Steve Gannon
Kane
Prologue
He had been right to change the game. Of that he was certain. Still, he was increasingly troubled by the danger inherent in his recent actions, danger he’d precipitated by breaking rules that had long kept him safe. Nevertheless, this new game simply felt… right.
He stood motionless, slowing his breathing as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gradually he began to discern dim shapes across the room: refrigerator, stove, dishes piled by the sink. In an adjacent alcove, a desk sat littered with papers, pencils, pens. Riding invisible currents, smells came to him as well. The aroma of stale pizza. A hint of fabric softener. A waft of perfume.
Her scent.
Outside, a breeze stirred in the night. Swaying with the wind, skeletal limbs of a nearby sycamore scratched at the roof. Upstairs, a sudden creak.
He froze, his senses straining.
Someone getting up, like last time?
Another creak.
He waited, palms slippery inside the latex gloves.
Silence.
He relaxed his grip on the pistol. Quietly, he pulled a dishtowel from a drying rack by the sink, stepped to the alcove, and lifted a telephone from the desktop. After punching in several random digits, he wrapped the towel around the receiver and set it back on the desk. Next he made his way to an electrical breaker panel behind the laundry room door.
Do it quickly, but don’t let them snap.
Covering the power panel with a wad of clothes from the laundry counter, he sequentially flipped off the toggles. Upon finishing, he heard a tinny voice sounding from the kitchen: “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again.” Then came a series of beeps, muffled by the towel but still alarmingly audible.
Careful not to make a sound, he quickly returned to the kitchen and found more dishtowels, further encasing the phone.
Better.
He stood in the dark, listening.
Nothing.
Satisfied no one had heard, he crept to a freestanding chopping block in the center of the room. After setting his knapsack on the maple surface, he reached for a rack of knives hanging by the stove. On his first visit he had noticed the black-handled utensils marked with the Zwilling J.A. Henckles imprint. Pulse quickening, he selected a razor-sharp utility knife with a four-inch blade. Next, with growing excitement, he reshouldered his knapsack and eased through the living room to the front of the house. There, a staircase led to the second floor.
Now?
Not yet. Give it a few more minutes.
Better safe than sorry.
He forced himself to wait on the bottom tread, an exquisite pressure building within. He pictured the woman as he had last seen her, long limbed and glistening with sweat, exercise tights clinging to her torso like a layer of paint.
Time to move.
In the rooms above, the family slept, unaware they were about to embark on a short but singular journey, one he was certain would prove the most intense of their otherwise insipid existence.
A moment later he started up the stairs.
1
Years ago my ex-partner, Arnie Mercer, was going through a particularly tough time in his personal life. Eventually he started seeing a therapist. Rather than talking with someone provided by the LAPD, Arnie chose instead to visit a private counselor in West Los Angeles-understandably not wanting his psychiatric treatment to show up in his police personnel jacket.
Like most cops who’ve run up against an “expert witness” shrink testifying in court to save some dirtbag defendant, I have little faith in the psychiatric profession. That said, the guy Arnie hooked up with struck me as even more of a quack than usual. I don’t know whether the counselor in question actually believed the stuff he was feeding Arnie, or whether it was simply an approach designed to help my partner sort out his problems.
Either way, Arnie and I talked about it. In a nutshell, here’s what Arnie’s therapist had to say: We’re all the center of our own little universe, and there’s no reality other than the one we each create for ourselves. Now, I could argue that one all day, and I did. If somebody hits you with a pipe, it raises a lump that’s real. You’re not making it up. On the other hand, Dr. X also contended-somewhat to the contrary, in my opinion-that being in control of your own little universe is merely an illusion. According to him, no one really controls anything in life that truly matters-and the sooner you accepted that, the better. I guess the lesson was to just sit back, don’t worry, and let things happen.
Naturally, I considered this a load of horseshit. I also realized that, following an exceptionally nasty divorce, Arnie was simply trying to get his life back on track as best he could. Being the sensitive person I am, I voiced my opinion to Arnie as gently as I could. “Arnie, that’s a load of horseshit,” I told him.
It’s been years since, but recently I’ve begun to have my doubts-at least about the “being in control” part. Not regarding little things, of course. As for the big things-sure, we all think we can control significant parts of our lives, the parts that matter. The important things.
Then, without warning, something ugly crawls out of nowhere and proves just how wrong we are.
Several years ago and a lot of tears in the past, my oldest son Tom died in a rock climbing accident. The cliche that advises parents not to outlive their children is true. Anyone who has lost a child knows it leaves a heart-wrenching emptiness inside you that can never be filled, a bottomless ache that may dull with time but will never be gone. Tommy’s death devastated me. I simply… broke. I crawled into a bottle and stayed drunk for days. Blinded by grief, I did and said things of which I’m ashamed-terrible, hurtful things I wish I could take back.
But of course I can’t.
Anyway, that morning as the sun crested a ridge to the east, I was sitting on a grassy slope in Forest Lawn Cemetery looking out over the city of Burbank and trying not to think about how things might have turned out if I had been a better father, a better man, when I noticed my wife Catheryn’s Volvo angling into a slot beside my beach-rusted Suburban in the parking lot below.
I had come out to visit Tom’s grave early that day, leaving Santa Monica before sunrise to avoid freeway traffic. Catheryn and I had decided on a temporary separation several weeks back, and I had been bunking in Arnie’s spare bedroom in Santa Monica ever since.
Curious, I watched as my three remaining children piled out of the Volvo-Travis, who had been driving, Allison, and Nate-followed by a relatively new four-legged addition to the Kane household, a two-year-old yellow Labrador retriever named Callie. No sign of Catheryn.
Not waiting for his siblings, Nate started up the slope, picking his way through rows of brass memorial plaques that curved across the hillside like contour lines on a map. Eager to explore, Callie bounded past Nate,
