“Once they figured they’d caught the guy who shot at them, they all relaxed. I just moseyed on down to the pier and waited around till I saw a boat leaving. Some guys from the Coast Guard, it was. “Hey, fellas, any way I could catch a ride with you? Our boat’s gone back to the mainland and I’m kind of stranded here.” They were real nice about it, ran me over to Friday Harbor and I got the last ferry out.”
He stopped in front of us.
“Now all I have to do is take care of you two, and I can head off into my new life.”
“How did you find us?” I blurted out, desperate to distract him a little longer. I could face the idea of dying, but not now, not so soon.
“I called your father. Told him I’d heard you’d had some kind of beef with the cops and I wanted to get in touch at this difficult time. He gave the address right there, over the phone.”
I dimly recalled my father telling me that a friend of mine had called a few days earlier. I hadn’t paid any attention at the time. I certainly hadn’t thought of Sam. As far as I was knew he was dead.
“This won’t hurt,” Sam went on in the same rapid patter. “I watched all the videos we made those other times, to get the new guys used to the idea. You can tell they didn’t feel a thing. Specters don’t have feelings. That’s the whole point.”
He stepped toward us, hefting the revolver. Since it didn’t matter what I said anymore, I wanted my last words to be the truth.
“We aren’t the specters, Sam. You are.”
He grinned tightly.
“We could argue all day about that, Phil. But there’s an easier way to prove you wrong.”
I knew that any resistance was hopeless, but just to wait passively to be killed seemed inhuman. As Sam moved toward Andrea, I hurled myself against his legs. He stumbled and fell. The gun went off with a sharp crack. For a moment we both lay sprawled on the floor. Then he wrenched himself free, whirled around and smashed the barrel of the revolver into my face.
“You stupid bastard!” he screamed. “Do you think you can change the will of God? You’re nothing, less than nothing!”
He got up and grabbed me by the hair, hauling me back to my knees. The pain was excruciating. I felt blood flowing from my cheek and nose. Sam went over to Andrea and stood behind her. He pressed the gun against her head. I gave her one last glance, to assure her that I loved her, that she wasn’t dying alone.
But she wasn’t looking at me. Her face was turned to the far end of the room and her eyes were stretched open in amazement. I turned, and at that moment the window looking on to the porch imploded in a shower of glass. Fragments flew everywhere, tinkling off the walls and furniture, cracking like sheets of ice on the floor. When the fallout ceased there was another person in the room, a figure of savage splendor, half-naked and covered in blood from head to toe.
Kristine Kjarstad was stretched out on a canvas lounger in her front yard wearing a black-and-white one- piece swimsuit. The book she had been reading lay facedown on the patio beside the remains of a glass of iced tea. Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed, stunned by the hot sun.
The yard was enclosed by a tall wooden fence, built as high as the code allowed, which made the space feel like an annex of the house, another room. A border of native shrubs in varying shades of green surrounded the brick patio: wax myrtles, ferns, viburnums and the ground-hugging evergreens which Kristine had planted because they were drought resistant. It seemed like a bad joke that a city where it rained as much as in Seattle should be subject to periodic water shortages, but a mild winter with little snowmelt to fill the reservoirs had resulted in yet another watering ban.
This was the last day of Kristine’s vacation, and she was making the most of it. Thomas was spending the weekend with his father, leaving her to luxuriate in peace, quiet and idleness. She had slept in, eaten a boiled egg, plowed through several pounds of newsprint, then smeared herself with sun block and gone outside. She knew that tanning was now regarded as seriously incorrect, but it was a pleasure she refused to give up. It was almost as good as sex, she thought, and better than some sex she could remember. She stretched out luxuriously and gave herself up to a gentle, pervasive sense of well-being.
When the gate clicked open, she thought for a moment that it was the paperboy or the mailman. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the paper had already come. She straightened up slightly, raising one hand as a screen against the sun. The front gate was still closed, but the one at the side of the house was open. A child was standing just inside it, at the very edge of the patio, as though afraid to advance any further.
Kristine blinked rapidly, trying to focus her sun-drenched eyes.
“Hi there!” she said.
A moment later she recognized the boy as Thomas’s new friend, the one who’d just moved into the Wallis house.
“Thomas isn’t home right now,” she said lazily.
But the boy wasn’t listening. He was talking, blurting something out in one long continuous sentence punctuated only by frequent gasps for breath. He must have run over from his house through the backyard, Kristine thought. She rolled up off the lounger, replacing a strap which she had slid down. She still couldn’t figure out what he was saying, but he seemed to be in distress. He backed away as Kristine approached, still gabbling, seemingly on the verge of tears.
“What is it, David?” she asked gently. “What’s the matter?”
Now the tears came, making the boy’s speedy patter even more incomprehensible. Kristine crouched down, making herself look smaller and unthreatening.
“Is something wrong? Where are your mom and dad?”
She’d only spoken to them once, apart from phone calls to arrange for the children to get together. The father was one of Paul Merlowitz’s clients-Paul hadn’t disclosed anything about the case, of course-and had been an English professor. They seemed a pleasant enough couple, although they’d managed to deflect her questions about where they were from and what they were doing in Seattle. Kristine hadn’t insisted. If she had been one of the framers of the Constitution, she would have added “privacy” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
After listening to the boy’s staccato delivery for another few minutes, she finally began to tune in to what he was saying. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, picking out a few phrases here and there, then trying to fit them together. The picture which emerged seemed harmless enough at first. A man had come to the house. He was a friend, or at least someone known to the family. Then David added a few more pieces to the puzzle, and the pattern abruptly became more sinister. The man had hurt his dad. He had started shouting angrily. David had been watching TV. He had got scared and run away. He was afraid the man had come to take him away again.
Kristine didn’t particularly want to butt in on some domestic dispute, but the boy’s terror seemed real enough. Then he added one final, decisive detail.
“He’s got a gun.”
Kristine Kjarstad ran up the steps to the porch.
“Stay here!” she told David. “Don’t leave this yard!”
She raced upstairs to her bedroom and opened the blue chest, painted with elaborate red and yellow designs in traditional Norwegian style, where she kept her issue revolver. It took her a few seconds to load the weapon- she’d seen the results of too many accidents to keep a loaded gun in the house with kids-then rushed downstairs again and out into the sunshine.
The boy was nowhere to be seen. As she hurried along the side of the house, it occurred to her that she might well be making a complete fool of herself. The whole thing could well be some fantasy the boy had dreamed up. Men with guns coming to a private house in broad daylight? Things like that didn’t happen in Wallingford.
She ran across the mangy lawn pitted with weeds and past the unpruned apple tree whose crop had already started to fall and rot. Next door, Mr. Shadegg was tending the immaculate beds of vegetables and herbs which his wife pressed on Kristine continually. He looked up at the figure in the bathing suit running by, revolver in hand.
“Call 911!” Kristine shouted at him. “The Wallis house!”
Mr. Shadegg just stood gaping. Kristine opened the gate in the picket fence and ran on across the Wallis’s yard to the back steps with their ancient stenciled notice NO PEDDLERS. It made her think again about the wisdom of what she was doing. If David had made the whole thing up, the story might end up in the papers. People would be coming up to her at Food Giant for months with an ironic glint in their eye.
