Stranglehold (39 page)

"At least let me ..."

"What would you do if you were me,
Cyn
? Let him spend another night getting raped? Let him go off and disappear with him for a couple of weeks so he can go on getting raped maybe
every
night? Stay by the phone,
Cyn
. See if you can reach Duggan. Goddamn it, I'm going for my son."

Robert crouched tight to the bed board and watched his father move back and forth from one side of the bed to the other. Four pillows were spread out in front of him like sandbags—soft ammunition, but all he had if his father should try to come at him again.

His father had a gun, a pistol so shiny it looked almost white. It glinted in the lamplight. He was waving it and walking back and forth across the room.

He felt like he had to go to the bathroom but he wasn't going to ask or say anything to his father, nothing at all. He held it in.

He kept waiting for them to say it was okay to go to sleep. For the night to end.

He heard someone coming up the stairs outside the locked door. His father heard it too. He stopped and turned to the door and waited for the knock.

Instead of a knock Robert heard his
grampa's
voice. "Arthur?"

He heard the doorknob turn against the lock.

"Come on, son. Let me in. Your mother and I have been talking, thinking. We think
y'ought
to give it up, son. Take yourself on out of here—just for tonight, you see? Spend the night at your place. Live to fight another day, so to speak. You know? Like you say, as it is right now, nobody can even say you were here at all except her. And we all say she's a liar."

His father just stared at the door.

"Arthur?"

His
father'd
been acting crazy all day now. Real crazy-worse than yesterday. Talking to himself when there was nobody to listen. Drinking beer and whiskey. Not eating. Hiding out on Officer Duggan. Robert could tell that even his grandparents were kind of scared of him now.

His father had called him a cocksucker. His father had pointed at him with the gun.

Think I'll shoot?
his father had said.
Bang. Bang
.

"This isn't
gettin
' us anywhere, son. Duggan comes back, finds you here, it's just going to be More trouble in the courts for you. You got to see that, Arthur. Your mother and I are behind you one hundred percent, but you know Duggan's practically the most persistent man in the damn county. You know that."

More footsteps on the stairs.

"Arthur?
Open up
."

His grandma.

His father took a step toward the door and then moved sideways to the night table and took the bottle on the table and drank. Robert could smell the stink of it all the way across the room over here.

"Open up the door, dammit."

He drank again.

"Go to hell," he told her.

"
What?
What'd you say to me?"

"I told you to go to hell, Ma. Hey, you can both go to hell. I'll come out when I'm good and ready."

Robert stared at his father in shocked silence. His grandma was always bossy but he had never once heard his father say no to her. Not on anything.

It would be like Robert saying something like that to
him
. The same kind of thing. He'd
never
do it. He'd never dare. And now here was his dad telling his grandmother to go to hell—and something about it scared him almost worse than anything.

There was nothing but silence behind the door.

He guessed they were surprised too.

His father stared at the door awhile longer and then turned to him and Robert saw that he was smiling.

"Just you and me, kid," he said quietly. And started to walk over.

When Duggan pulled up at the house, his wife was standing in the doorway with a coat over her shoulders and she wouldn't even let him get out of the car. He rolled down the window and Alice leaned in. She was holding a piece of paper, reading off it when she needed to.

"Ralph," she said, "you've been getting these emergency calls. Three in the past half hour. First from a Lydia
Danse
, who says her husband Arthur's at his parents' house, staying there, and she's afraid for her little boy. Then I got two more from somebody named Cindy
Fortunato
, who's a friend of hers and says Mrs.
Danse
has gone to get her son now and that she's carrying a weapon, a gun, and she wants you to call her right away. But I thought that maybe you should just go on out there and I should make the call. To save time."

"Thanks, Allie. Call her up. Tell her I'm on my way."

He leaned over and kissed her and started the car.

"You be careful," she said. "Domestic disputes, right?"

"Domestic disputes." He nodded. She knew as well as he did that they could be pure hell. "I will," he said.

As he started back down the drive he radioed in for backup.

"We're already on the way," the dispatcher told him. "The
Fortunato
woman called a few minutes ago. We got a car out as soon as she did. I got to tell you, this one really got screwed up, Ralph. Morton thought it was nothing all that urgent on the first call. But there wasn't any mention of weapons then, you know?"

"I know. Don't worry about it. I think everybody screwed up somewhere on this one."

He signed off. And Morton probably the least of them, he thought. Everybody'd fucked up. Fucked up bad. The judge, lawyers. Everybody.

Even him. Though he didn't really know how. There must have been something he'd missed, something he hadn't done that needed doing and that now saw him out here in the middle of the night trying to outdrive a lady with a gun.

To hell with it, he thought, now's what's important. Now you've got a chance to do something. And he drove toward the mountain.

The wooden beams jolted her in the car seat and then she was over the bridge. She slowed to thirty on the old dirt road and drove a little ways and then cut the headlights and stopped the car and got out. There was no point announcing herself.

All the way here she'd been praying to a god she rarely even considered that Arthur hadn't hurt him, that the man raving in the kitchen and taunting her on the phone had burned himself out, exhausted with sheer craziness, and gone to bed.
Alone
, she thought, saying it like a mantra. Please god.

Alone
.

This had to be the end of it. She could take no more from Arthur
Danse
and neither could Robert. The terror had to stop now one way or another. She'd take Robert and run. Where didn't matter. It didn't matter either anymore that they'd probably be poor, that the work she was trained for was going to be forever out of the question. Poor was still alive and poor was still
unabused
.

The house was brightly lit. Upstairs and down.

So they hadn't gone to bed.

No matter.

She cut across the field and felt the tall wet grass brush her right hand holding the gun. She brought it up to waist-level, the weight of it comforting in a way no gun's feel or heft had ever seemed remotely comforting to her. It was as though the gun were the ally she had needed all along but had never thought of. Not
Sansom
, not Andrea Stone, not the courts and not the police. Just this cold weight of metal.

Her final advocate.

She stepped up toward the porch. She knew the front door would be open. She knew that all the doors would be open. It was inevitable.

It was all of it inevitable and always had been.

He saw the headlights sweep the bedroom curtains as the car came up the hill and then immediately go dim. Robert didn't see them but he did.

She was coming.

She or Duggan.

It was starting. Something.

Trespassers
, he thought.
Thou
shalt
not trespass.

No way thou
shalt
, you fucking pieces of shit.

He unlocked the door and saw his mother and father standing there looking at him and the 9mm semiautomatic in his hand. His mother looked mad at him. The old man looked nervous and worried.

So what else was new.

"Daddy, grab the shotgun," he said. "We've got company."

It felt good to say that to his father. To command him.

He knew that when this was over he'd be in a position to command both of them. Because they both would be just as guilty as he was for what was about to happen here—as guilty as he'd ever been for anything in his life. They'd carry that.

He could use that against them the rest of their lives. It was about time.

It was whatever he wanted now.

He pushed past them down the stairs.

"Get the shotgun, daddy," he said. "And I mean move."

She'd been right, the door wasn't locked. She turned the doorknob and it opened with barely a sound and she saw Arthur in the doorway by the stairs, a black shape pointing at her, backlit by the light from the kitchen and she felt something slam into her chest and throw her back against the door and then she heard the explosion.

She raised the gun and fired, she didn't know how many times, and the figure fell away. She looked down at her body and saw there was blood all over her. She saw movement in the kitchen and then Arthur's father was coming toward her out of there shouting something that she was far too deaf to hear and she saw the double-barrel shotgun in his hands pointed in her direction so she fired again. Plaster showered down over her head and shoulders as the shotgun flashed and roared. Harry fell and lay slumped against the kitchen door.

She saw Ruth behind him and she tried to raise the gun again but the strength was gone from her arm and she felt herself sliding down the front door to the rough nappy doormat that lay askew between her knees. Ruth was shouting too, her face twisted and red and awful and angry but she couldn't hear.

Lydia saw her move quickly from Harry's body to Arthur's and when she got to Arthur she stopped and fell to her knees and put her hands to her cheeks and rocked there. She reached down and touched his face and then stared a moment at her bloody hand then she was screaming again, looking up at Robert in his
pyjamas
standing there frozen halfway down the stairs and screaming, not at him she thought or even at her or at anybody at all but in some mad incredible rage that Lydia could almost understand, could almost feel and know.

The room was swimming.

She saw Robert gaze in her direction, saw him register all the blood across her breasts and belly, saw the terror in his eyes and heard herself dimly and far away saying, "It's okay, baby. Everything's all right now. Nobody's going to hurt you anymore. It's all right, baby."

She felt hands at her shoulders, big hands, calloused hands, and looked up into Ralph Duggan's ashen face and heard what must have been sirens and then he was fading away into light and darkness and she couldn't see him, couldn't feel him, she could only hear the ringing in her ears until even that was gone. She imagined she felt her heartbeat And then there was only silence and darkness and an end to what she had come here for, to where time and maybe all her life had brought her.