Animosity (26 page)

I tried to rise to my feet, stumbled.

“Daddy, get up!
Get up!
”

“Go, baby,” I told her, through clenched teeth. “G-go to… Jason. Hurry…”

“Dad, no! Please! Please come with me!”

“Go, Samantha!”

The crochet needle withdrew from my shoulder. I watched it
melt into
my left pec, shrinking into me in reverse as if it had never been there at all, and then it exited out my back with a brief, final tug and a sick wet
slurping
noise.

Something heavy smashed into my spine.

My vision blurred. The world tilted, spun.

This was it, I knew. They were finally going to end it. Any second now they would finish me off, while my daughter watched…

And that was when the gunshot ripped apart the dusk.

I ducked, covered my head.

The crowd gasped.

The shot echoed through the street for several long seconds, like multiple explosions detonating up and down Poinsettia Lane.

At the edge of my driveway, Jason Burke stood with one trembling hand held high above his head. The passenger-side door of his Liberty hung open, and inside I saw his glove compartment had puked a rainbow of papers onto the vehicle’s floorboard, where he had gone searching for something moments ago…

Obviously, he had found what he was looking for. It wasn’t the Bible on the front seat.

A thin wisp of smoke drifted heavenward from the barrel of the gun in Jason’s hand.

I didn’t know what kind of gun it was. I didn’t care. I just knew it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could not take my eyes off of it.

“Get in the car, Samantha,” Jason said, trying his damnedest to sound calm. But an audible tremor lurked within his voice.

He pointed the gun at my neighbors.

“Move away from her. Let her through. I’m not kidding.”

The mob obeyed. Slowly, hesitantly, they backed away from my daughter and me…

Jason stepped forward, helped Sam to her feet with his free hand.

“I want my Daddy,” she cried, as he shoved her into the SUV.

Jason turned back to me. He held the gun on my neighbors, but in his furiously quivering hand the weapon resembled little more than a silver-black blur.

He wiped his bloody chin on the sleeve of his jacket.

“Time to go, Andy,” he said.

I nodded weakly, stood. My legs felt as if they had turned to liquid. My countless cuts and scrapes and bruises screamed in silent agony as I limped toward Jason’s vehicle.

But the second I stepped onto the blacktop, a bulky arm wrapped tight around my throat.

“Not so fast,” someone growled in my ear.

“Break the fucker’s neck!” a man shouted.

“Die, Holland, die!”

Jason’s Jeep sat less than six feet away. But I could not move.

I kicked at my attacker’s shins, tried to slam the back of my head into his face. With every move I made, I felt the hole in my chest grow wider, dribbling its gore down my abdomen.

I watched, helpless, as Jason slammed the Liberty’s passenger-side door. He glanced back at me before quickly rounding the vehicle. Moving for the driver’s side without wasting a second. He tripped once on his way, but did not fall.

Sam’s pale hands batted and squeaked against the window, her frantic sobs muffled behind the glass as she witnessed these last few seconds of my life…

“Daddy!”

“J-Jason,” I wheezed. “Please…”

Again, he glanced back at me. His lips parted as if he were about to say something, but nothing came out. The expression on his face was that of a man forced to make the most important decision of his life, against his will.

“How’s this for a
hair-o
story, you twisted son of a bitch,” Sal Friedman said, stepping between us and rearing back with his golf club to sink it into my face.

My eyes locked with Jason Burke’s.

“Jason,” I rasped. “T-take care of Sam… m-make sure she knows how much I love her… how much her mother loved her…”

The vice-grip on my throat let up then, but only to allow Sal Friedman to have his way with me.

“
Fore!
” Sal shrieked at the top of his lungs.

Jason threw the gun to me. A weak, underarm toss.

Somehow, I caught it. Barely. It bounced off my chest, would have landed in the grass at my feet if my right index finger had not looped through its trigger guard at the last second, trapping it against my thigh.

The pistol felt warm in my bloodstained hands. Like something sentient. Alive. Hungry.

The crowd gasped again in unison, recoiled from me.

Sal Friedman’s eyes went wide with terror. He dropped his nine-iron.

“Now, Mr. Writer Fella, you know I didn’t mean it,” he said, and a nervous little laugh followed the senior citizen’s words.

But the big man behind me did not shrink back with the rest of the mob. His arms wrapped around my neck again, and he hauled me violently off my feet. He squeezed tighter than ever. Colored spots danced before my eyes, and I felt consciousness slipping away bit by bit like a ridiculous pipe dream.

“ ‘
When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield
,’ ” an all-too-familiar voice whispered in my ear. It belonged to a man I once considered a friend, a man with whom I had shared many an ice-cold beer on countless warm summer nights. A guy who kept a clever quotation on hand for any scenario.

“ ‘
I wanted you to see… what real courage is
,’ ” he grunted as we struggled, “ ‘
Instead of getting the idea… that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked… before you begin… but you begin anyway… and you see it through no matter what
.’ ”

A massive, sharp-knuckled fist rammed into my kidney.

“That’s from
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Andy. I’m sure you’ve read it. And one might argue that the words of Edmund Burke are relevant as well to what’s been happening in our neighborhood of late: ‘
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing
.’ ”

He almost sounded as if he were about to cry as he finished.

“I’m sorry, old friend. I
can’t
stand by and do nothing. You know that’s just not me.”

He wrenched my skull violently to one side, as if trying to snap my neck. His breath was hot on the back of my head. It smelled like boiled cabbage, and during those next few seconds, in spite of my predicament, I found myself wondering if that was what my former friend had eaten for dinner earlier this evening. Boiled cabbage. I imagined him plopping down at his dining room table just like every night… perhaps saying Grace as quickly as possible ’cause tormenting the writer next door sure did build up a man’s appetite… I imagined him digging in, somehow living his life as if there were nothing out of the ordinary happening in our fair neighborhood… and then, after he finished with his dinner, he would compliment his wife on another wonderful meal… he would kiss her in that safe, hurried way old married couples kiss, and perhaps he would carry his dirty dishes to the sink, helping her wash them and rinse them and put them away so they could waste no time rejoining the fray next door… until it all led up to the
here
and
now
… to this bear of a man with his silver-haired,
U.S. NAVy
-tattooed arm curled around my throat, breathing his boiled cabbage breath onto the nape of my neck as if it were the hot, rank breath of Lucifer himself and he had come to claim my soul…

Tighter, he squeezed. Tighter. Crushing my windpipe…

“Nuh-oh,” I fought for air, “Gggkkk… B-Ben… Ben, plea—”

Suddenly, I remembered the gun in my hand. Dangling from my fingertips.

It was my last chance, I knew. My
only
chance.

I brought it up. Slowly. Tilted it back, blindly aiming over my shoulder for the man strangling me. For a second or two, I stared down into the pistol’s pitch-black barrel, but I did not stop to consider the possibility that I might shoot myself.

When the gun was parallel with my temple, just inches from my right ear, I pulled the trigger.

The world seemed to explode.

Something hot and wet splashed against the nape of my neck.

I stumbled forward, free at last from my neighbor’s deadly clutch.

Sucking in sweet, exhilarating lungfuls of oxygen, I whirled around to see Ben Souther holding both hands to his throat. Dark blood bubbled up between his fingers, gushed through his wiry gray chest hair in an endless river of red.

He gawked at me as if I had just insulted his entire family tree.

Then he collapsed on my lawn face-first.

I turned, pivoting on one foot. A foot that felt broken in several places. In the corner of my eye, Marianne Souther ran to her husband, fell atop his body, and started trying to shake him awake.

I pointed the gun at the circle of enraged faces surrounding me.

“Step back,” I told them, as I rubbed at my bruised Adam’s apple with my free hand.

I could not hear my own voice. I couldn’t hear anything. The gunshot had deafened me.

“All of you… get back right now… I’m not fucking kidding! Goddamn you, get
back!
”

Sal Friedman came at me with his golf club.

I shot him in the crotch, and he went down in a spray of crimson.

The old man writhed in the grass at my feet, holding himself through his tattered pink golf pants. I smelled piss, shit, blood, cum, smoke, gasoline, and gunpowder. But mostly blood. So much blood. Sal’s agonized yowls no doubt filled the neighborhood. But his suffering was silent to me.

I nearly dropped the gun when I saw what I had done.

But then I quickly regained my composure. I knew they had given me no choice…

“Let me through!” I shouted, holding my free hand to the wound in my chest.

The crowd wanted to tear me apart. I could see it in their eyes. But they obeyed, begrudgingly. They stepped back several feet, slowly clearing my path to Jason’s Liberty.

“That’s right,” I spat. As I limped toward the vehicle, wincing with every torturous step, I turned in a complete circle, covering my neighbors with the gun, making sure none of them could get the drop on me again. “Don’t come any closer… don’t even fucking move… or I swear to God I’ll—”

When I again faced Jason’s vehicle, I squinted through the blood caked in my eyes to see Donna Dunaway standing in the SUV’s open passenger-side door, dragging Samantha out by her hair. From his place behind the wheel, Jason engaged in a furious tug-of-war with the pregnant woman, fighting to keep Sam inside with him, but his awkward, one-handed grip on her wrist proved no match for his opponent’s vengeance-fueled strength.

“Daddy! No! Daddy, help me!” Samantha shrieked.

Her voice sounded as if it came to me from miles away. A shrill ringing filled my ears, drowning out everything else.

The crowd moved further back as I stabbed my way through them with the gun. Several of my neighbors dropped their weapons, ran for the street as if they had never fully believed in their cause to begin with.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” I shouted to those who remained on my lawn. “Move!”

Sam tumbled out of the Liberty, landed on her knees in the driveway at Donna Dunaway’s feet.

She reached out to me.

“You little bitch,” I could faintly hear Donna screeching at Sam as I drew closer. “Do you know what your father
is?
”

Her sharp fingernails raked across Sam’s face, drawing four bright red streaks in her soft pink cheeks.

“No!” I screamed.

Rough hands gripped the back of my shirt, jerking me back. I reached out for my daughter, bellowed her name again, but the distance between us doubled… tripled…

Without even thinking about it, I aimed the gun at Donna Dunaway.

I pulled the trigger, and an ugly brown hole appeared in her left breast. A hole that matched my own.

Donna looked surprised.

She fell.

But then, a second later, she barely seemed to notice her injury at all.

Her body lay sprawled on the blacktop, but Donna’s hands climbed up Sam’s torso like bloodthirsty creatures with minds of their own—like jittery, flesh-colored spiders—to lock on the child’s skinny throat. It might have been nothing more than the reflexes of violent death, but I could not be sure. Sam’s eyes bulged out, and her face turned blue as Donna squeezed with all her might.

I looked away, bit down hard upon my bottom lip, as I shot Donna Dunaway again… this time in her pregnant belly.

Her hands fell away from Sam’s throat. She lay still.

Around me, the mob’s muted fury rose to a fever pitch now. Their weapons struck my flesh, pounded relentlessly at my spine.

“Samantha, get in the car! Go!”

Sam stood. Wobbled. Fell to her knees again. Knelt there in the driveway, her body hitching with sobs.