,' he said, as if surprised by this.
'That's right. I shot Sonny.'
'Dead,' Jacob said. 'In cold blood.'
I didn't know what to say to that. I wanted to avoid thinking about what we'd done, knew implicitly that nothing good would come from self-analysis. Up to now I'd felt a comfortable sense of inevitability in all my actions, as if I'd merely been looking on, watching myself on film, thoroughly engaged in what was happening but harboring no illusion that I could alter even the most trivial of events. Fate, a voice seemed to whisper in my ear, and I let the reins slip from my hand. But now Jacob, with his questions, was eroding this. He was making me look back, see
