Relentless Read online

  I didn’t wait for his reply, but terminated the call.

  Because I did not want to wake Penny, who looked so peaceful on the nearby sofa, I left her and Milo in the family room with Lassie and retreated through the dining room to the living room, where the floor-to-ceiling glass presented a slightly different view of the harbor.

  Gazing at a picturesque and tranquil harborscape while talking to Hud Jacklight did not make his conversation seem more eloquent, more enlightened, or less absurd.

  “You’re alive? Really?” he asked.

  “No. I’m speaking to you from”—I quoted Longfellow—“‘the great world of light, that lies behind all human destinies.’”

  After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re scaring me, Cubbo.”

  “I don’t want to do that, Hud. I’m fine. Penny and Milo and Lassie are fine. When the house blew, we were on the road.”

  “What road?”

  “The open road, traveling.”

  “You were home. Yesterday.”

  “Now we’re on the road doing book research. If anyone in the media calls you, don’t talk to him. Refer him to my publisher’s publicity department. I gave them a statement.”

  Beyond the window, in the dying breeze, queen palms trembled as if in delicious anticipation of rain. The moored boats rocked gently in the harbor’s tamed swells. So lovely yet in some way … troubling.

  “What about Penny?” Hud asked.

  “I gave her publisher a statement, too.”

  “How’s her agent?”

  “Alma wasn’t in the house when it blew, Hud. She’s in New York.”

  “I mean the trauma. To Penny. Losing a house. Makes a woman think. For Penny, a turning point. Maybe it’s time. For change.”

  Although he was in his seventh marriage, this might have been the first occasion in his life when Hud Jacklight tried to imagine what a woman thought about anything.

  I punctured his swelling hope: “Penny thinks losing a house is enough change for a while.”

  “She said that?”

  “In exactly those words.”

  “Well, I’m here. All I’m saying. I’m here.”

  “That’s comforting to know, Hud.”

  High in the steadily blackening sky, a silent convulsion broke the string in an infinite necklace, and fat pearls fell through the day, bouncing on the slate patio, dimpling the water in the harbor, rattling gulls off the seawall to sheltered roosts.

  “There’s a bright side,” Hud said. “To the house. Now that you’re not dead.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Human-interest angle. House blowing up. Loss. All the memories. Mementos. Gone. Oprah will want you. Every show will. Big sympathy thing. Gonna boost book sales.”

  The man working on the deck of the sloop hurried below as the raindrops shrank in size and settled into a steady drizzle.

  He had been doing routine maintenance. Nothing more.

  “Hud, I don’t want people buying my book because they pity me.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, pride.”

  In anticipation of rain, harbor traffic had been diminishing. Now only a few craft were motoring to port along the waterways.

  “Tough world, Cubaroo. Competitive. Dog-eat-dog. No writer can afford pride.”

  The weight of the rain had quelled the light breeze. All was still and silvered.

  Hud continued: “Besides. It’s a sin. Pride. Too proud to do Oprah. You know these things. Isn’t it a sin?”

  “If it’s vanity, yes. If it’s conceit, arrogance, yes, a sin. If it’s self-esteem, maybe, probably. If it’s self-respect, no.”

  “Kind of complex,” said Hud.

  “Everything is.”

  With the advent of the rain, the view of the harbor should have been even more relaxing. Rain washes the world clean, and the world needs cleansing. Yet as the drizzle added luster to most surfaces, my disquiet grew.

  “Alma lost a client,” Hud said. “Last week. Major client.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Gwyneth Oppenheim.”

  “Hud, she didn’t fire Alma. She died of cancer at eighty-six.”

  “Still not good. Losing clients. A bad sign.”

  My disquiet was probably residual emotion from being startled by the blue heron. Being Jacklighted didn’t help.

  I told him that Penny needed my assistance with something, not with her agent but with another matter, and I terminated the call.

  Returning the cell phone to my pocket, studying the harbor as I moved, I left the living room for the dining room, and I paused at the windows there. The overhang kept the glass dry and clear.

  The raw teak planks of the pier floor, gangway, and boat slip had darkened in the downpour from deep gray almost to black. The teak handrails were lacquered; wet with rain, they appeared to be jacketed in ice.

  Stars folded into stripes, and from the limp red point of the neighbor’s sodden flag, a thin stream of water unraveled to their pier deck.

  Three large dark shapes undulated through the nearer channel, disappearing into the water only to reappear: a trio of sea lions.

  Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

  Complexity implies meaning. We are afraid of meaning.

  I moved into the family room and stood behind the sofa on which Penny remained asleep, facing the harbor. The longer that you look at anything, the more you see, but not in this instance.

  At the coffee table that went with the other furniture grouping, Milo’s work still engrossed him.

  He must have gotten up at some point because overhead lights were on.

  Although a couple of hours remained until nightfall, the storm clouds and the rain had wrung down a faux twilight.

  Pale on the window glass, room-light reflections made portions of the view ambiguous, feathered crisp edges, melded objects that in reality were distinct from one another.

  From here, the harbor was not as visible to me as I was visible to anyone in the harbor.

  Marty, architect and builder, once told me, in more technical detail than I could process, that each layer of glass in the triple-pane windows was specially processed in some way—laminated perhaps, involving nanotechnology of some kind. Also applied to both faces of each pane was a remarkable protective film. Consequently, this glass would not shatter and cause injury in an earthquake. Furthermore, were a madman or an incompetent burglar to seek entry to the house by smashing a window with a sledgehammer, he would need as much as five minutes to do so and, in the process, would have worn the edge off his lust for murder or larceny.

  When the first high-powered rifle bullet pierced one of the windows, the sole sound was a hollow pock! The glass did not shatter; neither did it craze into the spirals and radials of a spiderweb. Except for a corona of short cracks, the hole looked as neat as that a power drill would make in a board.

  I saw a small sparkling spray of tiny bits of glass even as I heard the pock, all but simultaneously saw the bullet hole, heard the spent round slap into something elsewhere in the room, but did not turn to see what had been hit.

  Instead, I grabbed the sofa behind which I was standing and pulled it toward me, toppling it onto its back, dropping flat as I did so, and spilling a rudely awakened Penny onto the floor with me, where we were hidden from the shooter by the upended furniture.

  “Gunfire,” I told her, and she was clear-eyed and clearheaded by the time the second syllable passed my lips.

  I looked toward Milo, who had been sitting on the floor at the coffee table, about twelve feet away, and saw him falling onto his side. For an instant, I thought he had been hit, but the lack of blood spatter confirmed a miss.

  No sooner had the boy dropped for cover than, by a
fraction of a second, another pock preceded the sound of a more violent impact, and the laptop on the coffee table blew apart.

  I cannot remember whether I was breathing like a marathon runner or was barely able to draw my breath, whether the sight of Milo in mortal danger sharpened my wits or dulled them. I know that although I was afraid, fear remained subordinate to a more intense emotion—call it horror—an abhorrence of the possibility that Milo might be killed, but coupled with horror was the energized despair that is desperation, which can make a cautious man reckless. In a crisis, the urge to act can rule the mind and heart, a mad dominion that favors the wrong action over no action at all, and I recall that forcing myself to hesitate and think took all the self-control I possessed.

  We were on the ground floor, so the shooter didn’t have to find a perch to angle down on us. He could be on the patio, on the private pier, on the seawall, on the upper deck of one of the boats at the public moorings.

  Prostrate on the carpet, Milo presented a low profile, but he remained a target, highly vulnerable.

  His eyes were squeezed shut, his face squinched, as though he were concentrating hard on wishing away the gunman. Right now he was not different ages physically, emotionally, and intellectually. At the moment, our brilliant little Milo was all six-year-old, and terrified.

  No sign of Lassie. Maybe she retreated to the entertainment-center cabinet.

  The patio had not been staged with outdoor furniture. The only obstructions between the shooter and the windows were the slender boles of four queen palms.

  Getting behind furniture in the family room would make Milo more difficult to target with precision. But it would not make him safe.

  Although Penny and I had the upturned seat of the sofa between us and the windows, I took no comfort in that barrier.

  The shooter knew where we were hiding. The upholstered seat would not stop—would hardly slow—a high-powered rifle round. If he concentrated rapid fire on the bottom of the overturned sofa, one or both of us would be hit.

  The window-piercing pock of a third round was followed by the crack of wood as the apron of the coffee table took the hit a few inches above our carpet-hugging son. Splinters prickled down on his head and back.

  Cursing the gunman, Penny started crawling toward Milo.

  Grabbing her by an ankle, I warned her not to abandon even the inadequate cover of the sofa. She tried to kick loose, and I held tight, desperate to gain a moment to think.

  I wanted to go for Milo, shield him and move him, but if Penny and I were killed, Milo had less chance of surviving than he did even at this moment.

  If he stayed flat and slithered, he could get behind furniture and then snake to the back of the room, putting ever more obstacles between himself and the gunman, and then make his way into the hall.

  I needed to get his attention, but I remained reluctant to shout at him, for fear that, already terrified, he would be easily startled and would raise his head.

  Suddenly Lassie appeared, ran to the boy, and stood over him. Even these circumstances could not knock a bark from her, but she began to lick her young master’s left ear.

  He opened his eyes, saw her, and reached up to pull her down out of the line of fire.

  “No!” Penny kicked out of my grip and crawled toward Milo, intent on dragging him to safety but making of herself a target too easy to resist.

  Penny began on hands and knees but quickly rose into a crouch, leaving the cover of the sofa with perhaps no other intention than covering Milo with her body and taking a bullet for him.

  For a moment, I froze.

  Each of us is the sum of his experiences, not in the Freudian sense that we are victims of them, but in the sense that we rely on our experiences as the primary source of our wisdom, unless we are delusional and live by an ideology that refutes reality. At decision points in life, a sane person is guided by the lessons of his past.

  Among other things, my past had taught me that the very fact of my existence is a cause for amazement and wonder, that we must seize life because we never know how much of it remains for us, that faith is the antidote to despair and that laughter is the music of faith.

  But every lesson we learn from past experiences is not always the one we should have learned. One moment of my past had taught me that anger should always be watered down if not extinguished with humor, and I made no distinction between unworthy anger and the righteous kind. Anger is the father of violence, as well I knew, but I had not allowed myself to consider that wrath, when it is the product of pure indignation and untainted by ideology, is the father of justice and a necessary answer to evil.

  The funny thing is, this awareness informed my fiction but not my life—until Shearman Waxx.

  The bow-tied beast was my tormentor but also my teacher, for by the Taser attack and by the destruction of our house, he awakened the part of me that had been in this moral coma. And by shooting at Milo, he helped me to learn as a man what I already knew as a novelist: that wrath can lead to principled action and to principled violence.

  If I’d had a gun, I would have gone out of the house to search for the source of the rifle fire, and would have tried to shoot Waxx dead before he shot me.

  Lacking a firearm, I had no moral choice but to give in to the urge to act that suddenly ruled my mind and heart, whether it was a mad dominion or not. Because I was unarmed and helpless to defend my family in a rational way, my only choice was irrational action.

  As Penny rose from her hands and knees, into a crouch, breaking cover, I stood upright, making the better target of myself. I bolted across the room, toward the corner where the entertainment-center wall engaged the view wall, passing in front of the windows.

  My wrath was so intense that I half believed a bullet couldn’t stop me, though I didn’t turn directly toward the windows with the intention of catching one in my teeth.

  I heard a round pock the glass, perhaps two, and prayed that I was the target.

  At the corner, I flicked down the wall switch that activated the motorized shades encapsulated within the three-pane windows. Because of the damage to the glass, I worried they might get hung up before fully descending.

  As the blinds came down, I turned my back to the windows to look for Penny and Milo.

  Somehow, she had flipped the immense coffee table across Milo, positioning it between him and the windows, and she had stood it on end. They were behind it, hidden from the shooter, though from this end of the room I had a narrow view of them.

  The table was well made, solid. Nevertheless, a single round had cracked the top, torn out a chunk of wood, and penetrated to the other side, fortunately without striking either mother or son.

  As the window shades reached the halfway point and continued to descend, one thing became clear to me. In this attack, Waxx had one target—Milo.

  He could have killed me three times as I passed in front of the windows. But he never took a shot when I was most exposed, not even as I stood motionless at the switch to watch the shades come down.

  As Penny muscled the coffee table on end, she must have been such an easy target that Waxx could have blown out her brains. And only one shot had been fired at the table after she and Milo were behind it—no doubt because Waxx did not want to risk killing her instead of the boy.

  The shades now covered three-quarters of the glass.

  Penny rose warily from behind the table, but instructed Milo to remain on the floor.

  Just as with John Clitherow and Thomas Landulf, the psychopath intended, before killing me, to take from me those I loved the most. Waxx imagined a specific order to my losses. Milo first. So I could witness Penny’s anguish before she, too, was murdered.

  I suspected he wanted to reduce me to despair, to the utter abandonment of hope, that I might accept my own murder gratefully, almost as a form of suicide. After seeing his wife and daughter brutalized, Landulf may well have pleaded to be killed. Although John Clitherow appeared to have taken extreme steps to s
tay alive, he told me that most days he yearned to join his family in death.

  If one day I asked for death, I would be denying the value of life in general and the value of my life specifically, which would be as well a denial of the value of my writing. By begging death and receiving it, I would confirm Waxx’s original criticism of my work.

  The motorized shades reached the bottom of the glass wall.

  Holding Milo close, Penny came out from behind the overturned table, and I hurried to her.

  Because of his poor writing, I had judged Waxx an ineffective if influential critic, a curious eccentric. He was not eccentric but grotesque, demonic, not ineffective but a relentless murder machine, his mind a clockworks of meticulously calculated evil.

  “Police,” Penny said. “At least they can stop this.”

  I disagreed: “No. They won’t get here in time.”

  Denied Milo, Waxx would not shrug in resignation and leave. He would come into the house after the boy.

  On the densely populated shores and islands of the harbor, houses stood close together. In this wealthy, peaceful community, gunfire would draw startled residents to their windows and their phones.

  Already, we should have heard sirens. There were none.

  Penny said, “After all that shooting, he’s got to scram.”

  “No one heard it.”

  Wondering what to do, where to hide, I grabbed her free hand, drew her and Milo into the kitchen, intending to go from there into the downstairs hall.

  Lacking wind and thunder, the storm had only rain for a voice, a susurration that could not mask rifle fire. The waterways were largely without traffic, free of engine noise.

  The rifle must have been equipped with a sound suppressor. And in the rain, while cascades of breaking glass might have been heard, the pock of bullets penetrating shatterproof windows went unnoticed.

  If Waxx had been cautious when positioning himself to shoot Milo, the dismal afternoon light and the skeins of rain would have made him all but invisible to anyone who stood at a window to enjoy the monochromatic beauty of the storm-bathed harbor.