by Joe Hill
“What a pile of shit,” Rickles said. “You asshole. You careless asshole. Guns don’t just go off.”
“Don’t they?” Kellaway asked, and shot him.
10:41 A.M.
He unbuckled Rickles’s seat belt and pulled him sideways, so the stout little man dropped across the front seat. Then Kellaway got out and went around to the driver’s side and hauled himself up behind the wheel. The driver’s-side window was mucked with blood and tissue, as if someone had thrown a great fistful of pink slime against the glass.
He pushed Rickles over to make more room, and the older man slipped and fell into the passenger-side footwell. Only his feet remained tangled up on the seat.
A guy had come out of the convenience store, a fifty-something dude with long, graying hair and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tee beneath an unbuttoned flannel shirt. Kellaway lifted a hand in a casual wave, and the guy nodded back and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. Maybe he’d heard the shot and come out for a look. Maybe he just wanted a smoke. No one else gave the pickup a second look. It wasn’t like on TV. People didn’t register what they heard, didn’t process what they saw. Busy pedestrians might walk by a dead homeless man for hours, assuming he was asleep.
Kellaway steered back toward Jay’s house and away from the life he’d lived for the last fifteen years. He thought his chances of escape were very slim, although he had a few things working in his favor. Those things were in his Prius. One of them was loaded with a banana clip.
He pulled into the courtyard of Rickles’s hacienda and parked the truck. As he climbed down, the front door opened and the towheaded boy named Merritt stood there gazing blankly out at him. Kellaway nodded—How ya doin’—and walked swiftly to his Prius with Chief Rickles’s Glock in his hand. He tossed it onto the passenger seat of his car and got out of there. When he looked in the rearview mirror, the kid had turned his head to stare at his grandfather’s pickup. Maybe he was wondering why there was crap all over the inside of the driver’s-side window.
A gust of wind tried to shove the Prius out of its lane and onto the dirt embankment, and Kellaway had to struggle with the wheel to stay on the blacktop. Smoke churned around him as he drove west.
If he moved quickly and didn’t hesitate, he thought there might be time to get George away from Holly and the sister-in-law. He had a boat, a little eighteen-footer with an outboard; in happier days he’d sometimes taken George fishing in it. He had a notion to get the boy and make a run for the Bahamas. They could hide out in the rocks off Little Abaco, maybe eventually work their way south to Cuba. It was two hundred miles or more to Freeport on Grand Bahama Island, and he doubted he’d ever been more than three miles out in the boat. But he wasn’t afraid of the deep swell, or of drifting off course and slow-roasting to death under the equatorial sun, or of capsizing and drowning with his child. It seemed to him far, far more likely that the Coast Guard would find him offshore and a sniper in a helicopter would blow his brains out while little George watched.
If they could hit him in the chop. If he didn’t hit them first.
Besides. They might stay back if they weren’t sure what he’d do to the kid. He’d never point a loaded gun at his child, but from a helicopter how could you tell if a gun was loaded or not?
The boulevards were wide and open, but the farther west he went, the less imposing the houses became. Modest one-floor ranches drifted toward him out of the haze and slipped away again. The makes of other cars were almost unidentifiable in the filthy murk. Headlights bobbed up out of the soup and sailed past, attached to shadows. In the movies the man with a license to kill pressed a button and released a cloud of smoke from the back end of his Aston Martin to blind his pursuers and make an escape. Kellaway was stuck with a Prius instead of a British sports car, but his smoke cover was much more effective.
Frances’s silver BMW wagon was in the driveway, parked nose-in to the garage, so Kellaway could read the COEXIST sticker on the back end. He pulled in right behind it, blocking her, and got out. The wind sheared across the lawn, and his eyes stung in the billowing smoke. Kellaway held the Glock in one hand. He popped the hatchback of his Prius and threw aside the sleeping bag that covered the weapons he’d lifted from Jim Hirst’s garage. He considered the Bushmaster, the Webley, and the .45, then picked up the single-barrel Mossberg with the pistol grip. He loaded it with PDX1 rounds, squeezed five in the tube, one in the chamber. The matte finish on the gun barrel was a flawless black. It looked as if it had never been fired.
Kellaway cut across the front yard, headed for the door. Frances’s ranch was guacamole green, the walls all rough, spiky stucco. She had cacti for border plantings, which he thought fit her personality. The front door was flanked by tall, narrow sidelights with cheap white panel curtains.
As he approached, he saw one of the curtains twitch. He couldn’t tell who’d been watching him, Holly or Frances, but just as he reached the door, he heard the bolt turn. It was almost funny, the idea that she thought she could lock him out.
He lowered the Mossberg and pulled the trigger, and the shotgun went off with a thunderous slam and blew a hole through the lock and the wood surrounding it. He planted his boot in the center of the door and shoved, and it flew open, and he followed it in and almost stepped on George.
Along with a fist-size chunk of the door, the Mossberg had blown away the upper right half of George’s face and a large portion of his skull. A splinter the size of a kitchen knife had gone through his left eye. The boy opened and closed his mouth, gurgling strangely. Kellaway could see his brain, glistening pinkly. It seemed to pulse, to beat, not unlike a heart. George tried to say something but could make only wet, smacking sounds.
Kellaway looked down at him in perplexity. It was like an optical illusion, something that didn’t make sense to the eye.
Holly stood six feet away, holding a cell phone up to her cheek. She wore white slacks and a sleeveless green blouse, and her hair was turbaned in a towel. Like George, she was opening and closing her mouth without making any sound.
The shot seemed to go off again, and then again, only inside Kellaway, in his head. He was screaming for a while before he realized it. He didn’t know when he dropped to one knee. He didn’t know when he set aside the Glock to put a hand gently on his son’s chest. Time just skipped forward, and he found himself bent over his child. Time skipped again, and Holly was kneeling by George’s head, cupping the red ruin of his skull in her hands. Blood squirted on her white pants. George had stopped trying to talk. Holly had put the phone down next to her knee, and someone on the other end was saying, “Hello? Miss? Hello?” A 911 operator, calling to them from another galaxy.
Kellaway took another deep breath and found he was done screaming. His throat was ragged and sore. He kept his hand on his son’s chest, had slipped it under his shirt to place a palm against his warm skin. He could feel George’s heart beating rapidly, a furious, frightened stammer in his chest. He could feel when it stopped.
Holly wept, tears plinking onto George’s face. George’s expression was stunned and blank.
“You told him to lock me out,” Kellaway said to her. It seemed incredible to him that his son had been alive and complete less than two minutes ago and now, abruptly, was dead, his face obliterated. It was too sudden to make sense.
“No,” Frances said.
Frances stood in the living room, on the other side of a pony wall. She held a vase in one hand. He assumed she had heroic notions of smashing it over his skull, but she seemed unable to move. All of them were stuck in place, shocked by the non sequitur of George dying in a single shot.
“He saw you coming before any of us. He saw you coming, and he was scared,” Frances said. She was quivering. “You had a gun.”
“I still do, you foolish cunt,” Kellaway said.
It turned out Frances’s fag of a husband, Elijah, was hiding in the bedroom. By the time Kellaway found him, the shotgun was empty. He had put three into Frances and two into Holly when she
tried to run out the door. But there were still fourteen rounds in the Glock, and he needed only one before his work was done.
11:03 A.M.
He might’ve sat with George forever.
He went over it again and again in his head, what should’ve happened.
In his mind Kellaway crossed the front yard to the door and blew a hole through the lock and shoved the door in and George was there but fine, ducked down, hands over his head. Kellaway scooped him up in one arm and leveled the shotgun at Holly as he backed out the door. You had your turn with him. Now it’s mine.
Or try this: He crossed the yard to the front door and blew a hole through the lock and Frances’s stomach at the same time. She was the one standing on the other side of it, not George. Why would it be George? That didn’t make any sense. Why would George be afraid of him?
He imagined crossing the yard to the front door and George threw it open before he could get there and ran to him, yelling, Daddy!, arms open wide. That was how it was when George and Holly still lived with him. George yelled Daddy! whenever he got home from work, as if he hadn’t seen him for months instead of just hours, and always came running.
What brought Kellaway up and out of his thoughts was the sound of someone saying his name in the next room, in a low, distant voice. He wondered if Frances was not dead, although he didn’t see how she could still be alive. Her guts were all over the carpet. Two blasts from the shotgun had all but cut her in half, just above the waist.
He’d been holding George’s small hand—it was already cold, the extremities cooled off so quickly once circulation ceased—and now he folded it across the boy’s small, slight chest and stood. Frances was splayed on her back on the other side of the pony wall. Where her stomach belonged was a red-and-black slime of mutilated intestines. A third shot had ripped a hole in the left side of her neck. It looked like her throat had been partly torn out by an animal. He supposed in some ways this was exactly what had happened, and he was the animal.
It wasn’t Holly saying his name either. Holly had fled into the kitchen, where she was now lying facedown, arms stretched out over her head, like a child pretending to be flying. He had gotten her in the heart, which was where she had gotten him, too.
The voice he heard was coming from the TV. A stern, dark-haired news anchor was saying that a lead slug had been found hidden in a toilet and that the discovery threw Randall Kellaway’s story into serious doubt. The newsman said the candle-lighting ceremony had been canceled abruptly with no explanation. He said the disturbing new evidence had been confirmed by a reporter with the Digest. The news anchor said the reporter’s name—and Kellaway said it too, very quietly.
Why had George been afraid of him? Because Aisha Lanternglass told him to be. She’d been telling the world for days that Kellaway was a scary person. Maybe not explicitly. But it was hinted at in every line she wrote, in every gleeful insinuation. When he met her in the parking lot and she flashed her teeth at him, her bright gaze had said, I’m going to fix you, cracker. I’m going to fix you good. The thought gave her joy; he could see it all over her face.
He kissed George good-bye, on what was left of his brow, before he left.
11:26 A.M.
Lanternglass drove at a crawl the whole last quarter of a mile to the office, on the western outskirts of town. Smoke billowed across the road in smothering yellow heaps that the headlights could barely penetrate. The wind snatched at her elderly Passat, jolting it this way and that. Once she drove through a whirl of sparks that spattered and died against the hood and the windshield.
“Mom, Mom, look!” Dorothy called from the backseat, pointing, and Lanternglass saw a sixty-foot-tall pine tree, engulfed in a red shroud of flame, over on the right side of the road. Nothing else around it was visibly burning, just that one tree.
“Where are the fire trucks?” Dorothy asked.
“Fighting the fire,” Lanternglass said.
“We just passed the fire! Didn’t you see the tree?”
“The fire is even worse farther down the road. That’s where they’re trying to hold it. They want to keep it from jumping the highway.” She didn’t add, And pouring down the hills into St. Possenti.
Just before they reached the office, the smoke lifted a little. The Digest was in a squat, unremarkable two-story redbrick building, which they shared with a yoga studio and a branch of Merrill Lynch. The parking lot was about half full, and Lanternglass saw people she knew, other employees, carrying boxes to their cars.
She got out and started to walk toward the fire door, and the wind came up behind her and shoved. She saw more sparks, floating in the high thermals. Her eyes watered. The late morning stank of char. Lanternglass took her daughter’s hand. They half ran and were half carried by the gusts to the stairwell.
They went up the cement stairs, three at a time, almost at a run, as she had so often done before. She wasn’t going to be able to pack her weights, still tucked in under the stairwell. If the building burned, they’d be melted back to ingots of raw iron.
The fire door to the newsroom was propped open with a cinder block. It was a modest office space containing six desks of the cheapest quality, low particleboard dividers arranged between them. At the far side of the room was a floor-to-ceiling glass partition, looking into the only private office at the Digest, Tim Chen’s. Tim stood in his office door, clutching a cardboard file box with some framed photographs and several coffee cups balanced on top.
Shane Wolff was there, too, sitting at a desk by the fire door, dismantling a PC and neatly setting the components into a cardboard box. Several other computers had already been removed. An intern, a wispy, nervous, nineteen-year-old girl named Julia, was pulling steel drawers from the file cabinet that occupied most of one wall and stacking them on a dolly. A short, solidly built sportswriter named Don Quigley used bungee cable to strap them in place. The atmosphere was one of quiet, industrious urgency.
“Lanternglass,” Tim said, and nodded toward her desk, which was the one closest to his office.
“I’m on it. I can pack everything I’ve got in ten minutes.”
“Don’t pack. Write.”
Lanternglass said, “You aren’t serious.”
“I think we both know I’m famously humor-deficient. I put an alert on the Web site about the bullet. The TV news is already running with it. I want the full story uploaded to the server by noon. Then you can pack,” he said as he hurried past her, carrying his box.
“My car is unlocked,” Lanternglass said. “Bring up my laptop? It’s in the backseat.”
He jerked his head in a gesture that seemed to indicate assent and hauled his file box out and down the stairs.
She slowed near Shane Wolff. “I’m going to miss this place if it burns down. Some of the most mediocre hours of my life were spent in this very room. You think you’ll miss anything about coming here?”
“Watching you run up and down the stairs,” he said. “Nothing mediocre about that.”
“Ew,” Dorothy said. “Mama, he’s hitting on you.”
“Who says?” Shane asked her. “Maybe I’m a fitness nut. Maybe I just admire someone who shows real dedication to staying in shape.”
Dorothy narrowed one eye to a squint and said, “You hitting on her.”
“Pfff,” Shane said. “Don’t go ragging on me now. I’m not the one walking around with my head stuck up a chicken’s butt.”
Dorothy touched her chicken hat and giggled, and Lanternglass tugged her hand and led her on to her desk.
A stack of flattened cardboard boxes leaned against the full-wall window looking into Tim Chen’s office. Lanternglass assembled one, and she and Dorothy began to empty out her desk. The box was half full when Tim returned with her laptop bag.
She fired up her aging MacBook and opened a new document while Dorothy continued to pack the box. Lanternglass began to write, starting with her headline: CRIME-SCENE DISCOVERY RAISES QUESTIONS. Shit, that was terrible. Too general, to
o vague. She deleted it, tried another. NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET: CRIME-SCENE DISCOV— Fuck, no, that was even worse.
It was hard to think. She had a sense of the world coming apart around her, buckling and splitting at the seams. In his office Tim Chen was throwing piles of folders into a box. Shane Wolff was on the other side of the room with part of the carpet torn back. He yanked a long Ethernet cable out from under it, gathering it in loops. A file cabinet with all its drawers hanging open overbalanced and fell with a crash. The wispy intern screamed. The sportswriter laughed.
At Lanternglass’s back she heard the wind whap against the windows, and suddenly Dorothy jumped to her feet, staring outside with enormous eyes.
“Whoa, Mom, it’s really blowing,” she said.
Lanternglass rotated in her office chair for a look. For a moment they all stopped what they were doing and stood still to stare through the windows. Fog roiled and foamed on the other side of the glass, all but obscuring the parking lot below. The wind roared, rushing the cloud along, the smoke a poisonous shade of yellow. Sparks whirled. For the first time, Aisha Lanternglass wondered if it had been a good idea to bring her daughter along with her to the office, if there was a chance of the flames overwhelming the fire department and reaching the building while they were still in it. But no, that was ridiculous. They didn’t even have to be out of the facility until tomorrow morning. The Park Service would not have allowed them so much time to evacuate if there was any real danger. Besides, people were still arriving to help with the move. Down in the lot, she dimly saw a bright red Prius turning in off the highway. Then the smoke thickened and she lost sight of it.
“Come on,” Lanternglass said. “Finish up, honey. I just need to do this, and we can go.”
She began to type again, new title: A SINGLE BULLET CHANGES EVERYTHING. There, that had plenty of zing. Anyone who read that would just have to go on to the next line. Whatever the next line was going to be. Lanternglass would find her way to it in a moment. She narrowed her eyes, squinting at the screen, like a shooter taking aim.
