Panic Attack (39 page)

She woke up alone, dazed, tied to the bed, her nose hurting like hell, lying in her own feces, the ropes cutting into her arms, and she was afraid that he’d left for good— that he was going to let her die like this. Her throat was already dry as hell from all the screaming and crying she’d done, but she yelled for help until she could barely make any sound.

Then, finally, Xan returned. Weirdly, she was actually glad to see him. At least he hadn’t abandoned her.
Then she saw he had a gun, and she screamed, or tried to scream, “Don’t shoot me.”
“I’m not gonna shoot you, baby. Relax.”
He was such a total maniac, the way he sounded so calm, so detached. How could this be the same guy who she’d thought was so great, who— Jesus Christ— she’d said “I love you” to?
He started untying her, saying, “You wanna live, just do what I say, you think you can do that? I don’t think that’s so hard, just to keep your pretty little mouth shut.” Then he winced and said, “Man, you stink. If there was a shower here I’d let you clean yourself off. I’m really sorry. I know how uncomfortable this must be for you.”
His face was near hers as he untied the rope over her chest, and she wanted to bite into his cheek, hear
him
scream. But she restrained herself, thinking,
Stay alive. Just stay alive.
As he finished untying her, she asked, “Where are we going?” and he said, “Nowhere.”
His tone was ominous, threatening. He lifted her out of bed and held the gun to her head. Was he going to shoot her now? Why untie her just to shoot her?
Then she heard a noise, a door opening.
“We’re back here, Doc,” he said.
Was it really her
father
? Then she saw him, aiming the gun. She figured he must’ve called the police. The whole building was probably surrounded. In a few minutes, even seconds, this nightmare would be over.
But why did Xan still seem so cocky? And why would the cops have sent her father in here alone? With a gun?
It started to hit her that her father had done it again. There were no cops.
Xan told her father to drop the gun or he’d kill her. She knew he meant it, and she screamed at her father as loud as she could to drop his gun.
Of course he didn’t listen. Her father never listened.
Then he shot her. It happened so fast. One second she was standing, the next she was on the floor, bleeding, pain ripping through her chest.
Then she heard another shot and with blurry vision saw her father, part of his head missing, lying on the floor.
Was this really happening?
The pain was getting worse and she was getting weaker, but she was thinking,
Stay alive. Just stay alive.
She knew if she moved or screamed or said anything, Xan would kill her. She saw him walking away, past her father. He probably thought she was dead. With the pain she was in, it took all her strength to stay still, to not even moan. She was shivering, and the blood,
her
blood, was spreading closer toward where her face was pressed against the floor.
Stay alive. Just stay alive.
She heard the front door open, then close. She spotted her father’s gun a few feet away from her, still partially in his hand.
Marissa crawled through her blood, through her father’s blood, toward the gun. Every moment and every breath was total agony.
She heard noise from outside, footsteps on the porch, and then the door opened. She grabbed the gun. There was blood on the handle, and it was hard to get a grip. She dropped it once, as she heard footsteps getting closer, and then she grabbed it again.
She looked up and saw Johnny looking down at her. He was aiming his gun at her face.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
He took another couple of steps toward her, stopping at the edge of the blood puddle.
“Oh, man, look at you,” he said, smiling. “You look so beautiful right now. I really hate to do this.”
Maybe he didn’t see that she had a gun, too, or maybe he just didn’t care.
“I’m gonna paint a picture of you tonight,” he said, “the way you look right now. I want to remember you like this forever.”
He was still smiling when she squeezed the trigger and a bullet struck him in his right shoulder. His gun fell, and Marissa kept shooting. She’d never shot a gun before, and the next few shots missed. Then she hit him in the upper thigh, close to his crotch. As he started to keel over, she held the gun steady with both hands and shot him in the middle of his chest. He fell to his knees facing her, blood dripping and then gushing from his still smiling mouth. She tried to fire again but was out of bullets. It didn’t matter, though. He collapsed face first onto the floor.

twenty- eight

Marissa was sick of everybody telling her how lucky she was. All the doctors and nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan had been going on about it for weeks, making comments like
If the bullet had been just an inch to the left you would’ve been killed instantly
and
If you hadn’t gotten to your father’s cell phone and called for the ambulance and if the ambulance hadn’t gotten there so quickly you wouldn’t be alive right now
. This made her
lucky
? If she was lucky, her parents never would have hired Gabriela as their maid. If she was lucky, that tropical storm wouldn’t have been approaching Florida and they wouldn’t have been in the house the night of the robbery. If she was lucky, she never would have gone with her friends to see Tone Def that night and met Xan, aka Johnny Long. Lying in the hospital bed, she ran through everything that had gone wrong in her life leading up to the nightmare in the bungalow in the Catskills, and she kept coming to the same conclusion: She’d been anything but lucky.

Although she’d been trying to avoid reading the newspapers and watching the news on TV, she knew that the media was calling her a hero, overglorifying everything she’d done. She’d just been trying to stay alive; how did that make her a hero?

While the media was praising her, they were blasting her father, calling him “Adam Bloom, the psycho therapist of Forest Hills.” They portrayed him as a crazed vigilante, who’d driven up to the Catskills to try to rescue his daughter, hell- bent on avenging the murder of his wife and restoring his own tarnished reputation. The media also criticized the police, particularly Detective Clements, for not pushing for a full mental evaluation of Dr. Bloom or revoking his gun license and for giving him the opportunity to go upstate on his own. Marissa enjoyed seeing Clements get attacked, and she agreed with what the media was saying about her father, too.

One day a couple of weeks after the shootings, Grandma Ann came to the hospital to visit and said, “You can’t blame your father forever. You can’t go through life with that kind of anger.”

Her grandmother looked worn and frail. Marissa was worried about her. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore, Grandma.”
Marissa had been through two surgeries to remove the bullet and repair the

deep tissue damage and several broken ribs, and she was still in severe pain, despite all of the painkillers they were giving her.

“Your father loved you,” her grandmother said almost desperately. “He just wanted to do the right thing.”
“The right thing?” Marissa said. “He fucking shot me.”
“He was trying to save your life.”
“Yeah, and he did such a great job of it.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“No thanks to him.”
“He was scared, he panicked. And if he didn’t go up there that Xan, I mean
Johnny,
might’ve killed you.”
It had come out in the news that Xan had actually been a career criminal named Johnny Long. He’d grown up in the same orphanage as Carlos Sanchez, and the police believed that Johnny had been the second intruder in the robbery and that he’d killed Marissa’s mother and Gabriela. Marissa knew it was her fault for letting Xan into their lives, but everything else had been her father’s fault.
“I know what your father did was wrong,” her grandmother said, “but imagine, just imagine, what the last seconds of his life were like, how awful that must’ve been for him. He had to die, thinking he’d killed you, thinking he’d killed his daughter. That’s the last thing he thought, the last thing he saw . . .”
Her grandmother was sobbing. Marissa gave her a couple of minutes to get hold of herself, then said, “Look, I know it’s hard for you to accept, Grandma, but my father made a huge mistake, okay? I wish he’d been a better man, I really do. I wish I could defend him, I wish I could justify what he did, but I can’t. panic attack 323

He was a selfish asshole who went around like he was wearing a red cape and he didn’t care about me or my mother or anybody but himself. If he’d called the police they might’ve saved me and I might not’ve gotten shot, and if he’d called the police when our house got robbed maybe my mother would still be alive and I wouldn’t’ve had sex with that son of a bitch Johnny Long. Don’t you see? My father caused it all, and I don’t care what you say, I’ll never forgive him for that, ever.”

The day of Marissa’s discharge, Grandma Ann returned to the hospital. She looked extremely frail, like she’d lost ten, maybe fifteen pounds since Adam’s death.

“Are you okay, Grandma? I’m really worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” she said flatly. “Are you ready to go?”
The plan was for them to ride in a Town Car to the Mansfield Hotel in midtown, where Marissa had booked a suite. Marissa intended to never set foot inside the house in Forest Hills again. It was already up for sale, and at some point she’d arrange for someone to sell off all the furniture and clothes and move everything else into long- term storage. Her parents’ life insurance policies, the proceeds from the sale of the house, and their other assets would make her a multimillionaire. She didn’t know what she was going to do with her life, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to waste it working. She was planning to move to Prague after all of the financial details were worked out. She’d live there for a while and then maybe move to Paris or Barcelona or some other city. She just wanted to get away— from New York, from America, from everybody who’d ever heard of Adam Bloom. The thought of having to live the rest of her life as Adam Bloom’s daughter disgusted her so much that she’d already started doing the paperwork to legally change her last name to Stern. It was her mother’s maiden name and she thought it would be a nice tribute.

She got out of the bed and into a wheelchair. She could walk fine, but it was hospital policy that all patients, no matter what their condition, had to be wheeled out when they were discharged. The orderly wheeled her very slowly so Grandma Ann, next to them, could keep up.

At the hospital doors, Marissa stood and walked next to her grandmother toward where the Town Car was waiting at the curb.
Reporters rushed them. One of the loudest shouted, “Ms. Bloom, how does it feel to be a hero?”
Marissa stopped for a moment, glared at the guy, a little older than her, and said,“I’m not a hero, and my last name isn’t Bloom, it’s Stern. I’m Marissa Stern. You got that?”
They moved on toward the car. Now the reporters were shouting, “Ms. Stern! Ms. Stern! Ms. Stern!”
Marissa helped her grandmother in and then got in after her. As they drove off down Fifth Avenue, she could still hear the reporters screaming.
“I swear to God,” Marissa said, “I better not see the name Marissa Bloom in the papers tomorrow morning.”
Her grandmother, looking away, didn’t say anything.

ac know ledg ments

For their enormous impact on this novel and my career I’d like to thank Ken Bruen, Bret Easton Ells, Lee Child, Kristian Moliere, Shane McNeil, Charles Ardai, John David Coles, Sandy Starr, Brian DeFlore, Nick Harris, Marc Resnick, Sarah Lumnah, Andy Martin, Matthew Shear, Matthew Baldacci, and everyone at Minotaur Books.