Eyes closed, she stood in her father’s most private space and pressed the cold muzzle to her temple. Experimentally, she applied pressure to the trigger. The hammer creaked.
Just a simple squeeze...
Kim lowered the gun and opened her eyes. As in a dream she carried the weapon to the range, raised it with both hands—and pulled the trigger.
The explosion deafened her, the recoil almost snapping her wrists. Kim looked at the smoking barrel in shock, then down-range to the man-shaped silhouette twenty feet away. It was backlit and she could see a ragged hole in its neck.
I did it,
she thought in astonishment.
I did it.
Then it struck her. If she’d pulled the trigger before...
Kim sat on the cold cement floor and the shakes came. She hung her head and gulped for air, certain she was going to be sick...but the feeling passed quickly and she got back to her feet. The gun was still in her hand, reeking of cordite, the barrel as warm as a friendly palm. Numb, Kim replaced it on its shelf...and noticed a narrow drawer at her feet. She sat on her haunches and slid it open.
Inside on a bed of green felt lay an assortment of tiny handguns: derringers, belly guns, ankle guns. Compared to the heavy artillery on the shelves above, these looked like toys. One in particular caught Kim’s eye, a pearl handled semi-auto, also a Colt. She brought it out and found it fit neatly into her hand. Holding it made her feel...safe.
It took her awhile to find the right bullets and even longer to figure out how to release the clip and thumb in the tiny cartridges. But when the gun was loaded and perceptibly heavier in her hand, it gave her an entirely new feeling.
Now she felt dangerous.
Kim took the gun up to her room and hid it in a secret shoebox in the back of her closet, where she was sure no one would ever look.
Outside, the storm laid waste to the night, but Kim was no longer afraid.
AT TEN TO TWO ON Sunday morning, when the waitress came around for last call, Will Armstrong ordered another double scotch. He had to shout to be heard over the plaintive, bass-heavy music. He downed the scotch while the bimbo on stage did her bump and grind. He hadn’t been to a strip joint in at least ten years and was mildly shocked when the evening’s first ‘exotic dancer’ strutted onto the runway and started fingering herself like a porn queen. The rules of shithouse etiquette had obviously changed in a decade.
He scanned the smoky barroom, eyeing the other patrons, itching for a fight. He’d spent the past thirty-six hours in a futile search for Nina and the boys, and the frustration tortured him like a relentless cramp, knotting his shoulders, curling his fists into bludgeons.
After feigning illness at work on Friday, he’d set out on a series of unannounced visits, dropping in on anyone he thought might harbor his wife and kids: friends of the family, relatives on both sides, including Nina’s bitch sister, Claudia. He’d even gone to the boys’ school, walked right into their classroom. But the twins weren’t there. “Your wife called to say they’d be out of school for a couple of days,” the teacher told him. “Is everything all right?”
“Nothing’s all right,” Will said to the stripper’s ass as she left the stage and the house lights came up. “It’s all fucked up.”
He got to his feet and swayed toward the exit, hoping some greaser would cross his path or eyeball him the wrong way. But no one did. It made him feel invisible, of no consequence, and when the night air struck him, he sobbed. The single thing he’d feared most since the day he met Nina was losing her...and now here he was, without her. Without his boys. He needed his family. She had no right to tear them apart like this. She’d violated a sacred trust, one which for Will ran much deeper than the vows they’d exchanged on their wedding day. Nina was his. She belonged to him, body and soul.
When he caught up to her, he’d have to remind her of that.
He continued down the stairs to the parking lot in the rain. By the time he climbed into the Suburban his petulance had swollen to fury.
“Where are you?” he shouted, socking the steering wheel with his fist, cracking the padded vinyl. “Where
are
you?”
Then it came to him. A snatch of conversation he’d had with Nina years ago, huddled next to her by a crackling fire in Algonquin Park, the two of them full of the urgent passion of youth. They’d slept together for the first time that night, a pair of virgins groping each other in a pup tent, and Nina had told him things afterward that moved him deeply, secret things that for Will completed the circle of their love. The part of her disclosure he remembered now lead to a second, more tender session of lovemaking.
“My mother’s a drunk,” Nina had told him. “A violent drunk. I’ve never known her any other way. She pushed my father down the porch steps one time in broad daylight. Broke his wrist so bad he couldn’t handle his woodworking tools for a year.” She’d rested her head in the crook of his arm...now, sitting in the truck in a riot of reflected neon, Will could almost feel its precious weight. “Sometimes she came after us girls. I was terrified of her, but Claudia wasn’t afraid. She used to hide me. We lived in the country and Claudia had dozens of great hiding places. Claudia used to hide me and take the lumps for us both.”
Will thought,
Claudia, you lying bitch. Get ready to take your lumps.
* * *
Claudia Rider was a spinster. Forty-one and never been kissed, she often joked. This wasn’t completely true, of course, but to Claudia, a large, powerfully built woman with a beak nose and a bawdy laugh, it sometimes seemed that way. Living alone was not a conscious decision so much as it was a consequence of
being
Claudia Rider. For starters, she was sloppy. Outrageously so. She seldom bathed. She had a house full of cats and absolutely no regard for the clock. Her livelihood—creating stained glass windows—was also her passion, and she went at each new project with an obsessive fervor, often working through the night. As her reputation grew and the jobs started rolling in, her studio space spilled over to include her entire house. There were chunks of lead and bits of stained glass everywhere and the reek of solder permeated everything. Who could live with that? But she was a marvel with kids, generous to a fault—and she did not scare easily, a quality she had her mother to thank for.
That was why, when Will Armstrong appeared at her door at two-thirty in the morning Claudia was awake, unsurprised and not the least bit intimidated. She opened the door to the limit of the chain and asked him what he wanted.
“My wife,” Will said, his red eyes flashing over her head, trying to see into the house. “And my boys. I know they’re here, Claudia, and I’m not leaving this time until you send them out.” He pressed his face into the gap. “Am I getting through here? Bitch?”
Claudia said, “Listen, you bully. Nobody pushes me around and
nobody
calls me a bitch. So tell your story walking.”
She started to push the door shut and Will got his fingers into the gap. He hunched his shoulders, preparing to ram his way through—but Claudia was a heartbeat faster. She drove her weight against the door and slammed it on Will’s fingers. There was a scream and the fingers were withdrawn. Claudia closed the door and locked it.
“Fucking bitch,” Will bawled. He drove his foot into the heavy door. “Open this door.”
“You clear out of here, Will Armstrong, right now, or I’m calling the cops. I shit thee not.”
Will clumped down the steps to the lawn and hollered at the second story windows. “Nina. Get your shit together and come down here, right now. Jeffrey? Jerry? Get down here. I mean it.”
A window went up across the street. “Hey, asshole. There’s people tryna sleep over here.”
“Fuck you.” Will bent over the flower bed and unearthed one of the bordering bricks. “I’m gonna count to three,” he shouted. “One, two,
three
.” Then he tossed the brick through Claudia’s living room window. “You think I’m fucking around out here?”
He waited a few seconds and stalked back to the Suburban for his tire iron. He’d just started up the porch steps when a police cruiser rolled into the driveway.
When the cops got out with their hands on their guns, Will tossed the tire iron on the lawn and sat on the steps.
* * *
It was dawn when the two police officers led Will out of Claudia’s house. By then the rain had stopped and the day looked fine. After much discussion—and a solemn promise from Will to pay for the broken window—Claudia decided not to press charges. Because Will was a doctor, the officers elected to leave it at that. They did, however, point out to Will in no uncertain terms that at the very least they could charge him with impaired. They seated him in the back of the cruiser and drove him home, leaving him with a stern warning that when he returned for the Suburban he’d best do it sober and without disturbing his sister-in-law. Will was suitably contrite. He nodded in all the right places. But at least he’d gotten inside the house.
He already knew where he’d look for them next.
* * *
Shortly after dawn on Sunday morning Nina was awakened by the phone. To her surprise the twins were already awake, lying like dolls on their motel bed, staring mutely at the ceiling.
She picked up the receiver and said hello. It was Claudia.
“Hi, kid.”
“Claud. What’s up?”
“Will was here a while ago. I had to call the cops.”
“Oh, shit. Did he...?”
“I’m okay, but listen. Steer clear of the fucker. He’s losing it.”
“Okay, Sis’. Thanks for calling.”
Nina hung up and saw the boys’ big, weary eyes on her.
“Can we go home now?” Jeffrey said. “I miss Daddy.”
“Soon,” Nina said. “Soon, honey boy.”
She patted her bed and the boys jumped in with her, one on either side.
WHEN ROB HARDIE GOT TO work on Monday morning, he was more than a little surprised to find Jack Fallon asleep on the couch in the doctors’ lounge. Considering what he’d just been through—losing the baby, his wife coming to the OR in hemorrhagic shock—Rob hadn’t expected to see the man at work for at least a couple of days. He tried to creep past him into the change room.
“It’s okay, Rob,” Jack said. “Just resting my eyes.”
Startled, Rob said, “Jesus, Jack, I...”
Jack sat up. “I know. You don’t have to say anything. It’s not the first time this has happened.”
“How’s Jen?”
“Fine. Like I said, we’ve been through this before.”
“Okay. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know. Are you sure you feel up to working today?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“All right, Jack. See you around.”
“Yeah. And Rob. Thanks for looking after my wife on Friday night.”
“Glad to do it,” Rob said, thinking he’d felt more gratitude from the guy he’d allowed to pull ahead of him in traffic this morning on his way to work.
* * *
The staff gave up early on offering their condolences to Dr. Fallon. The man’s remoteness was palpable. He spoke only when spoken to, his replies curt, and once his first case was under way he spent most of his time with his nose in a book. He was in neuro today, doing an unfortunate young woman with a pituitary tumor, and Karli, the circulating nurse, could tell his mind was a thousand miles away. He’d turned the page only once in the past twenty minutes and hadn’t looked up in twice that long. Secretly, Karli wished she could comfort him, but she knew that was not her place.
She sighed. The surgeon today was Dr. Stoddart, a man who gave new meaning to the word slow. In all probability this case would still be ongoing long after Karli had climbed alone into bed with a glass of hot milk and a Harlequin.
She sat on her stool and watched Dr. Fallon, wondering if he even knew she existed.
* * *
In another part of the hospital a day care patient by the name of Dan Doogan drew the curtain on a change cubicle, stripped off his street clothes and examined the hospital johnny the nurse had given him. He decided the open part went around back and did his best to suit himself up. The sleeves were too tight for his massive arms and he could barely reach the tie strings that dangled at his back. But with a little perseverance, he managed.
Dan knew he was no Einstein—he’d dropped out of school in the tenth grade—but perseverance, and a generous helping of will power, had served him well. At twenty-nine he owned a thriving gym, had a wife and three gorgeous kids, drove a forest green Lexus in the summer and a top-of-the-line GM pickup in the winter. His wife, Carole, was a model, and between them they banked over three hundred thousand a year. Life was good.
Except Dan came from a long line of Doogans with gallbladder disease, and his had finally caught up with him. He was getting attacks almost daily now and it was interfering with his training, never mind his business. His doctor told him the longer he waited the more likely he was to get into serious trouble. Gallbladders could rupture, the doctor said, and when that happened you were in a world of grief. Getting it done electively, through something called a laparoscope, he’d be discharged the same day with only a few tiny incisions, ready to get back into training in three weeks tops. His next contest wasn’t for another eight months, so he decided, what the hell, get the damn thing over with.
Except Dan hated needles; he hated doctors; he hated
pain
.
“Are you ready, Mister Doogan?”
In his cubicle Dan jumped. His hands were clammy and his bare feet left shiny sweat prints wherever he stepped. He pulled the curtain aside.
The admitting nurse, a petite blond of about twenty, eyed him up and down. Dan was used to that. People did it all the time. At six-foot-three, two hundred and twenty pounds of ripped muscle, Dan cut an imposing figure. He was four-time Canadian heavyweight bodybuilding champion and spent two hours a day, five days a week, working out in his own gym. Of course people stared.
Dan gathered the flaps of his gown into one ham fist and did his best to cover his tush. “As ready as I’m gonna get,” he said. “So what’s next?”