I nodded and went back to the living room.
The police told us they’d be leaving someone at the scene around the clock for the next few days. There was a black and white car parked up by the highway, and police tape still surrounded the Langley house, as if pranksters had toilet-papered the place, but neatly, and with yellow tissue.
The police presence didn’t make it any easier for Ellen to get to sleep. She went through the house several times, checking doors and windows. She asked me to do a check of the shed, standing on the back-door step while I went round the truck-the cops had finally let me bring my rig in from the highway-and examined the building where I kept my mowers and tools and other incidentals, including my old artwork.
“All clear,” I said, stepping back into the house, not mentioning that our property was surrounded by trees, and that if someone was watching us, he’d hardly need to use the shed to hide himself. The number of places where one could hide seemed limitless.
We got into bed, and Ellen tried reading for a while but finally put her book aside. “I keep going through the same paragraph over and over again,” she said, “and haven’t the foggiest idea what I’ve just read.”
I wanted to say something along the lines of “Rereading Conrad’s book, are you?” but managed to hold my tongue. “Not easy to focus at the moment, is it?” I said.
She shook her head, placed the book by the base of her bedside lamp, reached up and twisted the knob to turn it off. I got under the covers and we both stared at the ceiling for a while. I don’t know for how long, but I must have finally fallen asleep, because I was having that dream, where I’m on the lawn tractor, climbing a hill that’s getting steeper and steeper, until the front end of the mower lifts off the ground and starts going over my head and-
Ellen jabbed me in the side, sometime around midnight, and I awoke with a start.
“What?” I said. “The smoke detector?”
“No, not that!” she whispered urgently.
“What?” I said, my heart instantly pounding.
“I heard something.”
“What? Where?”
“A door. I heard a door downstairs.”
“Maybe you dreamt it.”
“No,” she said. “I was already awake. I haven’t been able to get to sleep yet.”
I threw back the covers and, wearing only a pair of dark blue boxers, slipped out the bedroom door. “Be careful!” Ellen whispered.
I whispered back, “Call the police.” If by some chance we were being visited by the same folks who’d gone to the Langleys’ the night before-my theories of the afternoon seemed pretty pitiful all of a sudden-the time to call for help was now, not later. I didn’t know what had happened to the cruiser up by the highway, whether it was still posted out there or not, and there was no way to tell, standing outside our bedroom door in the dark of night.
As I went by Derek’s door I noticed it was closed, which suggested to me he was in there, asleep, although Derek didn’t exactly keep us posted as to his comings and goings. I went down the stairs, feeling naked not so much because I was in nothing but a pair of shorts, but because I had nothing in my hands. We don’t keep guns in the house, but right about then I’d have been happy for one. I’d have settled for a baseball bat, but we didn’t have one of those either, at least not anyplace handy. Down in the basement, maybe, tucked away behind the furnace. Perhaps, if I could make it to the kitchen without running into anyone first, I could arm myself with a cast-iron frying pan, or the fire extinguisher that hung on the wall right next to the stove. You wouldn’t want to get hit in the head with that sucker.
As I reached the first floor I could hear Ellen on the phone upstairs, whispering urgently. Across the living room I spotted a poker hanging among the tools next to the fireplace. That would do.
I crept over toward it, delicately slipping the pointed iron bar out of its holder. I liked the heft of it in my hand and felt, while not relieved, at least slightly better prepared.
I moved through the darkness into the kitchen, and my eyes went to the deadbolt latch. It was in the vertical position, unlocked. There was no way Ellen had forgotten to lock that door. If she checked it once, she checked it three times.
Was someone in the house? Or had someone already been here and gone back out?
I froze, held my breath, listening for anything. I thought I could hear some murmuring, voices, but not inside the house.
Outside, on the deck beyond the back kitchen door.
I moved up to it, put my hand around the knob ever so carefully, twisted it silently to the left until I could turn it no more, confident now that the latch had cleared, then swung it open as swiftly as I could. I wanted the element of surprise on my side.
And I had it.
There was a scream, a woman’s scream, and that was followed by a man shouting, “Jesus!”
Upstairs, Ellen screamed, “Jim! Jim!”
My heart still pounding, I reached for the switch by the back door, casting light across Derek and his girlfriend, Penny Tucker. I’d met her enough times to recognize her, even in this limited light.
Evidently they’d both been sitting on the deck steps that led in the direction of the shed, just talking, but when I’d made my entrance they’d both jumped to their feet and Derek had reached out to steady Penny, who’d nearly stumbled over.
“Jesus, Dad, you scared us to fucking death!” Derek shouted at me.
Penny, who had enough sense not to use profanity with her boyfriend’s father, caught her breath and said, “Mr. Cutter, hey. It’s, like, just us.”
That was when we started hearing the sirens coming down the highway. And the car that had been parked up at the end of the lane was racing toward the house, then skidding on loose gravel as the driver hit the brakes.
“Shit,” I said.
SIX
So, this little matter of the mayor’s nose.
I think it was the kind of thing employment consultants refer to as a “career-limiting” move. “Career-ending” would be more accurate, but the thing is, given the chance to do things over again, I can’t see what I might have done differently. Although it would have been nice to actually break the mayor’s nose, instead of just bloodying it.
I got my job at the mayor’s office a little over six years ago and spent four with Randall Finley before starting my own business. Working for the mayor wasn’t all that bad a job. The money was reasonable enough. There wasn’t a whole lot of heavy lifting, unless you counted getting the mayor into the back of his car when he was tanked. And being a bodyguard for Randall Finley wasn’t exactly like a presidential assignment. You didn’t walk around with a wire in your ear, whispering things like “Blowhard is on the move” to fellow agents. Just as well, too, or I’d have had to get myself a two-hundred-dollar pair of sunglasses, and I’ve always been the kind of guy who buys them from Rite Aid.
Sure, Finley had alienated most of the unions in town, mocked them, accused all of their members of sitting on their collective ass. Promise Falls, with a population of forty thousand, wasn’t the biggest city in New York State, but you still needed a fair number of people to keep the water running through the pipes, staff the fire department, and collect the trash, and Finley had managed to get under the skin of all of them at one time or another. And there weren’t many on the city council who’d piss on Finley’s head if it were on fire, but still, the guy was an unlikely target for an assassin. You had to get him through the odd picket line, the occasional protest outside city hall, but nobody was scoping him out with a rifle from the top of the observatory (if we’d had an observatory). I got plenty of free meals out of it, all the banquets the boss had to go to, and he rubbed shoulders with the mildly rich and famous when they came to town on official business. Once, when Promise Falls had been chosen for a movie shoot, I got within five feet of Nicole Kidman. The mayor shook her hand and, even though I was standing right next to him, he
