The Truth of the Matter (25 page)

There were three of them. They had machine guns with flashlights mounted on the barrels. The effect of the lights was awful, like something out of a horror movie. All I could see in the darkness of the house were the crisscrossing white beams, and the black death-dealing bores of the gun barrels, and the gunmen’s twisted grimaces and hate-filled eyes half illuminated in the outglow of the light.

The deafening crash of the door bursting in stunned me. The moving light beams dazzled me. But in the instant before they spotted my location, I managed to make my move.

I leapt away from the window and dove for the living room floor.

“There he is!” someone shouted.

There was a coughing burst of gunfire. A stuttering flash of flame. I heard glass breaking as bullets flew through the room. I heard Sport barking wildly somewhere far away. I hit the floor and rolled beneath the crisscrossing beams of light.

I rolled to my feet and ran in the direction of the dining room archway. The light beams scanned the darkness. I saw the archway—the dark shape of it in the half-lit shadows. Then the lights found me. I dove again as the gunfire exploded behind me. I felt a terrifying breath of air as a bullet whistled past my ear.

I hit the floor and somersaulted, rolling through the arch. I dodged to the side as the lights went back and forth through the darkness above me like the spotlights at some nightmare movie premiere. The beams flashed in a mirror on the dining room wall. The guns stuttered death and the mirror shattered, the light flying everywhere in a weirdly beautiful and sparkling chaos.

I got behind the wall and crouched low. I heard a Homelander bark a gruff command.

“Find the lights. I’ll find
him
.”

One flashlight beam broke off from the others and moved toward the dining room, where I was. The other two must’ve gone off looking for a light switch.

I crouched behind the wall, waiting. As long as the house lights were off, I had a small advantage: I could track them by their flashlights, but they couldn’t track me.

Now, though, as I crouched, waiting, my heart hammering in my chest, a wave of weakness went over me. In the first moments of the Homelanders’ invasion, a rush of adrenaline had given me new energy. But underneath that energy, I was still totally weak and exhausted from my illness and from the memory attacks. I didn’t know if I had the strength to fight now. I knew I couldn’t fight for long. Whatever I did, it was going to have to be quick.

The flashlight beam came toward the room, sweeping back and forth, trying to pick me out of the darkness. I crouched low behind the wall waiting.

The flashlight’s advance halted.

“Turn the lights on, would you!” the gunman shouted with a curse. He didn’t want to come through the archway until he could see. And yet, he started up again, kept coming forward cautiously toward the archway as I crouched there, waiting.

A voice shouted back, “I’m looking for the switch!”

The gunman stepped through the arch. Instantly, he swept the light toward me, searching me out, ready to gun me down. Because I was crouched so low, the light passed over my head. Still, the gunman spotted me in the outglow.

But by then, it was too late.

I hurled myself at him, coming in under the barrel of the gun. With all the strength I had left, I shouldered the gun barrel upward. At the same time, I struck at him low and hard. The gunman let out a gasp of pain and doubled over. His body went slack and started toppling down.

With my other hand, I grabbed the barrel of the gun. As he fell, already unconscious, I wrestled the weapon away from him, holding him up only long enough to pull the strap over his head.

Now I had the gun.

Just then, the lights went on.

There was only one Homelander in the living room. It was the fat guy with the stupid face who had been guarding the entrance to the compound. He was holding his machine gun leveled right at me, right at my head— and he was ready to fire and gun me down.

He had one problem. I was holding a machine gun too. And it was leveled at him. And my finger was also on the trigger.

“Drop it,” the fat guy growled.

“You first,” I growled back.

I moved into the living room, circling away from him, trying to get in a position where I could keep an eye on both him and the guard who had fallen unconscious in the dining room. The fat Homelander circled away from me too. We both kept our guns trained on each other.

Somewhere upstairs, I heard Sport barking and barking. He hadn’t stopped since the Homelanders broke in.

“You think you can outshoot me?” the fat Homelander said to me. “I can kill you before you pull the trigger.”

“Maybe,” I answered him. “Or maybe you miss and die. Wanna take your chance?”

“
You’re finished, West!
”

It was another voice, thick and guttural. Waylon’s voice. I recognized it right away.

My eyes flicked to the sound of it, and what I saw made my blood turn to ice.

Waylon was just coming down the stairs. He had Margaret with him. He was holding her in front of him, with his arm around her throat. He had a 9mm pistol pressed to the side of her head.

“We’ve been watching the house, you know,” Waylon said. “We saw her go upstairs with the boy. That idiot dog’s barking led us right to her.”

I could still hear Sport barking wildly, locked in a room upstairs, I guessed. And I thought:
The boy. Larry. What about Larry? Where was he?

My eyes went to Margaret’s eyes. I saw the terror in them as Waylon pressed the gun to her. But I saw something else too. She was trying to tell me something. She made an almost imperceptible gesture—a little shake of the head: the boy was gone. She’d gotten him out of the house. Down the drainpipe, into the woods. Just like I’d told her.

I kept my gun trained on the fat guard, but I spoke to Waylon through gritted teeth.

“Let her go,” I said. “She has nothing to do with this.”

“I’ll let her go,” Waylon answered. “Just as soon as you put the gun down. On the other hand, if you refuse, I’m going to blow her head off.”

I hesitated, trying to think of something to do.

“Do you doubt that I’ll do it?” Waylon said.

I didn’t doubt it. I laid the machine gun on the floor.

“Now put your hands up.”

The breath came out of me in a sigh of surrender. I put my hands up.

It was over. I was caught.

CHAPTER THIRTY
Out of the Darkness

For a moment, we stood frozen that way: Waylon with Margaret held to him, the gun at her head. The fat guard with his machine gun trained on me. The other guard, a tall, slender olive-skinned man, lying stationary on the living room floor. And me, with my hands in the air. We were all motionless and silent. Upstairs, the dog went on barking.

Then Waylon let Margaret go. He shoved her. She stumbled forward until she was standing next to me. He pointed his pistol in our direction.

“Should I kill them?” said the fat guard.

I glanced at him, off to my left. I could see in his eyes that he was eager to pull the trigger.

Waylon thought about it. Behind his scruffy black beard, his heavy features worked slowly.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not yet. I still want to find out what he knows.” Then, after a pause, he added very casually, “But the woman—she is useless to me. Kill her.”

The fat gunman didn’t hesitate to do as he was ordered. The barrel of his machine gun swung from me to Margaret. I saw the gunman’s finger begin to tighten on the trigger.

I grabbed Margaret by the arm and pulled her behind me. I stood between her and the gun.

The fat gunman let out a curse. “Get out of the way, punk!”

I stood motionless and answered him with an empty stare. He couldn’t kill Margaret without shooting me, so for a moment—a second, two, three—he was paralyzed. But it was really we—Margaret and I—who were out of options, out of hope. I could delay the inevitable for only a little while, but the chase, in fact, was finished. I knew we were both less than a minute away from death.

“I’m sorry I brought this on you,” I said to Margaret over my shoulder.

“No, it’s on all of us,” she answered back. “It always has been.”

Waylon laughed, his white teeth flashing. “Very touching. Very heroic. Very moving.” He shook his head, still grinning. “All right, West,” he said to me. “You win. You win at last. I had orders to question you, but you’ve made it impossible. Congratulations, tough guy.” Turning to the fat gunman, he said, “I’ve had enough of this. Kill them both.”

“
Drop it!
”

Everyone in the room froze. The command had come from the open door of the house. I turned and saw nothing there—nothing but the night and darkness.

Then out of the darkness stepped Detective Rose, a pistol in his hand. He held the gun high in both hands and kept it trained on the fat gunman.

“Put the gun down right now,” he said.

The fat gunman hesitated and Rose fired off a round. He lifted the barrel of his pistol so that the bullet flew over the fat gunman’s head. It crashed into the wall, opening a small black hole and sending a puff of plaster into the room.

That was all the fat gunman needed to see. Terrified, he immediately stripped his machine-gun strap over his head and dropped the weapon to the floor. He put his hands up.

But not Waylon.

While Rose’s attention was on the fat gunman, Waylon turned and leveled his 9mm at the detective. I saw it— but I was too far away to do anything about it.

My arms flew out helplessly. I shouted, “Rose, watch out!”

Rose turned and Waylon fired at him and Rose fired back all in the same instant.

The room seemed to quake with the deafening explosions. My eyes wide, I saw the frame of the door go jagged as splinters flew out of it. Waylon had missed.

For what seemed like a long, long second, the two men just stood there with their guns trained on each other. It was weirdly quiet. It came to me that Sport had stopped barking upstairs, as if he were listening too, waiting to find out what had happened.

Then Waylon looked down in surprise to see the black hole that had appeared in his chest.

The next moment, the terrorist collapsed to the floor, dead.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Don’t Ever Be Afraid

Detective Rose stepped into the house—and now law enforcement officers came pouring in behind him. It seemed there was a whole army of them: state troopers in khaki, local cops in blue, detectives in jackets and ties. They filled the living room. Some of them grabbed hold of the fat guard. They threw his large body against the wall roughly. They wrestled his hands behind his back and snapped handcuffs on him. Others grabbed hold of the guard lying on the floor. He was starting to moan and shift around there. His eyes fluttered open and he let out a groan. By then a pair of troopers had him under the arms and were hauling him to his feet. They put his hands behind his back and handcuffed him too.

“This one’s dead,” said another trooper, kneeling over Waylon.

Rose nodded, holstering his gun. “We’re all gonna miss him,” he said drily. “He brought the world so much joy.”

“Detective,” said Margaret. The words seemed to break out of her: “My son. I sent him out to hide in the woods. He must be out there somewhere. He must be so afraid. Please find my son.”

“We’ve already got him,” said Rose.

“I’m here! I’m here, Mommy!”

A patrolman in a blue uniform came to the door holding Larry by the hand. The child broke away from him and ran into the room. He ran to Margaret and threw his arms around her.

Margaret hugged him, closing her eyes, tears pouring down her cheeks. It was a long hug, but finally, Margaret kneeled down so that she was at eye level with her son. She held him by the shoulders.

“Are you all right?” she said, crying. “Are you hurt? Where were you?”

“I didn’t go into the woods, Mommy,” Larry said in his piping voice. “I know you said to, but I didn’t want to leave you alone. I ran down the street to Mrs. Carter’s house. I used her phone and called the number.”

Margaret shook her head, confused. “What number?”

“The number you kept saying. The one on the card. You and Charlie were trying to call it, but the phone was broken. You kept saying the number, so I remembered it and I called it and told Detective Rose we were in trouble and he came.”

“We had a search headquarters set up just down the road,” said Rose. “We were less than two minutes away.”

Margaret wrapped her arms around Larry and started to sob helplessly.

“Second floor’s clear,” said a cop on the stairs—and as he spoke, Sport, released from wherever he’d been locked up, came bounding down to us. He joined Larry and Margaret and danced around them, panting happily.

“What about this one?” said a trooper. He was standing next to me. He put his hand on my arm.

Rose looked at me. His flat face was expressionless. His sharp eyes were distant and cold.

“Cuff him,” he said. “He’s a fugitive wanted for murder. I’m here to take him back to prison.”

The trooper grabbed me by the arm and the shoulder. “Hands behind your back,” he ordered.

I put my hands behind my back. I kept looking at Rose. Rose kept looking at me, his eyes cold. But still, somehow, I thought I saw something in them. Some recognition. Some message of encouragement. I hoped I saw that anyway. I hoped I was right about him and that he really was my ally.

The trooper put handcuffs on my wrists.

Sport barked a protest at them.

“Why are they arresting Charlie?” Larry cried out in distress.

I smiled down at him. “It’s all right, Larry,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”

“But they’re arresting him, Mommy! Why are they arresting him?”

“Ssh,” she said.

“Don’t worry, Larry,” I told him, trying to smile. “Don’t be afraid. It’s going to be all right, you hear me? Don’t ever be afraid.”

The trooper grabbed me by the shoulder again. He started pressing me toward the door.

I held back. I turned to Margaret. “Thank you,” I said. “God bless you.”