Little Death by the Sea (41 page)

“Patti, don’t...don’t hurt Darla...if you
care...” He knew he sounded impotent.

“The bitch is as good as dead, okay? So
forget it. What I want to talk with you about now is the kid.”

Jesus! Haley.

“You call the police or screw things up in
any way and I’ll kill her, okay, Gerry? Do you understand,
dearest?”

“Let me speak to Darla, Patti...please...” He
felt his tears splash against the phone receiver.

“No way, darling. Behave yourself and it’ll
just be the three of us. I’ll be Haley’s new mama. Screw me over,
Gerry, and I’ll strangle her right now with her own Winnie-the-Pooh
bathrobe belt, okay?”

He heard her small, guttural laugh, and he
thought he would lose his mind. “Patti,” he said softly. “Please
don’t hurt my wife and daughter. Please, don’t—“

“You want to say good-bye to your first wife?
I don’t mind that, Gerry. I’m not the jealous type. Especially when
it comes to widowers.”

He heard Patti laugh again and then the small
muffled noise that was his wife’s voice.

“Gerry?” Darla said. She sounded so weak and
small to him.

“Sweetheart, be brave. Keep her busy until
I—“

“Until you what, asshole?” Stump’s ugly,
strident shriek was back on the line. “I told you, the bitch is
history. Your only hope is for the kid now, understand? Do you
fucking understand me?”

“Yes,” he said quickly, swallowing hard.
“Yes, Patti, I do.”

5

Burton hung up the phone and turned back to
the blackboard.

“No answer?” Dave asked. He stood, holding
the Selby & Parker file in his hands.

“It’s busy.”

“The art director said Parker was scheduled
to be out of town tonight.”

“So you said.”

“The wife would have the number where he
could be contacted—“

“Her line’s busy, Dave,” Burton repeated
testily.

A silence mushroomed between the two of them
and they both stood looking at the blackboard.

Suddenly, Burton grabbed up his jacket from
the back of his desk chair and jerked open the door.

“Bring the address,” he said over his
shoulder.

6

Stump waved an arm at the cluttered kitchen,
its boxes stacked and perched on counters and kitchen chairs.

“We’ll go away, just the two of us, Gerry and
I,” she said. “But I think we’ll have to change our travel
destination under the circumstances. Perhaps Columbia, or maybe
Mexico if he doesn’t want to go quite that far.”

Afraid to speak, but convinced that her fate
was assured if she did not, Darla cleared her throat again.
“Why...why not just let him divorce me?” she asked in a whispery
croak.

“Divorce you?” Patti’s face contorted into a
sneer. “You must think I’m a moron. Is that what you think, Darla?
Do you think Patricia Stump is stupid?”

She slammed her hand down hard on the table
beside the gun and it jumped, making a harsh thumping sound. This
seemed to remind Stump of its existence because she snatched it up
and pointed it at Darla’s head.

“Go into divorce court with that mewling brat
of yours and stick Gerry for alimony and child support and the
house and the car and the agency? Just how well would I be taking
care of him if I were to let that happen? And then you always
popping up in our lives, I suppose? ‘Haley needs shoes, Haley needs
a father, Haley needs, Haley needs..” Stump mimicked a sing-songy
tone. “The only way Gerry and I can begin our new life together is
for me to erase his old one.” She smiled and wagged the gun in
Darla’s face.

Darla was surprised she wasn’t crying.
Surprised she hadn’t broken down and become totally deranged. The
bitch was pointing a gun ten inches from the bridge of her nose,
and she was just sitting there, continent and calm. So this is what
true fear does to you, she thought numbly. This is what facing your
own death feels like. She tried to force herself to think of a
plan. To concentrate on what she could do, could say, could
possibly say...

The knock at the door made them both jump
violently. Stump’s finger twitched against the trigger—the Glock
did not have a safety latch—but the gun, miraculously, did not
fire. She lowered the weapon and looked suspiciously at Darla.

“I don’t know who it could be,” Darla said,
her eyes desperate and hopeful.

“Stay here and keep your mouth shut,” Stump
said. “I’ll kill whoever it is if you so much as fart in here.” Her
mouth was a tight, nasty little slit that spewed words like the
snakes and toads from one of Haley’s book of fairy tales.

Darla nodded woodenly, her eyes never leaving
Stump’s face.

Patti Stump took the gun and walked to the
front door.

7

The taxi driver had refused to wait. Had
snatched her money, deposited her suitcase on the sidewalk, and
left, convinced, no doubt of his inability to find return fares in
this out-of-the-way suburb.

Gerry and Darla lived in a tract subdivision
with double and triple story elevations of stucco and brick. Maggie
never noticed before how unfriendly the neighborhood seemed before
tonight.

She rang the doorbell and held her breath.
The house was dark but she could hear noises from the back. When
the door finally opened and she faced Patti Stump—grinning insanely
from behind a large, ugly handgun—Maggie found herself running
through the options of what she could have done besides driving out
here. And when she heard Darla’s sobs coming to her from down the
hall and out onto the front steps, she knew that she had never had
any other choice.

“You’re dead, Maggie,” Stump said. “You know
that, right?” Stump grabbed Maggie by her hair and jerked her into
the house.

Chapter 23

1

She lay quietly in the large, queen-sized
bed. The house was quiet now. No more screaming or phones ringing
or awful threats. At last. Just a quiet easiness to the house, and,
more particularly, to this room. Patti rolled over lazily and
buried her face in one of the cotton floral pillowcases. Her heart
quickened as Gerry’s distinct scent filled her nostrils. This must
be the side he sleeps on, she thought with joy and she scooted her
body over and lay on it. Here’s where he dreams and wakes, reads
and makes love. A jarring thought pierced her when she called the
image to mind of her beloved locked in a passionate embrace with
the creature downstairs. Erasing the picture, she replaced it with
a more vivid one of herself and Gerry, together, finally, in this
bed.

She rolled across the whole bed, reveling in
the feel of it. Our bed now, she thought happily, as she pulled the
soft sheets, with their roses and violets dancing against a white
background, up to her sharp, hard chin. She lay and listened to the
quiet of the house and tried to imagine it filled with the sounds
of Gerry’s laughter and pleasure in her. It gave her a warm feeling
to think that it would all happen soon.

Getting up slowly, she walked to the bedroom
closet and pulled out several of his shirts. Most of them she had
seen over and over again at the office. She smiled to herself and
looked at the bottom of the closet. There, amongst his shoes, was
the laundry basket. She pulled it out and began pawing through it.
With shaking fingers, she extricated a man’s blue and white striped
dress shirt. She held it to her face and breathed deeply. Quickly,
she peeled off her own violet-colored pullover and tossed it into
the dirty clothes basket. She slipped the soiled button-down over
her shoulders and fastened it up to her neck. Raising an arm to her
face, she smelled the fabric. Any moment now that she cared to, she
could access him, call him to her, by just raising a shirt sleeve.
Patti moved to an old maple dresser that stood alone against one
wall of the bedroom. Odd, she thought, that he would have this old
crate here in among all this expensive furniture. Possibly a
boyhood dresser, she wondered? She pulled open the drawers one by
one. Underwear, undershirts, socks, his passport, bowties,
cufflinks, a Father’s Day card from the little girl, postcards, a
packet of condoms.

Patti held the condoms in her hand and
reflected for a moment on how she felt about finding them.
Deciding, at last, that they were his commitment not to have any
more children by the bitch downstairs, she replaced them in the
drawer and pulled open another. Her fingers touched another card:
“To the man I married on our anniversary.” She opened the card and
read its personal contents as coolly as if she were reading an
autopsy report. She closed the drawer quietly, tucking the card in
the waistband of her hiphuggers. Perhaps the bitch would like to
look at this while the trigger was being pulled?

Feeling annoyed and agitated once more, she
left the room, the card pushing uncomfortably into her midriff, the
Glock gripped in her hand. She shut the bedroom door behind her and
turned to the stairs leading back downstairs.

Time to do it, she thought. Time to finish
it.

2

Maggie sat in one of the kitchen chairs next
to Darla, her hands bound tightly behind her. Stump had pressed
packing tape to their mouths and so the two sat, mutely watching
each other, as if willing the other to be either a solution or a
solace. Stump had propped up the anniversary card in front of Darla
on the kitchen table. The cover showed floating silver bells and
pink hearts, some art designer’s idea of marital bliss, with the
words now screaming out: ‘
To The Man I Married—On Our
Anniversary
.’

Darla knew it was all over. She knew it was
going to end right here at her own kitchen table, her own
macaroni-and-cheese-hot-soup-and-tea kitchen table. A bizarre
thought came to her: she and Gerry had made love on this table
once. She wished she was ungagged just long enough to tell the
crazy bitch that. She looked over at Maggie. She looked dazed and
scared. She felt a rush of guilt.

“Botched it with you once, Maggie,” Stump
said as she wagged the gun at her. “Remember all that great advice
you gave me? About how to make a man run for his life away from
you? Remember that? You bitch. I’m going to enjoy killing you as
much as wifey.” She turned to Darla. “I killed her sister, you
know. It was easy. She was this stupid tramp, drunk or something. I
just walked in, and did her. So easy. Didn’t have to shoot her. She
had the strength of nothing.”

Without another word, she placed the snout of
the Glock to Darla’s temple, her finger quivering on the
trigger.

“Bye, wifey. Time to become the
ex-wifey.”

2

Burton stepped across the tidily shaved and
edged front lawn, and around to the side of the house. These new
suburban housing designs made his job easier, since they eliminated
all side windows. A small beam of light at the back of the house
pushed through the row of oleander bushes which crowded the kitchen
door. The light from the kitchen stabbed into the woods,
illuminating the back yard and the trunks of the trees in the
forest behind.

Moving as quietly as possible, while still
being mindful that Kazmaroff’s watch was usually a little fast when
timing ten-minute rear entries, Burton heard the first murmur of
human voices coming from inside the house. His heart beat quicker.
I was right.

He crept around the backyard and crouched at
the end of a small deck behind the large kitchen window. Through
the window, he could see two women, tied to chairs, their backs to
him, and another woman—dressed like some kind of homeless
person—waving the familiar, angular shape of a Glock. In the
instant it took Burton to process the scene, the armed woman
brought the gun to the head of one of the seated women.

And then the front doorbell rang.

No! No! Too soon!

The gun-woman froze. She looked over her
shoulder toward the front door. Then she scanned the kitchen
frantically as though looking for an intruder to suddenly
materialize before her. The expression on her face reminded Burton
of a cornered, wild animal. Her hand never wavered from the woman’s
head where she held the gun.

Burton quickly tried to size up the
possibilities. Would she try to answer the door? Would she make a
run for it?
Jesus, would she kill her hostages first?

He tried to get a bead on her with his own
Colt-45, but the Parker woman was blocking the way.
Think, man,
think! She’s not gonna wait forever
.

The sound of the brick as it hit the
seven-foot expanse of window in the breakfast nook felt like a
nuclear explosion to Maggie. She screamed, then jerked her chair
over on its side, crashing into Darla and knocking her chair
off-kilter too as both of them tumbled to the floor. At the same
time, Maggie was aware of Stump screaming and shooting out the back
window. The crazed woman pumped a dozen rounds into the darkened
backyard through the jagged framework that was the rear of the
breakfast room. Her screams were maniacal and frenzied.

“I’ll kill you, you bastard! Is that you,
Gerry? She’s dead, you bastard! I killed her! I killed her! I
killed her!”

Kazmaroff heard the first shot, then smashed
his way into the house through the living room window, bringing
drapes, curtain rods, window blinds and window frame crashing down
with him. Still clutching his gun, he struggled to his feet and
threw the draperies and hardware away from him and lunged down the
short hallway to the kitchen, kicking and knocking over packing
boxes as he went, years of sentimental keepsakes, photo albums,
Christmas ornaments and special family treasures smashing against
the wall behind him. Holding his gun in front of him in the ready
position, he bellowed as he ran, “Police! Drop your weapons!”

He arrived in the kitchen with no time to
assess the situation beyond pointing his gun at a woman shooting
out the back window of the breakfast nook.