suddenly there was a sharpness and a bright pain and a liquid warmth that smelled coppery and thick.
Kyle screamed, his voice already hoarse but now re-animated by pain as well as fear. He dropped his six- shooters, not hearing as they thumped against the thing and fell softly to the crusted carpet. He didn’t hear Brady’s whimpering die away to hitching sobs, then to nothing more than painful breathing and unconsciousness. He only knew that if he didn’t get out now now now he would never get out at all.
7
The front door was latched but not bolted. That saved Kyle’s sanity, perhaps his life.
With fingers that felt as thick and cold as frozen hot dogs fresh from the freezer, he fumbled with the pin in the center of the round knob. Two, three, four times he tried to swivel it just so. Finally, he succeeded.
The knob turned, the door swung open without so much as a creeeeak, and Kyle stumbled into the cold night. He grabbed his wrist with his good hand and stumbled down the sidewalk, blinded by tears and terror, faster and faster until he ran full-tilt into the front fender of the Lincoln. He bounced like a rag-doll, striking his shoulders and head on the rock-hard soil of the weed-choked front yard.
For a long while, he lay there, staring at the stars that whirled faster than stars had any right to. Finally, he remembered.
Brady.
He struggled to his feet, his good hand still clasped around his sliced wrist. His fingers felt stiff, as if the clotting blood had married flesh to flesh and his two arms were now one. He stumbled down Oleander, so light- headed with shock that the incline of the asphalt was enough to threaten to topple his precarious balance. He should have run for one of the porch lights on either side but he didn’t. He simply staggered down the center of the street, a small figure in silver and black that nearly disappeared into the night.
He might have run to the end of Oleander, he might have run until a careless driver crashed into him and killed him, he might have done a number of things. But what actually happened was that he slipped on a discarded candy wrapper, a bit of cellophane innocuous by itself but just enough to twist his right foot and throw him onto the asphalt. He yelped as he went down, crying out again when his cheek struck rough pavement.
Instantly-or years later, he didn’t know which-someone was pulling at him. He cringed away, trying to huddle into a corner of a darkness that wanted to consume him.
“Who is it?” one voice said.
“He’s hurt,” another said.
And then there was a babble of voices calling out and hands plucking at him and cold things pressing against his cheek and his wrist, and after a long while, red lights flashing, flashing through the darkness and a deep voice speaking to him.
“What happened?”
“His name is Kyle, Kyle Jantzen,” a shrill voice piped.
“What happened, Kyle?” This time the deep voice penetrated far enough to touch something quiescent and waiting in Kyle. He looked up, blinked.
“Brady,” Kyle finally said.
“He must mean Brady Wilton. He was out with the Wilton kid,” the shrill voice said. “I saw ‘em together not twenty minutes ago.”
“What about Brady?” The deep voice continued uninterrupted, as if the shrill voice had not spoken at all.
“Dead!” Kyle squealed without thinking. He felt his own life withdraw as he uttered the dreadful word.
“Where? Come on, Kyle, where?”
The boy looked around long enough to understand that he was lying on a thick pad, probably from someone’s chaise lounge. He was in the middle of a front yard perhaps three-fourths of the way up Oleander. He raised a shaking hand and pointed one finger at the dark outline at the top of the hill.
“There.”
8
The police found Brady only a few minutes later.
In spite of their fears, after what the Jantzen kid had cried out, he wasn’t dead. But then he wasn’t exactly alive either.
A short hospital stay would probably be enough for Kyle, already safely in the back of a County Hospital ambulance waiting for his father to arrive when the police entered the back bedroom at 1066 Oleander. It would take a longer stay-a much longer stay-to do the other boy any good.
He wasn’t hurt physically. Not much, anyway. A man’s mutilated body had toppled onto him and bruised his shoulder and his hip. But the carpet had cushioned most of the weight. If he was hurt much, it didn’t show. But when the police pulled the body away, he was staring straight ahead, as if he were examining on a microscopic level the shard of blood-encrusted glass still embedded six inches deep in the corpse’s throat, not three inches from the boy’s own throat but miraculously (it seemed then) not touching him.
He was still staring straight ahead half an hour later, an hour later. Days later.
Three weeks after Halloween night, the Wiltons put their house up for sale, and before Thanksgiving they had gone.
Kyle never saw Brady again.
9
It was easy enough for the authorities to identify the body. Ace McCall’s blood-soaked cowhide wallet was still buttoned securely inside his back pocket. Whatever had happened to him, it wasn’t a robbery. No one had disturbed the California driver’s license, the half dozen credit cards, or the five hundred dollars in cash tucked into the back flap.
The white Lincoln parked outside the house on Oleander carried additional identification in the form of a registration slip and a leather briefcase crammed with documents attesting to the identity of its owner.
It was far more difficult to determine precisely what had happened in the back bedroom of the house.
Officer Mark Riehmann’s first impression of the carnage in the back bedroom was simple: homicide. After calling for back-up on this one-a gnawing gut instinct honed by fifteen years with the County Sheriff Department told him that this case was going to be a bad one-he made sure that the Jantzen kid was going to be all right, then approached the house at the top of the hill.
He moved tentatively, slowly, alert to the sounds of sirens racing in response to his call. He was not quite to the sidewalk in front of the house when the first back-up car arrived. In spite of a sense of urgency amplified by the knowledge that there was still a kid in the house, perhaps trapped there with a homicidal maniac, he hesitated long enough to be joined by two other figures, shadowy in the darkness. He whispered instructions, then the three of them approached the house.
The front door gaped open. Other than that, there was no sign of life. Still, it took almost five minutes for them to penetrate the house and turn their flashlights onto the scene in the back bedroom.
McCall’s body lay sprawled across the floor, the feet still in the closet, the head angled toward the window opposite. The body was awash with blood, most of it crusted and brown, some still vividly scarlet and dripping. Beneath him lay another body. For an instant all three officers thought the boy must be dead, too. Then they realized that what they assumed to be a deathly pallor was actually smudged cosmetics and that the boy’s open eyes were not rigid with death but deep and dark and secret.
They pulled the body off the boy, and one of the other officers knelt to carry him outside. The boy shrieked
