Dead Aim (50 page)

He said in an urgent whisper, “Keep your voice down, Debbie.
He’ll hear you and know I’m here with you. Just sit tight.” He stepped toward the doorway.

“Michael!” This time it was a wail, a high-pitched shout that made him bob his head from one side of the doorway to the other to see if it had attracted Mallon. He could detect no sign of movement.

He stepped backward into the darkness again, leaned his heavy rifle against the wall beside the doorway, and instead took out his pistol. He twisted the crown of his flashlight to turn it on again, this time into a thin, bright beam that illuminated Debbie’s feet. In the dimmer glow around the small bright circle he could see that her pretty face was squeezed into a rubbery parody of its flawless structure, the big eyes narrowed to slits, the upper lip puckered, and the lower one protruding. He raised the flashlight’s bright beam up to shine on her face. As he had expected, she turned her head to the side to avoid the glare, and he fired the shot into her temple.

Parish had known in advance what he was going to do next, and now he executed the plan quickly. He turned off the flashlight as he moved toward the door, snatched up his rifle, and sprinted straight for the top of the hill. He wanted to get there and take a firing position in time to see Mallon break cover to move toward the origin of the shot. He reached the top, just inside the edge of the woods, knelt, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and waited for something in the landscape to move.

He heard the sound of a footstep behind him, and that told him he had guessed wrong. He turned to bring the rifle around to fire at his opponent. But too soon there came the familiar, loud pop of gunpowder that Parish had learned to love, and he died on his belly and looking up at the dark shadow-shape of a man.

I
t was bright. There was an instant when Diane believed it was only another variation on the dream. It always had a stern, angry figure who had found out what she had done. Sometimes it was her mother, who had always been so sweet, with a voice like velvet and hands as soft and soothing as warm water, but who in the dream came back knowing of Diane’s guilt and ready to punish her. Most often it was a male figure, a nightmare version of a judge. This time it was Robert Mallon.

The impression lasted only a fraction of a second, until she tried to roll over and cover her eyes to go back to sleep, and felt the cramped, sore feeling that made her eyes open. Her face had been pressed against the floor, her left shoulder, hip, and knee all hurt, and her neck was stiff. She considered trying to roll to her stomach, but the feeling was returning to her arms in needle stings, and it reminded her that they were taped behind her. She was afraid that if she were on her stomach, she would have a difficult time getting up again. Slowly, painfully, she extended her taped ankles and pushed her heels on the floor, raised her head, and rocked to sit up. She could not do it.

She was in the living room, and she saw that the sun was already
bright and hot outside, but the front of the house faced roughly northeast, and the sun would not reach the tall windows that looked out on the ocean until afternoon.

When she saw Mallon, she gasped. He seemed not to have heard her. He kept staring out at the ocean, motionless. He still had the same clothes on, but now they were rumpled and dirty, and his face looked bruised and swollen on the right side.

She said, “It would have been kinder to shoot me while I was asleep.” She shook her head in despair. “It serves no purpose to make me feel sadness and fear like this.”

He turned toward her. His eyes were tired, not angry. He contemplated her for a moment. “I’m not going to kill you. If that’s what you want, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

“Then why did you come back?”

“I’m going to do what I said, which was to let you go.”

She began to cry. At first it was great silent sobs that kept her from catching her breath to talk.

He knelt on the floor. He took out his pocketknife, cut the tape on her wrists so her hands were free, then the tape on her ankles. She got to her knees, very slowly and tentatively, then reached to the wall and steadied herself to stand. She said apologetically, “I have to go to the bathroom.” He nodded, and she walked there unsteadily.

She came back a few minutes later. She stood in the center of the empty living room tugging at her hair and muttering to nobody, “I look so awful.” She heard her own voice and said, “Who cares, right?”

He walked toward the front door, and she followed. She turned her head to look around at the empty house. She was surprised to see that it was pretty in daylight, completely different from the place where she had been locked at night. Then the door closed on it.

She followed him to her car, and said quietly, “You’d better drive as far as you can before you stop. Parish won’t stop looking.”

Mallon stared at her for a few seconds. Then he said, “He’s stopped.”

“I don’t understand.” She looked confused, not allowing even a possibility that what he had said could be literally true.

“Parish is dead. A lot of the others are too—the hunters.”

After a long pause, she said, “What are you going to tell the police?”

“The truth.”

“About me?”

“Not you. I gave my word that I’d let you go. If they find out Parish had your name in his records or something, that’s your problem.”

She was silent for a moment, thinking. Then she nodded. “Thank you.”

He opened the passenger door. “Get in.”

She sat in the passenger seat and waited while he went around the car, got in, and started the engine. When he pulled out of the driveway and turned toward the north, she said, “But what are you going to do afterward? Just go back to live in Santa Barbara and pretend that nothing happened?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m going away.” He looked up the road as though he were trying to read something figured on the pavement ahead. “Maybe I’ll try to build something.”

After that, he seemed to forget she was beside him. As he gathered speed, he kept turning his head to the left to watch a long line of brown pelicans gliding low over the rolling Pacific swells.

                                            
T
anya stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bedroom wall and brushed her hair. She watched the other girl, in another room, wearing the same new blue skirt and tank top, using her left hand instead of her right to brush the long blond hair to a shine. Tanya had always secretly relished the existence of the other pretty girl who lived in the other room beyond the glass, like a fish in an aquarium. She loved the whole idea of a second girl who lived a second life.

In Wheatfield when she was little she had sometimes turned her mother’s dresser so the mirror would be directly across from the full-length one on the closet door. She could make a whole long line of other girls, then kick her legs and look like the Rockettes, the nearest ones as big as she was, and the others smaller and smaller as their line stretched off into infinity.

She had dressed up in her mother’s clothes sometimes, so she could change the girl in the mirror. She would be someone who had a good life, someone who was loved and cared for, someone who was beautiful and had everything she wanted.

She could invent things that the girl in the mirror could say, and practice them, whispering so the girl in the mirror would not be overheard. She would assume faces that were distant and just a little disapproving, and know that seeing them would make people frantic, trying to find ways to please her. She tried expressions designed to reward too, opening her eyes and mouth wide in a grateful smile that admitted no possibility of darker thoughts, nothing held back or hidden. Sometimes when she did that she would add a laugh at the end—not a small, forced sound, but a delighted laugh that made her eyes glisten and her white teeth show to their best advantage.

The alarm system’s cool male electronic voice announced, “Kitchen … door”: Dennis was finally home. This was it. Tanya stopped brushing her hair, slipped the brush into her purse, felt for the other handle and gripped it once, then released it.

She could hear Dennis’s hard leather soles on the slate floor of the kitchen. There was no sound of his dropping his briefcase on the kitchen floor, so he had set it down gently: he had brought his laptop home again. He was planning to spend the evening working. “Tanya?” He was in the living room now.

She put her purse on the floor beside the dresser. “Up here.”

She spent the next fifteen seconds considering him—turning him around and around in her mind and evaluating him. Women always said men had a hard outer shell but were soft and sweet and vulnerable inside, but she had found the opposite. They had a layer outside that was yielding and squeezable, but when you squeezed you began to feel the hardness beneath, like bone. She had squeezed him a lot in a short time, and she was already beginning to reach the hardness. He was getting ready to say no to her, to deny her things. Maybe he would even criticize her when the bills came and he could see everything added up. It was time.

Dennis’s heavy shoes thumped on the carpeted stairway, coming closer. She already saw each step of the stairway in her mind, even though she had only been with Dennis Poole for a month, and all but a week of that had been spent in hotels. As he climbed step by step, she began to enumerate his unpleasant qualities. She didn’t like his laugh. It was a quick staccato that made his voice go one octave higher, like a jackass’s bray. A few times she had gotten up from her chaise next to him and gone into the hotel pool to cool her sun-warmed skin, come up from underwater, and seen him looking at other women in their bathing suits. He tipped waiters exactly fifteen percent and never a penny more, and was proud of it because it showed he could do the arithmetic in his head. He was not a sincerely appreciative lover. He pretended to care and be solicitous of her, but there was a practical quality about it. His concern was to please her, but it wasn’t the right kind of concern. He wasn’t a man unable to stop himself because he was enthralled. He was merely thinking about whether he was pleasing her enough to keep her.

Dennis had reached the top of the stairs. As she turned to look at him, her detachment was complete. He was a forty-two-year-old man with a soft belly and thinning hair who spent his days selling computer equipment to other men like himself. He was nothing. She smiled beautifully, stepped into his embrace, and kissed him slowly, languorously. “Hello, cowboy,” she whispered.

He laughed as she had expected. “I could get used to coming home like this and finding you waiting for me.” He looked more serious. “You know, I’m glad you were here for another reason. I think we need to talk about some things.”

“Sure. We can talk, but first, don’t you want to get comfortable? I should think you’d be tired after sitting in that office all day.” She knew that tone of voice. Anyone could tell he was getting ready to be cheap with her, to start complaining about money. She pulled back and said, “I’ll bet you’re sick of wearing that suit. Why don’t you get out of it, relax, and soak in the tub?” She looked down at his tie as she loosened it, not into his eyes. “Maybe I’ll join you.”

“Good idea.” He took his suit coat off and his tie, while Tanya went into the bathroom and turned on the water. The oversized Jacuzzi tub had jets that bubbled, so she turned them on too.

Dennis Poole was naked now, and he put his arms around her. She tolerated his embrace for a few seconds, then wriggled away and whispered seductively, “Wait.”

She went back out to the bedroom and walked to the dresser, where she had left her purse. She waited until she heard him turn off the water faucet, so the only sound was the steady burble of the jets. She quietly walked into the bathroom.

He was lying in the tub with his head cushioned by a folded towel, looking self-absorbed and distant as the bubbles massaged his skin. Tanya reached into her purse, took out the pistol, held it about a foot from his head, and squeezed. The report was a bright, sharp bang that echoed against the tile walls and made her ears ring. She turned away from the sight of his corpse, the red blood draining into the bath, and stopped being Tanya Starling.