yourself. Good. You ought to be. You’re going to die. By your own hand. I can see the death marks on your eyes.” She flicked her glance at Marybeth. “They’re on you, too, honey. Your boyfriend is going to kill you before he kills himself, you know. I wish I could be there to see it happen. I’d like to see how he does it. I hope he cuts you, I hope he cuts your little hooker face—”
Then the tire iron was back across Jessica’s throat and he was squeezing as hard as he could. Jessica’s eyes popped open wide, and her tongue poked out of her mouth. She tried to sit up on her elbows. He slammed her back down, banging her skull on the floor.
“Jude,” Marybeth said. “Don’t, Jude.”
He relaxed the pressure on the tire iron, allowed her to take a breath—and Jessica screamed. It was the first time she’d screamed. He pushed down again, cutting off the sound.
“The garage,” Jude said.
“Jude.”
“Close the door to the garage. The whole fucking street is going to hear.”
Jessica raked at his face. His reach was longer than hers, and he leaned back from her hands, which were bent into claws. He rapped her skull against the floor a second time.
“You scream again, I’ll beat you to death right here. I’m going to ease this thing off your throat, and you better start talking, and you better be telling me how to make him go away. What about if you communicate with him directly? With a Ouija board or something? Can you call him off yourself?”
He relaxed the pressure again, and she screamed a second time—a long, piercing note, that dissolved into a cackle of laughter. He drove a fist into her solar plexus and knocked the air out of her, shut her up.
“Jude,” Marybeth said again, from behind him. She had gone to shut the garage door but was back now.
“Later.”
“Jude.”
“What?” he said, twisting at the waist to glare at her.
In one hand Marybeth held Jessica Price’s shiny, squarish, brightly colored purse, holding it up for him to look at. Only it wasn’t a purse at all. It was a lunch box, with a glossy photo of Hilary Duff on the side.
He was still staring at Marybeth and the lunch box in confusion—didn’t understand why she wanted him to see it, why it mattered—when Bon began to bark, a full, booming bark that came from the deepest part of her chest. As Jude turned his head to see what she was barking at, he heard another noise, a sharp, steely click, the unmistakable sound of someone snapping back the hammer of a pistol.
The girl, Jessica Price’s daughter, had entered through the sliding glass door of the porch. Where the revolver had come from, Jude didn’t know. It was an enormous Colt .45, with ivory inlays and a long barrel, so heavy she could barely hold it up. She peered intently out from beneath her bangs. A dew of sweat brightened her upper lip. When she spoke, it was in Anna’s voice, although the really shocking thing was how calm she sounded.
“Get away from my mother,” she said.
38
The man on the radio said, “What’s Florida’s number one export? You might say oranges—but if you did, you’d be mistaken.”
For a moment his was the only voice in the room. Marybeth had Angus by the collar again and was holding him back, no easy task. He strained forward with all his considerable will and muscle, and Marybeth had to keep both heels planted to prevent him going anywhere. Angus began to growl, a low, choked rumble, a wordless yet perfectly articulate message of threat. The sound of him got Bon barking again, one explosive yawp after another.
Marybeth was the first to speak. “You don’t need to use that. We’ll go. Come on, Jude. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get the dogs and go.”
“Watch ’em, Reese!” Jessica cried. “They came here to kill us!”
Jude met Marybeth’s gaze, tossed his head in the direction of the garage door. “Get out of here.” He rose, one knee popping—old joints—put a hand on the counter to steady himself. Then he looked at the girl, making good eye contact, staring right over the .45 pointed into his face.
“I just want to get my dog,” he said. “And we won’t trouble you anymore. Bon, come here.”
Bon barked, on and on, in the space between Jude and Reese. Jude took a step toward her to grab for Bon’s collar.
“Don’t let him get too close to you!” Jessica screamed. “He’ll try and take the gun!”
“Stay back,” the little girl said.
“Reese,” he said, using her name to soothe and to create trust. Jude was a man who knew a thing or two about psychological persuasion himself. “I’m putting this down.” He held up the tire iron so she could see it, then set it on the counter. “There. Now you have a gun and I’m unarmed. I just want my dog.”
“Let’s go, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Bonnie will follow us. Let’s just get out of here.”
Marybeth was in the garage now, staring back through the doorway. Angus barked for the first time. The sound of it rang off the concrete floor and high ceiling.
“Come to me, Bon,” Jude said, but Bon ignored him, actually made a nervous half jump at Reese instead.
Reese’s shoulders twitched in a startled shrug. She swung the gun toward the dog for a moment, then back to Jude.
Jude took another shuffling step toward Bon, was almost close enough to reach her collar.
“Get away from her!” Jessica screamed, and Jude saw a flash of movement at the edge of his vision.
Jessica was crawling across the floor, and when Jude turned, she shoved herself to her feet and fell upon him. He saw a gleam of something smooth and white in one hand, didn’t know what it was until it was in his face —a dagger of china, a wide shard of broken plate. She drove it at his eye, but he turned his head and she stabbed it into his cheek instead.
He brought his left arm up and clipped her across the jaw with one elbow. He pulled the spike of broken plate out of his face and threw it away. His other hand found the tire iron on the counter, and he swung it into the side of Jessica’s neck, felt it connect with a solid, meaty thud, saw her eyes straining from their sockets.
“No, Jude, no!” Marybeth screamed.
He pivoted and ducked as she shouted. He had a glimpse of the girl, her face startled and her eyes wide and stricken, and then the cannon in her hands went off. The sound of it was deafening. A vase, filled with white pebbles and with a few waxy fake orchids sticking out of it, exploded on the kitchen counter. Splinters of glass and pieces of rock flailed through the air around him.
The little girl stumbled backward. Her heel caught on the edge of a carpet, and she almost fell. Bon jumped at her, but Reese righted herself, and as the dog hit her—crashing into her hard enough to sweep her off her feet— the gun went off again.
The bullet struck Bon low, in the abdomen, and flipped her rear end into the air, so she did a twisting, head- over-heels somersault. She slammed into the cabinet doors beneath the sink. Her eyes were turned up to show the whites, and her mouth lolled open, and then the black dog of smoke that was inside her leaped out from between her jaws, like a genie spilling from the spout of an Arabian lamp, and rushed across the room, past the little girl, out onto the porch.
The cat that was crouched on the table saw it coming and screeched, her gray hair spiking up along her spine. She dived to the right as the dog of black smoke bounded lightly onto the table. The shadow Bon took a playful snap at the cat’s tail, then leaped after her. As Bon’s spirit dropped toward the floor, she passed through a beam of intense, early-morning sunshine and winked out of being.
Jude stared at the place where the impossible dog of black shadow had vanished, too stunned for a moment to act, to do anything but feel. And what he felt was a thrill of wonder, so intense it was a kind of galvanic shock. He felt he had been honored with a glimpse of something beautiful and eternal.
And then he looked over at Bon’s dead, empty body. The wound in her stomach was a horror show, a bloody maw, a blue knot of intestines spilling out of it. The long pink strip of her tongue hung obscenely from her mouth. It didn’t seem possible that she could be blown so completely open, so it seemed she had not been shot but eviscerated. The blood was everywhere, on the walls, the cabinets, on him, spreading out across the floor in a dark
