He reached the pistol, clutched it, and let out a grunt of weary triumph. He flopped on his side, eeled around, and aimed back toward the foyer, prepared to discover that his dogged pursuer was looming over him.
But The Other was still flat on his back. Legs splayed out. Arms at his sides. Motionless. Might even be dead. No such luck. His head lolled toward Marty. His face was pale, glazed with sweat, as white and shiny as a porcelain mask.
“Broke,” he wheezed.
He seemed able to move only his head and the fingers of his right hand, though not the hand itself. A grimace of effort, rather than pain, contorted his features. He lifted his head off the floor, and the still-vital fingers curled and uncurled like the legs of a dying tarantula, but he appeared incapable of sitting up or bending either leg at the knee.
“Broke,” he repeated.
Something in the way the word was spoken made Marty think of a toy soldier, bent springs, and ruined gears.
Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, Marty got to his feet.
“Gonna kill me?” The Other asked.
The prospect of putting a bullet in the brain of an injured and defenseless man was repulsive in the extreme, but Marty was tempted to commit the atrocity and worry about the psychological and legal consequences later. He was restrained as much by curiosity as by moral considerations.
“Kill you? Love to.” His voice was hoarse and no doubt would be so for a day or two, until he recovered from the strangulation attempt. “Who the hell are you?” Every raspy word reminded him of how fortunate he was to have lived to ask the question.
The low rumble came again, the same noise he had heard when he’d been crawling toward the pistol. This time he recognized it: not the convulsions and drumming heels of a dying man, but simply the vibrations of the automatic garage door, which had been going up the first time, and which now was coming down.
Voices arose in the kitchen as Paige and the girls entered the house from the garage.
Less shaky by the second, and having caught his breath, Marty hurried across the living room, toward the dining room, eager to stop the kids before they saw anything of what had happened. For a long time to come, they would have trouble feeling comfortable in their own home, knowing an intruder had gotten in and had tried to kill their father. But they would be more seriously traumatized if they saw the destruction and the bloodstained man lying paralyzed on the foyer floor. Considering the macabre fact that the intruder was also a dead-ringer for their father, they might never sleep well in this house again.
When Marty burst into the kitchen from the dining room, letting the swinging door slap back and forth behind him, Paige turned in surprise from the rack where she was hanging her raincoat. Still in their yellow slickers and floppy vinyl hats, the girls grinned and tilted their heads expectantly, probably figuring that his explosive entrance was the start of a joke or one of Daddy’s silly impromptu performances.
“Get them out of here,” he croaked at Paige, trying to sound calm, defeated by his coarse voice and all-too-evident tension.
“What’s happened to you?”
“Now,” he insisted, “right away, take them across the street to Vic and Kathy’s.”
The girls saw the gun in his hand. Their grins vanished, and their eyes widened.
Paige said, “You’re bleeding. What—”
“Not me,” he interrupted, belatedly realizing that he’d gotten the blood of The Other all over his shirt when he’d fallen atop the man. “I’m okay.”
“What’s happened?” Paige demanded.
Yanking open the connecting door to the garage, he said, “We’ve had a thing here.” His throat hurt when he talked, yet he was all but babbling in his urgent desire to get them safely out of the house, incoherent for perhaps the first time in his word-obsessed life. “A problem, a thing, Jesus, you know, like a thing that happened, some trouble—”
“Marty—”
“Come on, over to the Delorios’ place, all of you.” He stepped across the threshold, into the dark garage, hit the Genie button, and the big door rumbled upward. He met Paige’s eyes. “They’ll be safe at the Delorios’ place.”
Not bothering to pull her coat off the rack, Paige shepherded the girls past him, into the garage, toward the rising door.
“Call the police,” he shouted after her, wincing at the pain that a shout cost him.
She glanced back at him, her face lined with worry.
He said, “I’m all right, but we got a guy here, shot bad.”
“Come with us,” she pleaded.
“Can’t. Call the police.”
“Marty—”
“Go, Paige, just go!”
She moved between Charlotte and Emily, took each of them by the hand, and led them out of the garage, into the downpour, turning to look back at him only once more.
He watched until they reached the end of the driveway, checked left and right for traffic, and then started across the street. Step by step, as they moved away through the silver curtains of rain, they looked less like real people and more like three retreating spirits. He had the disconcertingly prescient feeling that he would never see them alive again; he knew it was nothing more than an irrational adrenaline-hyped reaction to what he’d been through, but the fear took root in him and grew nevertheless.
A cold wet wind invaded the deepest reaches of the garage, and the perspiration on Marty’s face felt as if it had been instantly transformed into ice.
He stepped back into the kitchen and pushed the door shut.
Though he was shivering, half freezing, he craved a cold drink because his throat burned as if it harbored a kerosene fire.
Maybe the man in the foyer was dying, having convulsions right that second, or a heart attack. He was in damned bad shape. So it would be a good idea to get in there and watch over him, in case CPR was necessary before the authorities arrived. Marty didn’t care if the guy died—wanted him dead—but not until a lot of questions were answered and these recent events made at least some sense.
But before he did anything else, he had to get a drink to soothe his throat. Right now, every swallow was torture. When the cops arrived, he would have to be prepared to do a lot of talking.
Tap water didn’t seem cold enough to do the trick, so he opened the refrigerator, which he could have sworn was a lot emptier than it had been earlier in the day, and grabbed a carton of milk. No, the idea of milk made him gag. Milk reminded him of blood because it was a bodily fluid, which was ridiculous, of course; but the events of the past hour were irrational, so it followed that some of his reactions would be irrational as well. He returned the carton to the shelf, reached for the orange juice, then saw the bottles of Corona and sixteen-ounce cans of Coors. Nothing had ever looked more desirable than those chilled beers. He grabbed one of the cans because it contained one-third more ounces than a bottle of Corona.
The first long swallow fueled the fire in his throat instead of quenching it. The second hurt slightly less than the first, the third less than the second, and thereafter every sip was as soothing as medicated honey.
With the pistol in one hand and the half-empty can of Coors in the other, shivering more at the memory of what had happened and at the prospect of what lay ahead than because of the icy beer, he went back through the house to the foyer.
The Other was gone.
Marty was so startled, he dropped the Coors. The can rolled behind him, spilling foamy beer on the hardwood floor of the living room. Although the can had slipped out of his grasp so easily, nothing short of hydraulic prybars could have forced him to let go of the gun.