“You did a good job on that,” he said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Daddy.”
Her voice was bubbly, as effervescent as always, and it brought a smile to his face. She had really done a wonderful job since all this began. His little girl was growing up.
The reason for that of course was Ms. Hester upstairs. The poor thing was doing badly. After Eleanor had saved her (and he mentally hesitated over the memory, for yes, it had been Eleanor who did the saving), they brought her to their house, where she had slipped into a state of shock from which she couldn’t seem to recover. They weren’t equipped to care for her, at least not properly, not with the power out, and soon her shock took the form of a fevered sickness.
While Eleanor was at work, saving the city, and Jim was moving around the house, fixing this and that and occupying himself with any little task in a desperate attempt to ward off the restless boredom of cabin fever, Madison had calmly invested herself in the ceaseless effort to ease Ms. Hester’s suffering. She was her nurse. She read to her. She held her hand and wiped her brow and fed her with a spoon and kept her hydrated and cleaned her when she went to the bathroom. Yes, he realized, she had played nurse, but she wasn’t just playing at it. She was actually doing real work. She was recognizing a problem and confronting it head-on, like an adult.
Jim turned from his daughter’s ministrations and glanced across the street, toward Ms. Hester’s house. A light breeze carried the stench of mud and sewage across the patio. It made his nose wrinkle and his Adam’s apple pump up and down in his throat. Ms. Hester’s house was a shambles. Mud from Hurricane Kyle’s storm surge had pushed through that side of the street and poured into the gaping hole on the kitchen side of her house. Water now filled the house up to a height of about two feet, not quite covering the top of the mud flow, and in the stillness the house, the tree that jutted through it had a skeletal eeriness that he didn’t like. Not one little bit.
A figure was walking around the back corner of the house.
Jim watched the man carry something from the house and put it into a small green boat and thought:
Is that really him? It can’t be. That slime ball Bobby Hester is looting his own grandmother’s house. Is that really what I’m seeing?
But he was. Bobby Hester was carting a TV right out of his grandmother’s house and putting it into the back of a boat that was almost certainly stolen as well.
What was next? he wondered. Her jewelry? Her collection of Spode china?
“Sweetheart,” Jim said, pulling his hand away, “do Daddy a favor and go inside the house.”
She followed his gaze across the flooded street to Ms. Hester’s house.
“But, Daddy . . .”
“Don’t argue with me, Madison. Go upstairs. Right now. Go on, move.”
He gave her a gentle push toward the door. She resisted momentarily, then turned and ran inside. He followed her to the door and watched her run up the stairs.
“Stay put up there, you hear?” he said to her back.
She reached the landing and turned. “Daddy?”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Just stay up there, okay? Daddy’s gonna go check something across the street.”
“Daddy, no . . .”
“It’s okay, Madison. Just hang tight up there. I’ll be right back.”
But part of him wondered if that would happen. It hadn’t come across in his voice, at least he hoped it hadn’t, but the truth of the matter was that he was very scared just now. He was pissed off at the idea that anyone would steal from an old woman, that much was true, but he was also out of his depth.
He watched Madison disappear into the game room upstairs, then turned back to Ms. Hester’s house. What would he do if he actually got his hands on Bobby Hester anyway? Jim had picked up more than a few cop stories over the years of his marriage with Eleanor, and he thought he had a pretty good idea of what meth addicts were capable of doing. They tended to be violent and unpredictable, not the kind of people who listened to reason. If he were actually to catch Bobby in the act, what would he do?
He had a momentary vision of belting Bobby across the jaw with a hammer, his meth-addled body flying backwards, landing with a splash in the water and then going still as a small, thin groan escaped his lips. Jim would stand there, victorious, a suburban Conan the Barbarian, defender of all that was right and good.
As far as fantasies went, it felt like a good one. It appealed to his sense of justice.
But a nagging, insistent little voice in the back of his head kept repeating:
It’ll never happen that way. He’ll get the hammer from you and hit you with it again and again and before you know it it’ll be you flying backwards, landing in the water, a pink cloud spreading out around your head. Only you won’t go still, and he won’t stop to gloat. You’ll keep sliding under the surface of the water, unconscious, little silvery bubbles escaping from your nostrils as he drops the hammer and grabs your neck and holds you under until you’re dead.
He shook his head as though to shake off the voice and walked out the door. The hammer was where he had left it on the porch. He scooped it up, flexed his fingers over the handle, and stepped into his flooded yard.
Jim was halfway across the street, up to his chin in water, before he realized he hadn’t planned his approach. For a moment he entertained using the downed pecan tree as a cover, but then he remembered all the water moccasins he’d seen gliding through the water over the past few days. They took shelter in the trees, he knew, and the idea of suddenly finding himself entwined in a bolus of writhing snakes was more than he wanted to deal with.
He sank a little lower in the water and dog-paddled around the bedroom side of the house and into the backyard, where he hoped to get the drop on Bobby Hester.
And, as he peered through the open back door and saw Bobby in the kitchen, struggling to remove a microwave oven from its alcove in the wall, it appeared his plan might actually work.
Staying low in the water, the hammer gripped tightly in his right hand, Jim glided through the living room.
He stopped at the edge of the couch and slowly rose from the water.
Bobby Hester was busy pulling at the microwave, grunting and cursing under his breath, but as Jim closed the distance between them, the situation abruptly changed for the worse.
Bobby took his hands down from the microwave. His back was still to Jim, but his head was turned just enough for Jim to see dark light in Bobby’s left eye.
“You’re in my house,” Bobby said.
Jim froze. The distance between them was maybe eight feet. Even in hip-deep water Jim figured he could probably close that distance in the wink of an eye. But it wasn’t going to happen. His fear had rooted him to the floor as surely as if hands had come up from the dark water and grabbed his ankles. A flood of adrenaline twisted his stomach into knots. He could feel his face and his scalp tingling with a heated electric flush.
Come on, Jim
, he thought.
Do something. Don’t just stand here. He’ll know how scared you really are.
“This isn’t your house, Bobby.”
At the mention of his name, a wicked smile lit the corner of Bobby Hester’s mouth. One hand went into the dark recesses of the shelf in front of him and came out with an imposing ten-inch chef’s knife. Jim saw a flash of light dapple across the blade as Bobby turned to face him.
“This is my grandmother’s house,” Bobby said. “Might as well be mine.”
There was a maniacal light dancing in Bobby’s eyes, not sane. Dark pockets, like bruises, filled the hollows of his cheeks, and when his burned and bloodless lips spread open, they revealed a mouth of broken and blackened teeth.
Jim thought:
That’s a tweaker’s face. The man is amped up as high as a body can go. Oh shit, what have I done?
“You don’t have her permission to be here,” Jim said. He was trying as hard as he could to sound confident and strong, but no amount of trying could keep the tremors from his voice. He heard it, and he was pretty sure Bobby Hester heard it, too. “You need to get the hell out of here, Bobby. Just walk out that door over there.”
Bobby glanced down at the knife in his hand. It was a deliberate gesture, full of implication. Then he looked at Jim, his eyebrows raised.
“I’ll tell you what I need to do,” Bobby said. “I need to get the rats out of my grandmother’s house.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he lunged forward, slashing the knife in the air between them. The thrust wasn’t meant to cut Jim, only scare him, and that it did. Jim stumbled backwards, falling over something under the water (he wasn’t sure what). He managed to keep from going all the way under, but the damage was done. Bobby threw his head back and let out a savage sound that was part laugh, part battle cry, and he charged again, jabbing the knife in front of him like a bayonet.
Jim scrambled away from the knife until his buttocks hit the submerged top of Ms. Hester’s kitchen table. The next instant he was on top of the table and sliding backwards across it like a piece of wet ice over a tile floor. He caught himself at the back edge of the table and jumped to his feet, his jeans pulled halfway down his ass, full of water.
But he was on his feet. He looked down at the table, and then down at Bobby Hester, who was still closing on him, and it seemed impossible to Jim that only a moment before he had been down there in the water with that deranged, knife-wielding lunatic. He saw Bobby, his mouth a diseased O, staring up at him in surprise.
I did it,
Jim thought with a clear resounding sense of exaltation so intense that for a moment he wanted to laugh.
The laughter died inside him a split second later, though, for Bobby charged the table and grabbed it by the corners and started to shake it.
“Whoa-o-o,” Jim said, as the table trembled below him. He could feel it tilting to one side, and as it reached the tipping point Jim’s feet slid out from under him and the hammer went flying. For a horrible moment he tracked its flight, watched it tumble end over end until it plunked into the water and slipped into darkness.
But the table was still tipping, and Jim’s balance was gone. His feet slid out from under him and he went down, landing on his ass just a few inches from the edge of the tabletop. He was lucky he hadn’t landed squarely on it, for the table was heavy wood and slate and solid enough it might have broken his back had he hit a few inches farther to his right. As it was the force of his weight coming down on the table slammed it back down flat on the ground and Jim bounced, unhurt, into the water.
Bobby lunged for him again, screaming something that Jim couldn’t exactly understand, though the murderous intent behind the sound was plain enough.
In that instant, a plan popped into his mind fully formed. Rather than try to get to his feet and run away, Jim went under the water, under the table, and kept on swimming back in the direction of the living room. The water was black. He didn’t dare open his eyes, not with all the garbage and chemicals floating around in it. He just kicked wildly, his hands groping blindly at the emptiness around him, hoping he was going in the right direction.
When his hands hit the recliner he knew he was in the right spot. He felt for the little side table Ms. Hester had always kept there.
Where are you? Come on,
he thought.
It’s here somewhere
. And then his right hand closed around a small ceramic figure. Jim shot to the surface, drew a deep breath, and spun around. Bobby Hester was still in the kitchen, but was already charging toward him, the knife still in his hand.
Jim had just a moment to examine the figure, an angelic child dressed in a graduation cap and gown and holding a small tightly rolled diploma, bought in honor of Madison’s promotion from elementary school to middle school, before Bobby Hester shrieked at him.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you!”
But now, with the cold reassurance of some distance between them and still riding the excited high of his narrow escape over at the kitchen table, Jim Norton saw that he could do this. He tossed the figurine an inch or two in the air, giving it a quarter turn, wrapped his index and middle finger over the base like a pitcher about to throw his best heat, and let it fly at Bobby Hester’s head.
Bobby flinched away from the hurtling figurine. He threw up one arm to block his face, but it was too little too late. The figurine struck his forearm with the solid-sounding clink of porcelain on bone and was immediately followed by a howl of rage and pain from Bobby.
Jim reached under the water and came up with another figurine. There was a whole army of the things down there, and he was on fire. He threw the next figurine and caught Bobby in the chin.
Bobby staggered back, stumbling over something in the water. When he looked back up at Jim, there was an expression of utter surprise on his face.
Jim laughed at him. He reached into the water for another weapon, but when he came up, he found that Bobby was no longer looking at him. And the expression of surprise on his face was gone, replaced by a sour sneer of contempt.
Jim looked over his left shoulder, and saw Eleanor standing there, her pistol in her hand.
“That’s far enough, Bobby. Put the knife down and leave.”
“Fuck you, bitch. This is my hou—”
The word broke off mid-syllable, for at that moment Eleanor fired a single shot, the bullet smacking into the wall less than a foot from Bobby’s ear.
“It’s up to you,” she said. “We can stay here and discuss it if you want to, or you can crawl your miserable hide right out that hole in the wall behind you. But just remember this: If you want to stay, I’ve got orders to shoot looters on sight, if necessary.”
Jim shifted his gaze back to Bobby Hester. Bobby was a wasted life, his mind charred to cinders by all the meth he’d smoked, but nonetheless, Jim could see the logic working itself out in Bobby’s mind. There was a look of savage contempt on his face, but he also seemed to know that Eleanor wouldn’t miss on her next shot.
And that’s a safe bet, you sorry sack of shit
, Jim thought.
At this distance, she can shoot your remaining teeth out one by one.