Even as the second shot boomed close after the first, the car tires
shrieked. The Buick bolted forward, as a mean horse might explode out
of a rodeo gate.
He ran after the car, but it blew away from him with a backwash of
turbulent air and exhaust fumes. The look-alike was still alive,
perhaps injured but still alive and determined to escape.
Rocketing eastward, the Buick began to angle onto the wrong side of the
two-lane street. On that trajectory, it was going to jump the curb and
crash into someone's front lawn.
In his treacherous mind's eye, Marty imagined the car hitting the curb
at high speed, flipping, rolling, slamming into one of the trees or the
side of a house, bursting into flames, his daughters trapped in a coffin
of blazing steel. In the darkest corner of his mind, he could even hear
them screaming as the fire seared the flesh from their bones.
Then, as he pursued it, the Buick swung back across the center line,
into its own lane. It was still moving fast, too fast, and he had no
hope of catching it.
But he ran as if it was his own life for which he was running, his
throat beginning to burn again as he breathed through his open mouth,
chest aching, needles of pain lancing the length of his legs.
His right hand was clamped so fiercely around the butt of the Beretta
that the muscles in his arm throbbed from wrist to shoulder. And with
each desperate stride, the names of his daughters echoed through his
mind in an unvoiced scream of loss and grief.
When their father shouted at them to shut up, Charlotte was as hurt as
if he'd slapped her face, for in her nine years, nothing she had said
and no stunt she'd pulled had ever before made him so angry. Yet she
didn't understand what had infuriated him because all she'd done was ask
some questions. His scolding of her was so unfair, and the fact that he
had never been unfair in her recollection only added sting to his
reprimand. He seemed angry with her for no other reason than that she
was herself, as if something about her very nature suddenly repelled and
disgusted him, which was an unbearable thought because she couldn't
change who she was, what she was, and maybe her own father was never
again going to like her. He would never be able to take back the look
of rage and hatred on his face, and she would never be able to forget it
as long as she lived. Everything had changed between them forever. All
of this she thought and under stood in a second, even before he had
finished shouting at them, and she burst into tears.
Dimly aware that the car finally started, pulled away from the curb, and
reached the end of the block, Charlotte rose partway out of
her misery only when Em turned from the window, grabbed her arm, and
shook her. Em whispered fiercely, "Daddy."
At first, Charlotte thought Em was unjustly peeved with her for making
Daddy angry and was warning her to be quiet. But before she could
launch into sisterly combat, she realized there had been joyful
excitement in Em's voice.
Something important was happening.
Blinking back tears, she saw that Em was already pressed to the window
again. As the car pulled through the intersection and turned right,
Charlotte followed the direction of her sister's gaze.
As soon as she spotted Daddy running alongside the car, she knew he was
her real father. The daddy behind the wheel--the daddy with the hateful
look on his face, who screamed at children for no reason--was a fake.
Somebody else. Or some thing else, maybe like in the movies, grown out
of a seed pod from another galaxy, one day just a lot of ugly goop and
the next day all formed into Daddy's look-alike. She suffered no
confusion at the sight of two identical fathers, had no trouble knowing
which was the real one, as an adult might have, because she was a kid
and kids knew these things.
Keeping pace with the car as it turned into the next street, pointing
the gun at the window of the driver's door, Daddy yelled, "Hey, hey,
hey!"
As the fake daddy realized who was shouting at him, Charlotte reached
out as far as her safety belt would allow, grabbed a handful of Em's
coat, and yanked her sister away from the window. "Get down, cover your
face, quick!"
They leaned toward each other, cuddled together, shielded each other's
heads with their arms.
BAM!
The gunfire was the loudest sound Charlotte had ever heard. Her ears
rang.
She almost started to cry again, in fear this time, but she had to be
tough for Em. At a time like this a big sister had to think about her
responsibilities .
BAM!
Even as the second shot boomed a heartbeat after the first, Charlotte
knew the fake daddy had been hit because he squealed with pain and
cursed, spitting out the S-word over and over. He was still in good
enough shape to drive, and the car leaped forward.
They seemed out of control, swinging to the left, going very fast, then
turning sharply back to the right.
Charlotte sensed they were going to crash into something. If they
weren't smashed to smithereens in the wreck, she and Em had to be ready
to move fast when they came to a stop, get out of the car, and out of
the way so Daddy could deal with the fake.
She had no doubt Daddy could handle the other man. Though she wasn't
old enough to have read any of his novels, she knew he wrote about
killers and guns and car chases, just this sort of thing, so he would
know exactly what to do. The fake would be real sorry he had messed
with Daddy, he would wind up in prison for a long, long time.
The car swerved back to the left, and in the front seat the fake made
small bleating sounds of pain that reminded her of the cries of wayne
the Gerbil that time when somehow he'd gotten one small foot stuck in
the mechanism of his exercise wheel. But wayne never cursed, of course,
and this man was cursing more angrily than ever, not just using the
S-word but God's name in vain, plus all sorts of words she had never
heard before but knew were unquestionably bad language of the worst
kind.
Keeping a grip on Em, Charlotte felt along her seatbelt with her free
hand, seeking the release button, found it, and held her thumb lightly
on it.
The car jolted over something, and the driver hit the brakes.
They slid sideways on the wet street. The back end of the car swung
around to the left, and her tummy turned over as if they were on an
amusement-park ride.
The driver's side of the car slammed hard into something, but not hard
enough to kill them. She jammed her thumb on the release button, and
her safety belt retracted. Fumbling at Em's waist--"Your belt, get your
belt off!"--she found her sisters release button in a second or two.
Em's door was jammed against whatever they had hit. They had to go out
Charlotte's side.
She pulled Em across her. Pushed open the door. Shoved Em through it.
At the same time, Em was pulling her, as if Em herself was the
one doing
the rescuing, and Charlotte wanted to say, Hey, who's the big sister
here?
The fake daddy saw or heard them getting out. He lunged for them across
the back of the front seat--"Little bitch!"--and grabbed Charlotte's
floppy rain hat.
She scooted out from under the hat, through the door, into the night and
rain, tumbling onto her hands and knees on the blacktop.
Looking up, she saw that Em was already tottering across the street
toward the far sidewalk, wobbling like a baby that had just learned to
walk. Charlotte scrambled up and ran after her sister.
Somebody was shouting their names.
Daddy.
Their real Daddy.
Three-quarters of a block away, the speeding Buick hit a broken tree
branch in a huge puddle and slid on a churning foam of water.
Marty was heartened by the chance to close the gap but horrified by the
thought of what might happen to his daughters. The mental film clip of
a car crash didn't just play through his mind again, it had never
stopped playing. Now it seemed about to be translated out of his
imagination, the way scenes were translated from mental images into
words on the page, except that this time he was taking it one large step
further, leaping over typescript, translating directly from imagination
into reality. He had the crazy idea that the Buick wouldn't have gone
out of control if he hadn't pictured it doing so, and that his daughters
would burn to death in the car merely because he had imagined it
happening.
The Buick came to a sudden and noisy stop against the side of a parked
Ford Explorer. Though the clang of the collision jarred the night, the
car didn't roll or burn.
To Marty's astonishment, the right-side rear passenger door flew open,
and his kids erupted like a pair of joke snakes exploding from a tin
can.
As far as he could tell, they weren't seriously hurt, and he shouted at
them to get away from the Buick. But they didn't need his advice.
They had an agenda of their own, and immediately scrambled across the
street, looking for cover.
He kept running. Now that the girls were out of the car, his fury was
greater than his fear. He wanted to hurt the driver, kill him.
It wasn't a hot rage but cold, a mindless reptilian savagery that scared
him even as he surrendered to it.
He was less than a third of a block from the car when its engine
shrieked and the spinning tires began to smoke. The Other was trying to
get away, but the vehicles were hung up on each other. Tortured metal
abruptly screeched, popped, and the Buick started to tear loose of the
Explorer.
Marty would have preferred to be closer when he opened fire, so he'd
have a better chance of hitting The Other, but he sensed he was as close
as he was going to get. He skidded to a halt, raised the Beretta,
holding it with both hands, shaking so badly he couldn't hold the sight
on target, cursing himself for his weakness, trying to be a rock.
The recoil of the first shot kicked the barrel high, and Marty lowered
it before firing another round.
The Buick broke free of the Explorer and lurched forward a few feet.
For a moment its tires lost traction on the slick pavement and spun in
place again, spewing behind it a silvery spray of water.
He pulled the trigger, grunting in satisfaction as the rear window of
the Buick imploded, and squeezed off another round right away, aiming
for the driver, trying to visualize the bastard's skull imploding as the
window had done, hoping that what he imagined would translate into
reality. When its tires got a bite of the pavement, the Buick shot away
from him. Marty pumped another round and an other, even though the car
was already out of range. The girls weren't in the line of fire and no
one else seemed to be on the rainy street, but it was irresponsible to
continue shooting because he had little chance of hitting The Other. He
was more likely to blow away an innocent who happened to pass on some
cross street ahead, more likely to shatter a window in one of the nearby
houses and waste someone sitting in front of a TV. But he didn't care,
couldn't stop himself, wanted blood, vengeance, emptied the magazine,
repeatedly pulled the trigger after the last bullet had been expended,
making primitive wordless sounds of rage, totally out of control.
In the BMW, Paige ran the stop sign. The car slid around the corner,
almost tipping onto two wheels before she straightened it out, facing
east on the cross street.
The first thing she saw after making the corner was Marty in the middle
of the street. He was standing with his legs widely spread, his back to
her, firing the pistol at the dwindling Buick.
receding car.
She tramped the accelerator to the floor, intending to swing around
Marty and catch up with the Buick, ram the back of it, run it off the
road, fight the kidnapper with her bare hands, claw the son of a bitch's
eyes out, whatever she had to do, anything. Then she saw the girls in
their bright yellow rain slickers on the right-hand sidewalk, standing
under a street lamp. They were holding each other. They looked so
small and fragile in the drizzling rain and bitter yellowish light.
Past Marty, Paige pulled to the curb. She threw open the door and got
out of the BMW, leaving the headlights on and the engine running.
As she ran to the kids, she heard herself saying, "Thank God, thank God,
thank God, thank God." She couldn't stop saying it even when she
crouched and swept both girls into her arms at the same time, as if on
some level she believed that the two words had magic power and that her
children would suddenly vanish from her embrace if she stopped chanting
the mantra.
The girls hugged her fiercely. Charlotte buried her face against her
mother's neck. Emily's eyes were huge.
Marty dropped to his knees beside them. He kept touching the kids,
especially their faces, as if he was having difficulty believing that
their skin was still warm and their eyes lively, astonished to see that
breath still steamed from them. He repeatedly said, "Are you all right,
are you hurt, are you all right?" The only injury he could find was a
minor abrasion on Charlotte's left palm, incurred when she'd plunged
from the Buick and landed on her hands and knees.
The only major and troubling difference in the girls was their unusual
constraint. They were so subdued that they seemed meek, as if they had
just been severely chastised. The brief experience with the kidnapper
had left them frightened and withdrawn. Their usual self confidence
might not return for some time, might never be as strong as it had once
been. For that reason alone Paige wanted to make the man in the Buick
suffer.
Along the block, a couple of people had come out on their front porches
to see what the commotion was about--now that the shooting had stopped.
Others were at their windows.
Sir
ens wailed in the distance.
Rising to his feet, Marty said, "Let's get out of here."
"The police are coming," Paige said.
"That's what I mean."
"But they--"
"They'll be as bad as last time, worse."
He picked up Charlotte and hurried with her to the BMW as the sirens
swelled louder.
Chips of glass are lodged in his left eye. For the most part, the
tempered window had dissolved in a gummy mass. It had not cut his face.
But tiny shards are embedded deep in the tender ocular tissues, and the
pain is devastating. Every movement of the eye works the glass deeper,
does more damage.
Because his eye twitches when the worst needle-sharp pains stitch
through it, he keeps blinking involuntarily, although it is torture to
do so. To stop the blinking, he holds the fingers of his left hand
against his closed eyelid, applying only the gentlest pressure. As much
as possible, he drives with just his right hand.
Sometimes he has to let the eye twitch unattended because he
needs to use the left hand to drive. With the right, he tears open
one of the candy bars and crams it into his mouth as fast as he can
chew.
His metabolic furnace demands fuel.
A bullet crease marks his forehead above the same eye. The furrow is as
wide as his index finger and a little more than an inch long. To the
bone. At first it bled freely. Now the clotting blood oozes thickly