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Chapter 24

Joe raised his glass and addressed everyone more or less gathered around the table, which really meant Leo, who was propped up in a rented rolling hospital bed nearby.

"To old returnees and newcomers alike," he toasted, nodding toward Lyn and her daughter, Coryn. "May you forever be welcome at our table, and may you forever stay out of all ditches. But if you've got to do what you've got to do, then speedy recovery and consult my brother and mother on matters of technique."

To the general laughter following, he added, "I cannot tell you how happy I am with this outcome. You two scared the bejesus out of me."

They were all back home at last, Leo having been released earlier in the day, with home nursing and physical therapy visits scheduled for the next few weeks. By pure coincidence, Lyn had said that Coryn was visiting from Boston, so Joe had brought them north for the day's major event, much to Coryn's satisfaction-she had wanted to check him out in any case, and now had been handed serendipitous access to the entire diminutive clan.

Joe couldn't be sure, of course, since he'd only just met the girl, but she seemed to be liking what she saw. Certainly, that was true for him. He found her genuine and honest and funny-a natural offshoot of her mother, all the way down to the same almost lissome frame.

Unfortunately, they weren't going to have her for long, since she had to be back at work the next morning and was driving south in an hour, leaving Lyn behind to spend the night. This was, therefore, a celebratory dinner for more reasons than just Leo's return to the fold.

The meal was easy, relaxing, and filled with laughter. Joe kept glancing at his mother and seeing in her expression the pure joy of a return to normalcy. The proximity of her own mortality, which, he knew, had loomed large in her mind with Leo's disability, seemed to have slipped back once more. She looked more relaxed and self-confident than he'd seen her in weeks.

By the end, when all except Leo were gathered by the door to send Coryn off with hugs and best wishes, Joe was back to feeling that his out-of-kilter world might be resettling on a more even keel. Lyn and he seemed on the right track, with her daughter's blessing; the double homicide investigation in Brattleboro was gaining credible steam; the source of Leo's accident had been addressed with Dan Griffis's flight from the area-even if for unrelated reasons; and Leo was on the mend.

Life had been worse, and not that long ago.

Later, in his old bedroom at the front of the house, with the walls glowing in candlelight and the two of them buried deep under old family quilts, he and Lyn made love quietly, with an ease and a familiarity that each found at once surprising and confirming.

But this peacefulness proved short-lived. In the middle of the night, Joe heard the phone ringing in the living room-an unheard-of occurrence in most rural settings, and a nearly guaranteed harbinger of ill tidings.

He slipped out of bed fast and focused, getting to the phone by its third ring.

"Gunther?" said a familiar male voice.

"Yes."

"It's E. T. Griffis. My son Dan is headed your way right now. I told him you got Nugent and that you know why Andy went to jail. Do what you have to do. I'm done with him."

The phone went dead.

"What's happening, Joey?"

He turned and saw his mother in the hallway door. Lyn had also appeared across the room.

"Trouble," he said, dialing the phone to no avail. "That was E. T. Dan Griffis is coming here to take a bite of me, or maybe all of us. Shit."

Joe gave up on the phone just as the warning system he'd set up-which Willy had triggered earlier-started pinging near the front door, where he'd put the receiver.

He looked at both women. "He's cut the phone line and is coming up the driveway now. Chances are, he doesn't know we're up, so no lights. Lyn, call 911 on a cell, use my name, and say that a home invasion's about to start. Mom, go back to your room, close the door, grab Dad's shotgun, park yourself in a corner, and blast whoever comes through without announcing themselves. Can you do that?"

"What about Leo?" she typically asked.

"I'll take care of him. Will you do what I asked? I want to know where you'll be."

"I will," she said, and swung around in her chair and rolled out of sight.

Lyn was already dialing her phone.

He motioned to the staircase lining the living room wall. "You go upstairs. Can you shoot a gun?"

"Yes."

He ran back to their bedroom, quickly grabbed his pistol, and thrust it at her, pushing her toward the stairs. "Go, go, go."

"What'll you use?"

"I'm set," he told her. "Dad had more than one gun."

She ran for the stairs, now speaking quietly into the phone. Joe crossed to his father's old office, now mostly used for storage, climbed onto the cluttered desk, and pulled a World War Two-era M1 carbine off the wall. On top of the bookshelf beside it, he found a fifteen-round magazine, fully loaded, which, he knew, Leo kept there for varmints or just for plinking when he was in the mood. He slapped the magazine into place, chambered a round, and returned to the dark living room.

Time was running short. It had been awhile since the warning sensor went off.

Joe, moving fast and by instinct, knowing to avoid furniture he couldn't even see, ran in his bare feet to the guest bedroom they'd set up for Leo, off the kitchen.

He'd barely entered the room when he heard his brother whisper, "What's happening?"

"Home invasion," Joe said quietly, laying the rifle on the bed and rolling the whole unit toward the bathroom. "Dan Griffis is coming to get me. E. T. called to warn us. Stay put and stay quiet, Leo. You want the gun?"

"What'll you have?"

"I don't know. I gave mine to Lyn. Mom has the twelve-gauge. Maybe I'll grab a knife."

"Don't be a jerk. Keep the M1," Leo said, "I probably couldn't lift the goddamn thing anyhow."

Joe didn't argue. He finished rolling the bed through the-luckily-unusually wide bathroom door, stepped outside, almost completely closed the door, and then reached inside to pull the bed against it, making entry as awkward as possible.

"Go get 'em, Joey," he heard his brother say.

He knew he was out of time. He left the guest bedroom quietly, slipped into the hall, bypassed the kitchen, and froze, listening intently and thinking of all the things he should have done but hadn't had time for, including putting on anything besides his blue jeans.

The first sound came from the building's south wall-a single sharp snap, as from a twig breaking. Joe jogged through the house, flattened against the south wall from the inside, and glanced through one of the windows in time to see the bulkhead door to the basement swing open, dumping its load of snow. A dark shadow disappeared into the cellar's void.

"Okay, you bastard," he muttered, and much more stealthily made his way to the door leading down to the basement, off the hallway between the living room and the kitchen, painfully aware that any misstep or creaking floorboard would resonate below him.

In the hallway, he positioned himself so that he was partially protected by the width of a waist-high bookcase, across the top of which he steadied the carbine, pointing toward the door.

Then he waited.

There had been times in combat like this, with an attack anticipated, when all bodies had been called to the perimeter. As now, every minute had stretched to absurdity, and every slight noise had cracked like a shot. By the time the cellar door began swinging back on its hinges, barely visible in the moonlight from the distant windows, Joe's face was damp with sweat.

He waited until the shadow emerging from below was fully in the hall before he said quietly, "Do not move. I have a rifle on you."

The man opposite him froze.

"Lie facedown on the floor before you," Joe ordered. "Arms and legs outstretched. Hands open."

The shadow did as it was told. Joe reached across the hallway, inside the nearby kitchen door, and switched on a light. Ahead of him, looking up with pure venom in his squinting eyes, was a man Joe had never before seen. He was wearing a checked shirt.

Just as his heart sank with the realization that he'd been had, Joe heard Dan's voice behind him, farther down the hall: "Nice try, Gunther. Real tricky. Leave the gun alone and put your hands up."

Joe followed instructions, aware of the man in the checked shirt getting up as Joe glanced over his own shoulder at Dan.

He'd barely registered that Dan was standing right across from his mother's bedroom door when one panel of the latter blew up with a shattering explosion that sent Griffis smashing against the far wall with a scream, his right knee torn apart.

Purely on instinct, Joe didn't even look back at the man who had emerged from the cellar. He simply dived through the nearby kitchen door, rolled into a forward somersault, and then pushed himself off and to the side of a cabinet front as a bullet smacked into the place he'd just been occupying.

But he was now exposed in the light, sprawled on the floor, and knew he was out of luck.

The man in the checked shirt stepped into the room, the gun dangling by his side, his face malevolent. In the hallway, Griffis was screaming, "Kill the prick, Mike. Blow his fucking head off."

Through the kitchen's other door, leading to the dining room, one arm and half of Lyn's face appeared, her eye sighting down the length of Joe's pistol.

"Don't do it, asshole. Drop the gun or you die."

Before Mike could respond, Lyn fired, the sound enormous in such close quarters. The gun in Mike's hand flew away from him with a spurt of red blood, and he spun and crouched simultaneously, doubling over his wounded hand. Joe leaped to his feet, ran back to the hallway, and snatched up his carbine. He brought it to bear just as Dan Griffis, lying on the floor and bleeding, reached for the pistol that he'd dropped moments before.

"Don't move!" Joe yelled.

Simultaneously, the barrel of a shotgun appeared through the hole in his mother's door, followed by her almost sweet advice. "Dan, I think you should stop this."

Griffis glanced up at the barrel and over to Joe, and slumped back against the wall, effectively putting his gun beyond reach.

"Shit," he moaned softly.

In the meantime, Lyn had entered the kitchen and was aiming at Mike in a combat stance, as if on the range, looking incongruous only because of her nightgown.

"Is that it?" Joe asked Dan. "Just the two of you?"

Griffis sighed, both hands now wrapped around his shattered knee. "Yeah. The other guy wimped out."

Lyn glanced at Joe quickly, breaking her focus on Mike for only a fraction. "This something I should start getting used to?"

He considered that for a moment. It had some painful relevance, given how things had worked out with Gail.

"Maybe," he answered as truthfully as he could.

She tilted her head and smiled-the daughter and sister of men lost at sea. "Okay," she said simply.

In the distance, they heard sirens approaching.