“Okay, call the cops,” Adam whispered to Dana.
While she was making the call, Adam went to the walk-in closet, flicked on the light, reached to the top shelf, and grabbed his Glock .45. Then he bent down, moved some things out of the way, and opened the shoe box where he kept the bullets.
“What’re you doing?” Marissa asked.
Adam was still bending down, loading the clip, and didn’t answer. He’d bought the gun four years ago after a couple of houses in the neighborhood had been robbed. He practiced shooting once in a while in the city, at the West Side Pistol Range. He enjoyed shooting and it was a great way to relieve stress and safely express anger.
He came out of the closet with the gun in his hand and Marissa said, “Are you fuckin’ crazy?”
Dana was still on the phone, finishing up the conversation with the 911 operator, whispering, “Yes, we think he’s in the house right now…. I don’t know…Please hurry…. Yes…. Please hurry.” Then she ended the call and said, “They’re coming.” She put an arm around Marissa, then she saw the gun in Adam’s hand and said, “What the hell’re you doing with that?”
She hated the idea of having a gun in the house and had been asking Adam to get rid of it.
“Nothing,” Adam said.
“Then why’re you holding it?”
He didn’t answer.
She said, “Just put it away, the police’ll be here any minute.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Adam, the police’re coming. There’s no reason to have a—”
She cut herself off when there was another noise. There was no doubt this time—there were footsteps, the guy heading upstairs.
“Oh my God,” Marissa said, covering her mouth, starting to cry.
Adam was trying to think again, focus, but his brain was overloaded and he said, “Hide in the closet.”
Dana said, “What’re you—”
“Nothing. Just go, goddamn it.”
“Come with us.”
“Just hide…
now.”
Dana seemed hesitant. Marissa’s crying was getting a little louder.
“He’ll hear her,” Adam whispered urgently.
Dana and Marissa went into the closet and hid. Adam went to the door, the gun at his side at the level of his head. For several seconds, he listened, but heard nothing. He hoped this meant the guy had decided to go back downstairs. Maybe he’d heard Marissa crying and would simply leave the house and run away.
But then there was another creaky footstep on the stairs—the son of a bitch was coming up. It hit Adam as if he were realizing it for the first time—
someone was inside his house
.
He’d grown up in this very house and then his parents had given it to him when Marissa was a baby, when they moved to Florida. He’d loved growing up in Forest Hills Gardens, with all his friends so close by and the houses with the big backyards, but the neighborhood was safer now than it had been back then, and when he was ten years old, an older kid had stolen his bicycle—just came up to him with a knife one afternoon
and said, “Give it up.” As a teenager, he’d been mugged on Queens Boulevard twice, and when he was in his twenties—living in Manhattan while he was going for his doctorate at the New School—he was once robbed at gunpoint in the vestibule of a friend’s apartment building in the Village.
Standing with the gun drawn, listening to the intruder take another step up the stairs, he remembered how awful and helpless it had felt to be a victim, and how he didn’t want to be a victim again. His thoughts were frantic, but he was trying to be logical. He thought,
What if the guy has a gun? What if he’s a total maniac? What if, any moment now, he charges up the stairs and starts shooting? What if he shoots
me?
Adam imagined getting shot, lying dead in the hallway, and then the guy finding Dana and Marissa in the bedroom. The guy could be some crazed rapist. There were always stories in the news about home invasions, men breaking into houses and raping women, but he’d never thought it could actually happen to him, in his own house.
But it could be happening now.
The guy was on the staircase, getting closer. In a few seconds he could be at the top of the landing and then it would be too late.
All of this was going through his mind at once and he didn’t have time to think it through clearly. If he’d had more time, if he’d been in a calmer, less scattered state, he might’ve realized that the police would be arriving at any moment. There was a private security company in Forest Hills Gardens and there was supposed to be a response time of less than five minutes. If he locked himself in the bedroom, hid with Dana and Marissa, the guy probably wouldn’t be able to get to them. He might try the locked bedroom door, but then he’d give up and the police would arrive.
But Adam wasn’t thinking about any of this. He was only thinking about how he wanted to protect his family, how he didn’t want to be a victim again, and how some son of a bitch had broken into his house, the house he’d grown up in, the house that his father had bought in 1956.
He heard the guy take another step on the staircase, and
then another. Was Adam imagining it or was the guy approaching faster? There was only a nightlight on in the hallway, a little candle-shaped orange light plugged into a socket at ankle level. Adam’s eyes had adjusted, but it was still hard to see very clearly. At any moment, though, the guy would appear. After he took another step or two, Adam would see his legs, or the guy might rush up to the landing and it would be too late.
Adam was standing by the entrance to his bedroom, and then, an instant later, he was in the hallway, running with his gun drawn, yelling, “Get the fuck out of here!”
It was darker near the stairway than it had been near the bedroom door. Now Adam could tell that the guy wasn’t as far up the staircase as he had thought. He was maybe halfway up and Adam could tell that he was a big guy, but that was about it.
Then he saw the guy’s hand reaching for something. It was a sudden movement and Adam knew that it had to be a gun. He even thought he saw a glimmer of something, shininess near the guy’s hand. If he waited any longer, the guy would shoot him first. Then he’d shoot his way into the bedroom, find Dana and Marissa, and kill them, too.
The guy started to say something. Later Adam would dwell about this moment and remember that the guy had said, “Please don’t—” but at that moment everything was happening so fast that he wasn’t even aware that the guy had spoken. He was only aware of the danger he and his family were in as he started firing his gun. He wasn’t sure if the first shot hit the guy, but the second one did, high up, in his neck or head. The guy was falling backward, starting to tumble, and Adam remembered his shooting instructor saying,
Always go for the chest, not the head
—and he emptied the rest of the clip, the other shots going into the guy’s chest or mid-section. Then the guy fell out of view, into darkness, but Adam heard his body land with a loud thud at the bottom of the staircase.
There was silence for a long moment, and then there was noise from downstairs, but it had nothing to do with the guy Adam had shot.
There was someone else in the house.
There were footsteps, then deep breathing. Adam was out of bullets. If the other guy came upstairs or started shooting, he was screwed.
“Get the hell out of here or I’ll shoot!” Adam yelled.
That was smart, brilliant maybe. Make the guy think he still had bullets. Why wouldn’t he think so? Adam had fired off the shots so quickly the guy couldn’t have possibly counted the shots. And even if the guy had counted them, knew Adam had shot ten rounds, how would he know he didn’t have more ammo?
The strategy worked or maybe the guy just panicked. Adam heard him running away, knocking into something—the console?—and then the front door opened and closed, and the guy was gone.
“Adam.”
He turned suddenly, felt a sharp jolt in his chest. Then he registered Dana and Marissa standing there.
“Are you okay?” Dana asked.
“Back to the bedroom!” Adam shouted.
“Are you okay?” Dana asked again.
“Just get back!”
Dana and Marissa went into the bedroom and Dana shut the door. Adam was worried about the guy on the stairs. What if he was still alive?
He reached toward the wall at the other end of the landing and put his thumb on the light switch. He hesitated, wondering if this was a great idea. Maybe the guy was aiming his gun up the stairs, waiting for a clear shot.
Adam flicked on the light, relieved to see that the guy, wearing a black ski mask, was crumpled at the bottom landing, not moving at all. He headed downstairs, going slowly, not taking his eyes off the guy’s body.
As Adam got closer, he could tell that the guy had darkish skin, looked Latino, maybe Puerto Rican. His chest and face were a bloody mess, there was a big hole and oozing blood and gray stuff where his left eye used to be, and a big chunk of his jaw was gone.
Adam stared at the body for a while, trying to process what he’d done.
He’d shot a man. He’d shot and
killed
a man.
Then he looked toward the guy’s right hand. There was a flashlight two stairs above the guy’s head, but Adam didn’t see any gun. There was no gun on the staircase or on the bottom of the stairwell either. Maybe the guy had fallen on it and it was under his body.
Adam remained, staring at the man he’d killed in a daze, until the police started banging on the front door.