“There’s this little document called the Ten Commandments that says we’re not supposed to kill anybody.” With his free hand, Bobby touched the spots where the bullets had torn through Pinnix and Ramseur and ripped into the drywall, nearly invisible now. Had I not shown him the exact spots earlier, he’d have never known. “It’s a rule riddled with exceptions, of course, so what you’re really dealing with is the Nine Commandments and One Suggestion. Nevertheless, we’re all brought up to think thou shalt not kill. But you’ve killed. You’re part of a special group of people now.”
“The one you’re in,” I said.
“That’s right. Welcome to the club. You failed to follow the One Suggestion, but you popped a bunch of shitbags who deserved it, so you’re a hero. But there’s a downside to that.”
He turned around and smiled. He leaned back against the wall, taking a short gulp of beer.
“I’m an alien,” I said.
“Bingo.”
“That’s not what’s bugging me.”
“You feel guilty for wasting shitbags. You’re telling yourself they were human beings, too, I shouldn’t get so juiced over killing God’s creatures.”
“No,” I said.
“So what is it now?”
I told him about my conversation with Dr. Wingrove and how it dovetailed perfectly with my theory that I had been somehow selected for special cosmic persecution. I didn’t mention the Bald Man. I had learned long ago that men have thoughts that make perfect sense within the confines of their own brains, but once spoken aloud they spoil into madness. This was one of them; the idea that the Bald Man wasn’t just a prank caller but also a demon belonged inside.
An idea occurred to me then and I gestured at the watch on his wrist. “That thing have a stopwatch feature?” I asked him.
“Uh… yeah.”
“I need your help with something.”
“What with?”
“I need you to time me.”
Allie, Abby and Kate were busy in the formal living room—upon the floor of which said room Allie and I had made love after I pulled my ninja act in Durham—and we left them there as Bobby followed me into the basement. I turned on the lights and laid down on the floor in between the coffee table and the sofa.
“What are you doing?”
“Let’s see how long it takes me to get locked and loaded and get upstairs.”
He frowned down at me. He regarded me this way for a long time, and for a moment, I thought he wouldn’t do it. But finally, with a roll of his eyes and shake of his close-shaven head, he removed the watch from his wrist and began pushing buttons.
“Okay,” he said. “Ready… set… go.”
I laid on the floor with my eyes closed for what felt like a long enough time for two men to creep upstairs into the kitchen. Then I leapt off the floor and made my way over to the gun cabinet.
“Thirty seconds,” Bobby said.
I looked down and worked the combination. My head had begun to pound with the memory. My trigger finger itched for action. When I heard the definitive click, I depressed the handle and opened the cabinet. Bobby said nothing as I withdrew the AK-47, checked the action to make sure the chamber was clear, and rammed an empty magazine into the receiver.
“Locked and loaded,” I said.
“One minute.”
I shouldered past him, barrel pointed towards the ceiling. I mounted the stairs and climbed slowly, careful not to make a sound. I paused at the top, replaying the conversation I’d heard in my head. Then I leapt through the door, spun on my heels, and hit the edge of the sink with my ass cheeks. “Time!” I called, barrel pointed down the empty hallway.
I heard a beep. A moment later, Bobby emerged from the basement.
“One minute, thirty-three seconds.”
I lowered the rifle. I swallowed.
Bobby looked at me blankly. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well? What did we get out of all that?”
One minute and thirty-three seconds. I laid the rifle down on the granite countertop and walked into the hallway. I stood where Pinnix and Ramseur had stood, where I’d seen them, where I’d killed them. Bobby joined me but didn’t say anything. For the moment, we just stood there in the hallway and listened to our women chattering in the living room beyond.
“If I was unconscious for only thirty seconds,” I said quietly, “they stood here for a full minute.”
Bobby looked down at his watch. He didn’t say anything.
I laid a hand on the opposite wall. I pointed at the place on the ceiling where the banister appeared on its way down from the second floor. “The stairs are right there,” I said. “You can see them even in the dark. As soon as they entered this hallway, they would have seen the way to get upstairs.”
“And that’s significant… why?”
“Because they stood here for a solid minute. At the least. They were carrying a rape kit, man, they weren’t interested in stealing any of my property; they wouldn’t have looked around for any goodies. The goodies they wanted were upstairs. They knew that. But they stood here for a solid minute.”
We stood in silence as I tried to imagine standing still in a strange house for that long. Funny; a minute had never seemed like a long time before. The seconds ticked by in our heads with the speed of molasses running down frost-covered iron. With each passing moment, the absurdity of what Pinnix and Ramseur had done only grew.
When a minute had passed, Bobby rolled his eyes again. He retreated into the kitchen and returned with our beers, which we had laid on the counter on our way to the basement. “They stood there for a while and listened,” he said. “Trying to hear if there was anybody else in the house other than the dumbass in the basement and the girls they were after. A little recon would have made sense.”
He handed me my beer. I accepted it but did not drink; I studied his expression and saw the discomfort there, the thoughts beneath his words. One minute doesn’t sound like much, but in the context of an assault it becomes an eternity. They wouldn’t have stood there for a full minute. Bobby understood this. I could read this in the tension set in his jaw, born of the effort it took to hold the corners of his mouth up in that wry, this-is-all-a-bunch-of-bullshit smile.
And he understood, too, that this exercise assumed I had lain on the floor for only a half a minute. It was entirely possible—and likely—that I had been out for far longer than that.
“Are you still obsessed with that stupid idea that you caught them on their way out? Do you still honestly believe it’s possible that your wife and maybe your daughter got raped by two strangers and don’t remember a second of it?”
No, I didn’t honestly believe that. Not anymore. What possessed me now—what quickened my heartbeat and narrowed my eyes and brought a sheen of sweat to my skin even though it was only sixty-eight degrees in here—was that the results of our experiment didn’t jibe with my theory of this attack. I had concluded that they hadn’t hit me that hard because the Bald Man had wanted my brains unscrambled and my faculties intact enough to send me running out the back door to get help—whereupon I would have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had run while these men raped and then killed my family. But then, once they’d knocked me down, they should have proceeded upstairs post-haste. Not stood there in the hallway waiting for me. Why would they have waited for me?