They’re cruising through the Bluffs now, almost home. So close to his moment of truth. This announcement he’s going to make—maybe it will bring him closer to his parents. Maybe the low-grade estrangement he’s occasionally felt has more to do with his unwillingness to come clean about who he is—his identity as a gay man—than with his being adopted or a different race than his family. His brother is adopted, and he’s well adjusted enough. Not all angst-ridden like Jacob, at any rate. And it’s not like he’s all that ‘black’ when you get down to it, though it pains him to admit that he-who-shall-no-longer-be-named might have been right when he suggested as much at the American Apparel store. He’s more like ethnically ambiguous. Olive. Creole. He doesn’t even get those bumps in his skin when he shaves, which is (let’s be honest) the mark of a true brother.
The folk vibe fits him well. He would be a total poser if he started up again with the slouchy pants and wifebeaters and high-top kicks, laying down lame-ass rap verses over prerecorded beats, the way he used to in high school. Worse, he would be a cultural appropriator, because that isn’t his native culture—just like Mom used to say to Dad when they thought Jacob wasn’t listening.
The lights are on in the Henderson’s house on Cherry Lane. Rich and Holly’s parents must be out of town. Jacob’s been to a handful of quasi-debaucherous shindigs at their place in the past. Rich and Holly act a bit spoiled for his taste, but the location has the advantage of being stumbling distance from home—just a quick shot through a patch of woods in the back.
He turns left onto Rockford Lane and then onto Moon Drive. Their house comes into view up ahead on the left. Jacob’s heart flutters as he makes out the police cruiser parked at the end of the driveway.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Shots Fired
4:03 a.m.
Val leans against the wall beside the door, favoring her right foot. She grips the handle of the scissors tightly, ready to pounce on whoever comes into the room. If John returns, he’ll surely announce himself, so if anyone comes through the door silently, it must be Stanley or that maniac cop who was firing at John. She doesn’t want to stab Stanley—or anyone, for that matter—but she might not have a choice.
Dresden is moaning continually now, his head hung low, drool and blood dripping from his lower lip, a spot of pink spreading on the carpet. Given his position, he’ll be the first thing anyone sees coming into the room. And even if he tries to alert the person to Val’s presence, she’ll have enough time to attack.
Seconds pass. Then minutes. Dresden occasionally mutters something incoherent. Val wipes her hands on her pants and restores her grip on the scissors. Someone is coming. Someone has got to be coming.
Stanley stops and listens. The cop is shouting from the main room, saying something about the stairs.
Okay, so maybe he’s got the situation contained. He’ll sort out who’s who. He’ll take John and Val to the hospital and Dresden into custody—which at this point Stanley has no problem with whatsoever. They’re no longer brothers-in-arms. Dresden has crossed too many lines.
He approaches the side door of the house, walking as quietly as he can through the mudroom.
A pistol shot rings out. Stanley goes still. He stands by the door, barely breathing. He hears shouting, followed by two more shots. He’s got to get out of here. This may be his last chance. His hand goes to the doorknob, but he can’t bring himself to turn it.
Get out of here. For the love of God, get out of here.
A shadow appears on the wall of the mudroom. Stanley waits for the cop to bark an order, or perhaps to shoot without saying anything. Neither happens. Stanley turns around to look. Standing in the hallway is a short figure wearing some kind of body suit. The suit is a bulky mess, with a vaguely rodent-like headpiece. What in the hell could this thing be? It looks like a hobbit wearing a homemade Batman costume.
Whatever it is, it’s carrying a shotgun. The figure turns to look at Stanley. Through the mask, Stanley makes out the delicate features of an adolescent boy.
Another pistol shot.
The boy raises the shotgun and aims it clumsily in the direction of the main room.
Slinging the strap of his rifle over his shoulder, Stanley lunges over to the boy and lifts him up. The boy struggles, but Stanley ignores this, along with the howling pain in his back. He plucks the shotgun out of the boy’s hands and starts down the hall, carrying the boy with one arm.
The kid thrashes wildly. He starts to cry out.
Stanley tosses the shotgun in a crate of lacrosse sticks, throws his free hand over the boy’s mouth, and makes for the door.
“Be quiet,” he whispers, releasing the boy’s mouth for long enough to turn the knob.
When they’ve gone about 20 paces out onto the lawn, Stanley dumps the boy on the grass. “What the hell were you doing in there?” he says.
“I was coming to rescue those defenseless souls from your clutches,” the kid says, a quaver in his voice.
“How’d you know what’s going on in there?” The kid is silent. “Look, never mind. There’s no time. Do you live close by?” The kid nods. “Go home. Now.”
“I am sworn to protect—”
“Do it!” He shoves the kid toward the road, a little harder than he means to.
The kid staggers back, then starts trotting toward the road as quickly as his unwieldy apparel will allow. Stanley glances back toward the house, then lumbers in the direction of the barn at the far end of the lawn. There, he’ll regroup. Figure out the best way to get to his car—parked a mile away, on the far side of the Bluffs—and try to decide where he’s headed next.
Whether he can risk going home.
Whether he needs to have his stitches looked at, to make sure they don’t get infected.
This whole thing has become such a mess. And all for nothing. It’s long past time for him to cut his losses. He’s done what he can, and now he’s getting out.
He comes up to the barn. There’s a padlock on the front door, but no alarm system and (thankfully) none of the cameras that have been eyeing him for the last eight hours. He’ll go inside, and take his first easy breath of the night.
He raises his rifle, preparing to slam the butt of it against the padlock.
A car pulls into the driveway. It parks just behind the police cruiser. Two young people in their teens or early twenties get out—a girl and a boy.
Stanley recognizes them from the pictures in the house. It’s the kids. Their Goddamn kids came home.
The young man starts rushing for the door. If he spooks the cop…
Stanley takes off, tromping back toward the house. He waves his hands and hollers, trying to get their attention.
The young man looks at him. He freezes for a second, then calls out to his sister. “Clara! Hurry up!”
The girl hesitates. She stands beside the car, trembling.
Stanley is halfway across the lawn. “Don’t go in there!” he shouts. “It’s not safe!”
“Clara, come on!” the boy yells. The girl starts after her brother, holding her ribcage as she stumbles down the driveway.
Stanley tries to step up his pace, but it’s like his body has slammed on the emergency brakes. His lungs won’t take in enough air to give him the fuel he needs. His hips will barely move, seized by the inflammation in his lower back. However hard he pushes, he can manage no more than a brisk, uneven walk. He must look like something out of a horror movie, he realizes—his head all cut up, lurching across the lawn after the two defenseless kids.
The boy and girl climb up onto the porch. He shouts to them once more, imploring them to stop.
But they don’t. They go through the busted front door, swinging it closed behind them.
Stanley stops a few paces from the driveway. He takes a breath.
That’s it. There’s nothing he can do to help them. He may as well get out of here while he still can. There’s no point in making this even worse for himself.
He turns and looks at the barn.
Images of his daughter flood his mind.
You can’t help them, he tells himself, but you can help her.
He takes a long, exhausted breath. Then, nostrils flaring, fingers curling into tight fists, he turns once more and drags himself toward the house.
John pushes aside the old linens in the drawer. His heart sinks.
His eyes had not betrayed him. The shotgun isn’t here; the kid has got it.
The whole thread of his arguments with Val over what to do with the thing—her insistence that they lock it up in a safe if they planned to keep it at all, his uncharacteristic dismissal of her concerns (based on what, some ridiculous masculine urge to have dominion over his home?)—every word they’ve ever said on the subject races through his head. The way he chose to handle this weapon has been the one crack in his careful judgment. And now it has burst wide open.
There’s no time to reflect on it. The kid in the costume is down there, armed with a shotgun, about to meet up with a half-crazed cop. There’s no way that will end well. He’s got to find the kid before that meeting happens.
John rockets down the stairs. He hoists himself up on the railings, clearing each flight in two or three steps, ignoring the contusions on his hips and knees, the torn tissue in his elbows and shoulders.
He reaches the first floor and whips around the corner into the back hallway. The boy is there, raising the shotgun to aim it into the great room.
John starts toward him. But before he gets there, two meaty arms reach into the hallway from the mudroom. The boy is lifted up and carried away.
John steps carefully down the hallway and turns into the mudroom just as Stanley and the boy are going out the side door. He’s missed his chance. He won’t be able to get the gun, and now the maniac cop is on his way up to…
Hang on.
Something is out of place. He senses it before he sees it. Among the sporting equipment in the mudroom, there is something that doesn’t belong—a foreign object.
His eyes go to the crate of lacrosse sticks. He spots something metallic and heavy among them. He steps over and, not fully believing what he’s got in his hands, pulls out the single-barrel Winchester shotgun. He opens the barrel. It’s loaded.
Everything goes still for a moment. Then John’s whole body quakes with a seismic shift from helplessness to power—the same power he felt when he first shot a bird out of the sky.
A well-aimed shot with this thing will take the cop’s head off. It’ll tear a hole through the mid-section of the dirt bag who tried to rape his wife.
John forgets about Stanley and the boy.
He goes into the hallway.
He pastes himself against the wall, staying in the shadows as he inches toward the great room, silently daring the cop to come into view.
Come on, you piece of shit. Just give me one clean shot.
The measured, meticulous doctor is gone. John is ready to kill.
He is about to turn the corner when he hears footsteps at the front door. He looks and sees shadows in the foyer.
Someone else is in the house.
Damien is halfway up the stairs when he hears the front door open. He’d gone off to Neverland again after firing the second and third shots, standing by the window with his arms outstretched for, what, two minutes? Three? Fuck knows. But now he’s back in business, creeping up the staircase, not announcing himself to whoever else might be up there.
But now there’s someone at the door. Who the fuck could that be? They having a fucking party?
He crouches down and looks. The shadows of two individuals stretch across the floor of the great room. Then one of the individuals comes into view: a young African-American male wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt and soiled jeans. He’s got a shiner in one eye, and he looks dirty. This guy’s been in some trouble tonight. He could be on something.
Take no chances.
“Put your hands where I can see them!” Damien shouts.
The young man looks up the stairs. He looks confused.
A voice calls from elsewhere, “Jacob, get back!”
“What the…” the young man mutters. His right hand drifts toward the pocket of his sweatshirt.
Don’t let him get whatever’s in that pocket!
Damien lifts his weapon and fires two rounds.
The first misses, but the second is a clean shot to the right shoulder. It sends the young man wheeling back into the wall.
He aims again, ready to take the kill shot.
A thunderous bang tears through the house.
Damien’s body twists to the left. He goes to aim again, but when he raises his arm, the gun is gone. Along with half of his right hand. What’s left is a shredded mess of bone and blood.
His ears are ringing and his vision has gone blurry. He feels vertigo overtaking him, the way it had once or twice under heavy fire in the desert, smoke and hot ash and shrapnel raining down, no way to tell which way you were looking.
Through his bleary haze, he makes out the half-dressed man he’d seen in the upstairs hallway vaulting up the stairs at him, a shotgun in his hands.
The man knocks him down, bludgeoning him with the weapon. He’s getting his ass beaten, and the man is grunting as he does it.
Why this guy, who claimed to be the owner of the house, should be attacking him for taking down a strung-out, trespassing street kid is a fucking mystery. Nonetheless, the guy seems intent on killing him.
Oh well. At least he won’t have to do it himself.
Well, shit. He may as well have been snubbed out by some camel jockey back in the desert for all the last few years have amounted to. And how it’s ending now. What a fucking sack-of-shit story his whole life has been.
He takes a few more knocks to the face and the side of the head. The light and sound begin to fizzle out.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, the beating stops. Or seems to. Could be that he just can’t feel it anymore, that he’s floating off to emptiness.
Then there are voices. Male and female. Arguing. Sobbing. Above him and below him. All around. Voices whose intentions he can’t make out.
Then everything goes to black.
Val comes out of the guest room, hopping on her good foot, one hand running along the wall, the other still clutching the scissors. It wasn’t a pistol she heard, nor a rifle. It was the unmistakable boom and blast of a shotgun. And as her daddy might have said, if she needs a better cue than that to quit sitting on her thumbs, then she ought to check her pulse.
At the top of the stairs, she beholds what might be the most unbelievable sight of the night. John is standing over a small, uniformed man, raining down blows on him, first with the butt of his shot gun and then with his bare hands. The man is unresponsive.
“John!” she screams, but he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even look at her.
“Mom!” Clara’s voice. Val looks past John and sees her daughter down in the great room. She’s crouching down. Then Val sees Jacob slumped on the floor, and she knows what has possessed her husband.
Stanley comes in from the foyer. He glances at Clara and Jacob, then runs up the stairs. He pulls John off the bloody, gurgling body and hauls him to the base of the stairs.
“Let me go!” John shouts, kicking and spitting, but Stanley holds him fast.
“Stop it, Doc! Stop it! You gotta help!” But John doesn’t stop. He reaches behind him and claws at Stanley’s face, pulling loose more of the stitches he’d sewn hours earlier.
Val sits against the railing of the staircase and slides down to the bottom, as she’d always forbidden the children to do. She nearly tumbles over the edge, landing at the bottom with a dizzying jolt to her injured ankle.
She scrambles over to Jacob. She takes his face in her hands. Clara is nearly hyperventilating beside her. Jacob is breathing, but he’s lost a lot of blood and his eyes are beginning to roll back in his head.
“Call 9-1-1,” she tells Clara.
Clara nods and pulls out her
phone.
Val crawls over to John. She grabs hold of her husband’s body and hoists herself up to her feet.
“Honey, please,” she says, lifting a hand to his face.
John knocks her hand away, almost hissing at her.
“For God’s sake, John, think about what you’re doing!” she says. “We need you here.”
The words seem to reach him, if dimly at first. He gazes up the stairs at his handiwork, then turns and looks across the room to where Jacob is slumped against the wall. Sensing that something has shifted in him, Stanley lets go of John.
John stumbles over to his children. “Clara,” he says, “go get my medical bag from the kitchen. I left it by the sink.” His voice has regained its levelheaded authority, and Clara immediately goes to do what he has asked, her cell phone still raised to her ear.
Val’s legs quiver as the cascade of adrenaline that had shot her out of the guest room begins to vacate her system. She ought to be panicking over her son, or raging as John had, but it’s just not in her at the moment. After a lifetime of hasty responses, her system has finally put on the brakes.
She begins to collapse but finds herself upheld by two large hands. She looks up and sees Stanley’s face, smeared with blood and sweat.
“You should run,” she tells him.
He nods but doesn’t move, and Val feels herself being lowered gently to the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY: Fault Lines
September 19, 2016
10:24 a.m.
“I’ve never seen him act like that,” Clara says, her fingers resting lightly on Jacob’s hand, careful not to disturb the IV tube running down his arm or the heart rate monitor clipped to his finger. “Dad’s usually so gentle, you know? But when that cop shot you—God, I can’t believe I’m actually saying that—it was like something flipped inside of him. Like someone flicked a switch. He just went nuts. He turned into an animal.”
Reclamation Page 28