Dark Specter

24

It was a Sunday morning, ten days after I was released. I had gone to run some errands at the local stores and now I was walking home, relishing the warm sunshine and the cool breeze and the stunning views of snow-capped mountains above the wooded ridges and valleys of the North Seattle skyline.

We had been in the house a week, and were still settling in. It had been made a condition of my release that I should remain in the state, available to the San Juan County investigators. At the same time, both Andrea and I wanted to get away-and to get David away-from the islands themselves which, beautiful as they were, held such horrific memories for us. When my lawyer mentioned a house in Seattle that was available for a few months at a reasonable rent, we jumped at the idea.

When I was finally given my conditional freedom, I had no expectations about anything or anyone from my former life. All that had been wiped clean. After being charged with crimes I had experienced only as a victim, nothing seemed impossible, or even unlikely. Normality had become a meaningless concept. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that David had vanished again, and that everyone was conspiring to convince me that he had died back in Minnesota months before. As for Andrea, I no longer had any firm belief that she had ever existed in the first place. She was just one among many phantom figures I seemed to have encountered in the course of my hallucinatory experiences on the island.

So I was even more amazed than pleased to find her waiting for me when I emerged from my cell. Thanks to a benign sexism on the part of Sheriff Griffiths, Andrea had never been regarded as a suspect, and once he had taken a full statement from her she had been free to go. But she had stayed. That made all the difference. We both had to make plans, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make them together. After what we had just lived through, any arrangement was bound to seem provisional. Why not take the path of least resistance, rent this house that my lawyer had found and see how things turned out?

It had been Andrea’s testimony which had finally convinced the sheriff of my innocence. We had each been questioned separately and in great detail about the events of that fatal day, and our answers matched to a degree which ultimately made it impossible to believe that we were making it all up. One of the two survivors from the hall was Ellie, and she had been able to corroborate my story about the events leading up to the final horror. Finally, the police had talked to David. His story, told with the idiosyncratic clarity of a child’s vision, corresponded fully to Andrea’s and mine. That clinched it.

The investigators were now working on the theory that one of the dead gunmen had still been alive when the sheriff and his men approached the compound. Thinking they were enemies, he had opened fire, and had then died in the long interval before the helicopter arrived to illuminate the scene. All in all, I got the impression that the cops were asking me to stick around not because they had any further intention of charging me, but to try to lend an air of credibility to the fact that they’d arrested me in the first place.

That was fine with me. I had no wish to go home, and for that matter no home to go to. The events I had lived through had cut me off forever from my past, and called into question everything I had ever imagined in the way of a future. I was left with the present, and for the present I was content to settle into this pleasant house, knowing that whatever happened we would have to move out in a couple of months, but not oppressed by that knowledge. I no longer had any interest in long-term plans. I was content to live one day at a time, as long as I could live it with Andrea and David.

Through all this, David had of course been my major preoccupation. My feeling that his previous acceptance of the situation had been too good to be true had been confirmed. It seemed somehow to be linked with his being on the island. The moment we left, everything changed. He became withdrawn and intensely clinging. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without finding him outside the door in tears when I came out. There was also the question of Rachael’s death, which I had ducked before. Now I told him the truth, although without mentioning that she had died by her own hand. He at first refused to believe that he would never see her again, then became preoccupied with the physical details of her present whereabouts. In fact Rachael had been cremated, but I spared David that knowledge too, particularly after what he had seen on the island. I said she was buried underground, and he wanted to know how deep and where and whether she had enough food and a phone. I explained that that was just her body, and that his mom was not really there. I added, with a twinge of hypocrisy, that some people believed that she was in heaven. David immediately decided this was right, and that she could see him and hear everything he said. I decided to go along with this and let him work out the truth for himself at a later date.

One very important factor in David’s stability was completely fortuitous. The woman who owned the house in back of ours happened to have a boy about the same age, and the two made friends one day over the fence. This was the more surprising because David had never been very outgoing, even in the old days back in St. Paul. But although it would be absurd to suggest that the ordeal he had been through was what we would once have called “a growth experience,” there was no question in my mind that he had changed, becoming more independent and less tentative with other children. The only thing he absolutely insisted on was my continual physical presence. I’d only been able to sneak out to the store because he was plugged into some TV show he’d become hooked on.

The main problem with David’s understandable dependency on me was that I wanted to be with Andrea-alone with Andrea. Her problems of readjustment were not as serious as David’s, but they were just as real. After living in seclusion for so many years on the island, she had lost many of the skills that we all take for granted. Going almost anywhere was a torment to her. Traveling in a bus or car made her sick, the sight of strange faces made her panic. She couldn’t deal with answering the telephone or going shopping. Like a prisoner released after many years, she found herself unable to cope with the demands of organizing a life in which she was constantly called upon to make decisions.

All of this would simply have been irritating if I hadn’t been in love with her, but I was. Whenever we were apart, even for an hour or two, I felt unreal, drained of substance, like one of those specters whose meaning Sam had so totally perverted. What Blake meant, as far as I can recall, is that every one of us has a male and a female component, and that we can only achieve full humanity when the two are commingled. Split from that whole, the male component becomes a “specter,” a reasoning machine spinning abstract theories and arbitrary rules and then enforcing them ruthlessly. The female component similarly degenerates into an “emanation,” jealous, moody, nagging, envious.

Something like that had happened to me. Without Andrea, I felt reduced to a pale parody of myself. I wanted to be with her all the time, to care for her in this difficult transitional phase she was going through, to help her find her feet in the outside world. I never discussed these feelings with her, or asked her what she felt for me. It would have been forced and intrusive. Once we had both settled down there would be time enough to talk, and to decide what we were going to do next. For now, it was enough that we had these few months together, without conditions or promises.

I walked home unhurriedly, enjoying the mild summer day. Our house was in a pleasant neighborhood called Wallingford, with just enough yuppie input to have excellent bread and coffee and micro-brews and similar amenities readily available, while retaining a solid core of long-time residents from the days when it had been an unpretentious blue-collar community, blighted by fumes from the gas works down by Lake Union. The paper bag I was carrying contained a crusty French loaf, a bottle of good olive oil, tomatoes, basil, pasta and a selection of local goat’s and sheep’s cheese, together with a couple of bottles of Hogue Cellars’ fume blanc. Life seemed good.

As I turned the corner into our street, I saw something that brought me crashing down. At the other end of the block, coming toward me, was a policeman. He passed the house next door where the students lived, then turned up our steps and disappeared inside the fence.

For a moment I was tempted to go hole up at the trendy cafe where the local house-husbands went to sip herb tea and write in their diaries. It wasn’t that I was seriously concerned about being arrested again, although there was always the possibility of some unexpected development in the investigation. But even the prospect of having to answer another set of questions designed to trap me into some inconsistency seemed too grim to contemplate. I just wanted to be left alone.

But I knew this was dumb. If the police wanted to question me, there was nothing I could do. Better to get it over with now. I carried on down the hill, clutching my sad sack of goodies. Our gate was open. I walked up the steps to the porch. The lace curtains of the living room window were drawn. I opened the front door and called, “Hi, I’m home.” There was no answer.

Setting the groceries down on the table in the hall, I walked through into the living room. It seemed to be empty, but I could hear a strange noise, like someone humming tunelessly. Although it was such a lovely day, the blind over the window looking on to the garden was lowered. A black bag I’d never seen before lay on the pine table. I rounded the section of wall forming a kind of proscenium arch into the dining area, and stopped. Andrea was on her knees in the corner of the room, looking up at me imploringly. Her wrists and ankles were handcuffed together and a patch of tape covered her mouth. She was trying desperately to speak, but all that emerged was the inarticulate humming I had heard. Then something cold and hard touched the nape of my neck.

“Hi, Phil. I’m home too.”

I felt my skin prickle. I couldn’t see who was standing behind me, but I knew the voice. I also knew that the person it belonged to was dead.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. What was happening was impossible.

“Do it, or I’ll blow your brains out right now!”

Mechanically, I obeyed. I felt a handcuff bite into one wrist, then the other. Then a vicious kick at the back of my knees sent me crashing to the floor.

“Kneel!” said the voice.

By pushing with my shoulder against the sofa, I managed to get to my knees. My ankles were locked together with another double click. There was a tearing sound, and then a hand was clamped to my face, pressing a sticky surface hard over my lips, gluing them together. A figure moved into the space between me and Andrea. I looked up, and the impossibility was confirmed. The man in a black uniform standing over us with a gun in his hand was Sam.

“Big surprise, huh?” he sneered. “Ripley’s Believe It or Not. And you didn’t, did you, Phil? I laid it all out for you. I shared the Secret with you, and you still didn’t believe. Mark and Rick and the rest, they didn’t believe either. They demanded proof. Well, they got their proof, just like you’re going to.”

He burst into a savage laugh.

“They accused me of making mistakes! And I did make a mistake. The mistake I made was thinking that they were worthy of sharing the Secret. I didn’t want to be alone, you see. I didn’t want to have to bear this great burden alone.”

He nodded gravely.

“Like the first Christ, I wanted the cup to pass from me. I told myself that there were other people out there as real as me, and that I could recognize them. Well, I’ve been punished for my weakness, justly punished. I accept the bitter truth now. I am alone, and always will be. What happened on the island proved that. They were all destroyed, but I survived. Plus you two, and the kid.”

He broke off, as though a confusing thought had just struck him. Then he reached forward and ripped the tape off my mouth.

“Where is he?”

I could hear the faint sound of the TV down in the basement.

“At a friend’s,” I said.

Sam nodded reflectively.

“In that case he gets to live. That’s the way it works. That’s how God protects his chosen ones. You thought maybe he suspended the laws of physics for us, so a bullet fired into our brains wouldn’t penetrate the skull? I told you, Phil, things are set up like this to make faith both possible and necessary. If some people got a special deal, it would be obvious that God was protecting them. But it doesn’t work like that. This gun would kill me just like it’s going to kill you two. The reason it doesn’t is because it’s never fired!”

He laughed again.

“I’m living proof of that! There I was, trapped in the hall with all the others, surrounded by three crack shots who gunned down anyone who came out. The hall is torched and burns to the ground, and pretty soon afterward the whole island is crawling with cops. Yet I walked out of there without a scratch on me, as easy as checking out of a hotel! You want miracles? There’s a miracle!”

“So how did you do it?” I asked.

The longer I kept Sam talking, the more chance there was someone might come to the door and scare him off. Or maybe he’d crack up and go over the edge. The way he was acting, it looked like he was high on something. If I could spin things out, it just might turn on him. It was a chance at least, the only one we had.

“How did I do it?” he echoed. “I had faith, Phil, the faith that moves mountains. I knew I couldn’t be harmed. I knew God wouldn’t let that happen. But I also knew that I couldn’t just sit there and expect Him to stop the world and let me get off. God helps those who help themselves!”

He had started pacing up and down the dining area, swiveling around every four paces. His face was pale and strained with a manic energy.

“Those fuckers had us pinned down, right? Mark on one side, Lenny on the other, Rick out front. Lenny was the one I went for. I knew he was only going along with the others out of weakness. Lenny was too scared to stand up to Mark, but I knew he couldn’t stand up to me either. I opened the window in my room and called to him, told him I wanted to talk. Then I climbed out and walked over to him.”

Sam looked at me with contempt.

“You couldn’t have done that, Phil, for all your fancy talk. Walk up to a guy who’s crouching down twenty feet away holding a Cobray automatic on you, just staring him down! I knew he wouldn’t fire, you see. I knew God wouldn’t let him. I kept on talking to him the whole time, telling him how this was all a terrible mistake, urging him to come over to our side. In the end he lowered the gun. He knew he couldn’t use it. I walked right up to him, and when I was close enough I pulled out my pistol and shot him in the face.”

He paused, listening. I too had heard something, a faint click, then a scuffling sound. I knew it must be David. The program he’d been watching was over and he was now coming upstairs. I glanced at Sam, and realized that he’d read my expression perfectly. He ran through to the kitchen and I heard the door to the basement open. I turned my head toward Andrea, but I couldn’t bear the look of helpless anguish in her eyes. There was nothing either of us could do for David now.

It seemed an eternity before Sam returned. When he did, he was alone.

“How come the TV’s on?” he demanded.

I shot another glance at Andrea. Had David managed to hide somewhere? Perhaps God really was protecting him. I hoped someone was.

“He always leaves it on,” I said. “He thinks those are real people in there, and if you switch it off they die.”

Sam’s eyes bored into mine. He had seen the look on my face earlier, and was still suspicious, but his desire to maintain an aura of omnipotence made it difficult for him to show any uncertainty or doubt.

“But how on earth did you get off the island?” I asked, to get him back on track. “The police searched the whole place with dogs.”

Sam smiled, secure and superior again.

“How did I get off?”

He burst into raucous laughter.

“The police escorted me ashore, Phil!”

By now it was obvious that he was out of his skull on something or other. His whole mood had changed in a few seconds, and he seemed to have forgotten the question of David’s whereabouts.

“I let Rick and Mark torch the hall and pick off the suckers inside as they tried to escape,” he continued in a rapid burst. “It was a regular turkey shoot. I could have taken them anytime, but it suited me just fine that there wouldn’t be any survivors. They were so busy covering the hall they didn’t see me creeping up behind them. They had no reason to watch their backs. They thought everyone was inside getting barbecued. I took them out one at a time at close range. They never even knew what hit them.”

He patted the black jacket he was wearing.

“Mark had this phony police uniform he’d put together to get past Andy, some kind of security guard outfit. I stripped it off him and changed into it. When the real cops showed up I fired a burst over their heads with the Cobray to make sure they called in reinforcements. After that I sat tight in the woods and watched the whole thing. I saw you guys come in, and I saw the reception you got. That beat everything, Phil, watching you get led away in cuffs!”

He started pacing up and down again, seemingly trying to relieve the surges of nervous energy which threatened to overwhelm him.

“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.

She went around the side of the house and up the front steps to the porch. The lace curtains were pulled across the window and all she could see was a vague silhouetted figure at the rear of the room. She was about to ring the bell when she heard the sound of a gunshot inside. A man shouted something in a tone of fury. There was a cry of pain.

She tried the door. It was locked. Someone could be injured, even dying. There could be more shooting at any minute. Closing her eyes and saying a swift prayer, Kristine took a step back and hurled herself at the window. It shattered under the impact and she fell into the room, stumbling over some piece of furniture. She quickly recovered her balance and straightened up, grasping the revolver two-handed. Thin seams of blood seeped from her exposed skin, but she didn’t notice the pain, riveted by the scene at the other end of the room. The couple who lived here were kneeling on the floor. They were both handcuffed, and a patch of silvery tape covered the woman’s mouth. A man in some kind of uniform was holding a pistol to her head.

“Police!” Kristine shouted. “Drop it!”

The gunman smiled.

“You shoot, so do I,” he said in a quiet voice. “You might miss. I won’t.”

“There’s no way you can escape!” Kristine rapped out. “I called 911 already. There’ll be a squad car here any second. You haven’t killed anyone yet. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”

The gunman’s smile broadened. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Great tits!” he said. “I bet you have a cute ass, too. Even the blood’s kind of a turn-on, tell you the truth.”

Kristine ignored the taunts. She knew she had to take the initiative in the next few seconds or the situation would get out of control. But what was the situation? The setup looked like one of the cases she had been working on before her leave. Was this a copycat, some jealous lover who had read about the Renton case in the papers and decided to borrow the MO?

“Looks like we have a standoff here,” the gunman said, staring at her intently. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll let God decide.”

“God?” echoed Kristine faintly.

“Isn’t that best? After all, we’re only human. We could make a mistake. But God doesn’t make mistakes.”

His tone changed abruptly, from ruminative meditation to rapped-out instructions.

“We both raise our guns so they’re pointing at the ceiling, then break out the cylinder, cover one of the shells and let the rest fall to the floor, engage the cylinder again and spin it. Then we lower our guns at the same time and fire. If nothing happens we try again. Sooner or later one of us will get lucky. God will decide which.”

“No fucking way!” Kristine snarled.

The gunman’s smile vanished. He jammed the pistol against the woman’s skull so hard she winced with pain.

“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two …”

The bound man kneeling on the floor spoke for the first time, a howl of despair.

“For God’s sake!”

“OK, I’ll do it,” Kristine shouted.

She had no choice. Even if she fired now, the gunman would have time to blast the woman’s head apart. This way, he would at least be forced to remove the pistol from his victim’s head. Once he did that the odds would be even, and there was a possibility that Kristine might get a shot at him. But she would only have one chance. She wished she had spent more time on the range.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the man said. “You’re thinking you can maybe get the drop on me while we’re unloading the guns. Well, think again.”

Keeping the pistol rammed up against the kneeling woman’s head, he reached into the black bag lying on the dining table and produced a snub-nosed lump of black metal. Kristine recognized it as a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic submachine pistol, long the weapon of choice among drug gangs and other connoisseurs of violence. “Semiautomatic” described the way the weapon came set up, in order to evade the provisions of the 1934 National Firearms Act, but converting it to full auto was simply a matter of sending off for a kit to form the lower receiver frame. After that, the thing was capable of delivering a full clip of thirty-two 9mm pistol bullets in a couple of seconds.

The man laid the Cobray down on the table.

“This is going to stay right here,” he told Kristine. “If you try anything funny, or your buddies come to the door, this house is going to be full of corpses in no time at all.”

Kristine stared right into his eyes. The stinging pain of her lacerations was beginning to tell.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “You could blow me away while I’m unloading.”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“You don’t get it, do you? No one seems to get it! I’m not going to try any tricks. I don’t need to. I already know what’s going to happen. As long as you play straight, I won’t touch the automatic.”

In one smooth gesture he whisked the pistol away from the woman’s head and pointed it at Kristine. Her finger tightened instinctively on the trigger, then relaxed. I’m outclassed here, she thought. I could never have done that so quickly. The gunman seemed to have endless reserves of confidence and capability.

“Let’s go!” he said.

Locking eyes with her, he began to raise his pistol in a slow, smooth arc. Kristine found herself doing the same. She had the tunnel vision of the shooter, focused only on what is happening up front, rigid, inflexible, locked into combat.

“Now we’re going to break out the cylinder,” the man said, as though talking to a child.

The two clicks were practically simultaneous.

“Cover one of the shells and let the rest fall to the ground.”

If he tries anything, I can dive behind the chair and take him from there, Kristine thought. But it seemed a faint, weak memory from a previous existence, with no force or relevance to what was happening. She blocked one hole in the cylinder with her thumb and let the other bullets fall to the floor. In the background, she could hear a television blatting away.

“Put it together again and spin the cylinder three times,” the man said.

Kristine obeyed. The man nodded. She had done well, he was pleased with her.

“OK,” he said, “here’s where we play.”

She tightened her hold on the wooden grip of the revolver and started to lower it in time with his, the two guns describing twin parabolas through the still air. Someone was weeping somewhere. It was the kneeling man. She felt irritated with him for disturbing them at this important time.

“I want to play too,” said a voice from the kitchen.

Something flew through the air, striking the gunman in the face. He whirled around to face this new threat. The moment his eyes left Kristine’s, the spell was broken. She pulled the trigger, but the gun just clicked emptily. She was vaguely aware of a shape in the doorway to the right, small and indistinct. The gunman was turning back now, taking aim. Click. Click. Click. Kristine pumped the trigger desperately, all her force in that one finger, aiming for the center of mass in the upper chest area, and then felt rather than heard the gun come to life in her hands, and saw the gunman reel back clutching himself, his mouth open in amazement.

He sagged toward the table, reaching for the Cobray. Kristine rushed him, but there was a sofa blocking her path and she was only halfway there when the automatic went off. Lumps of hot metal flew through the air, striking her in the face and body, and for a moment she thought how easy and painless it was to die. Then she realized that they were the ejected shell casings. The bullets themselves were ripping into the walls and ceiling, having passed through the body of the collapsing gunman.

The clattering stopped as his finger released the trigger. Kristine started trembling all over. She looked at the bound couple, then at the boy standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was holding the dart gun that her mother had given Thomas. The foam projectile lay on the floor beside the dead gunman.

David looked at his father, then surveyed the scene of carnage with an expression of awe.

“Coo-ul!” he said.