Paul Doiron: Trespasser

His plan was to make my death look like suicide. It would seem that I’d swallowed my gun out of guilt for Ashley Kim, Hans Westergaard, Travis Barter, and every other reason I had to feel depressed. And the state police might even believe it, too. Would Charley and Kathy, though? What about Sarah? In my heart of hearts I feared that everyone I knew would accept the evidence that I had committed suicide, just like my cowardly father had.

“Two suicides in two days, Westergaard and me,” I said. “No one will believe it.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

The whiskey came surging into my bloodstream. “I’m not going to tell you the combination.”

He plopped down suddenly in the chair. The legs squeaked across the floor. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should wait for Sarah to come home.”

He reached into his coat sleeve and, like a vaudeville magician performing a trick, drew out a wad of cloth. It was a pair of Sarah’s underpants. He dangled it between us and then pressed the cotton against his nose and inhaled loudly.

I snarled at him and tried to rise, but he pushed me back with the curved end of the crowbar.

The alcohol was beginning to zap the nerve connections in my brain. Sarah was due home any minute. The thought of this monster raping the woman I loved in front of my eyes was the most horrific thing I could imagine.

Dear God, I prayed. Please don’t let him hurt her. He can kill me and it will be all right, but please don’t let him hurt Sarah. I won’t fight him if you just make him go away afterward. I’ll trade my life for hers, God. I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but please, God, don’t let him hurt her.

“So what’s it going to be?” Snow asked.

My eyelids were getting heavy. There was no escape. All I could do was save Sarah. Let him shoot me with my Walther and maybe he’d go away before she came home.

Except the Walther wasn’t in the safe. My off-duty weapon was still in my coat pocket.

“The combination is forty-three fifty-five,” I mumbled.

“You’d better not be fucking with me.”

I closed my eyes and shook my drowsy head to indicate that I was being truthful.

Snow flicked my nose with his finger. “Don’t pass out on me yet.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, as if I were slipping into unconsciousness. I heard him give a hyena laugh and then I heard the stomping of his boots as he left the room. It wouldn’t take long for him to realize the combination was bogus.

The whiskey had numbed much of the pain in my body, but the booze had left me uncoordinated. It took all my strength to sit up on the couch. I leaned my weight on my good arm and tried to get my feet under me, but it was as if my legs had turned to spaghetti. I crashed forward onto the pine floorboards. I tried to crawl toward my coat, which was hanging beside the door.

Snow sprang from the bedroom and stepped hard on my spine. “Where do you think you’re going?”

I could barely breathe with his weight crushing me. “It’s twenty-one fifty-four,” I gasped.

“What?” He removed his boot but held it ready to crack my spine.

I flopped onto my back. “The combination is my call number.” This was the truth; I didn’t figure I could lie to him twice.

Snow cocked his head suddenly and a smile oozed across his lips.

I didn’t understand why he was smiling.

Then I heard the puttering of a car engine. Blue-white headlights pierced the front windows as Sarah’s Subaru turned into the dooryard. I could feel my swollen heart pumping hard against my sternum.

Snow stepped out of the light. I rolled my head toward him and saw his sick, goblin leer.

“Just like Ashley and the professor,” he said.

The car door slammed as Sarah got out.

It took everything in me to shout her name.

Snow kicked me hard in the head. “That was stupid.”

He yanked open the door and went leaping down the front steps like some long-legged hunting dog. I felt myself on the verge of blacking out again, but fear kept me awake. I got up on one knee and then collapsed forward against the hanging coats, bringing down a pile of wool and Gore-Tex on top of me.

I heard Sarah shriek out in the yard. But I didn’t allow myself to be distracted.

Focus, focus, focus.

I found the pistol in the pocket of my jacket with my left hand and pulled back the hammer with my thumb.

Snow had left the door hanging ajar. Mist drifted into the house on the breeze. When I crawled onto the front stoop, I saw him stretched on top of Sarah in the mud, pummeling her. She kept screaming my name over and over.

Carefully, I raised my left arm. I watched the barrel of the pistol weave back and forth. I steadied it with my shattered hand.

“Snow,” I mumbled.

He didn’t hear me above Sarah’s screams.

“Snow!”

As he twisted his body and rose up on his knees to face me, I shot him through the chest.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital. My throat was scraped raw from the tube the doctors had used to pump my stomach, and there was a ringing in my ears, like a phone from a distant room, that just wouldn’t stop. I tried to rise on the pillow but felt instantly dizzy, as if I’d been spun around in a circle half a dozen times. I bent my elbow slightly and discovered a fat IV needle taped to the big vein that ran along my left forearm.

Most people who suffer from a concussion experience amnesia-they can’t remember the incident that caused the head trauma.

I remembered everything.

With my blurred vision and the splint on my hand, it took me a few moments to push the call button. The woman who answered wore blue-green scrubs; she had wiry black hair and dark, tired-looking eyes. It took me a while to recognize her as the ER nurse I’d met the night of the ice storm.

“Where’s Sarah?” I rasped.

The woman touched my hand and nodded. “She’s resting comfortably.”

The little blond doctor appeared around the edge of the ICU curtain. Dr. Tennis Shoes wasn’t smiling this time. He leaned close to the nurse.

“How’s he doing?” he asked, as if I weren’t awake and looking right at him.

“He just asked about his girlfriend.”

His whisper was loud enough for me to hear. “Did you tell him she lost the baby?”

The nurse grabbed him forcibly by the biceps and shoved him away from my bed. “Doctor,” she said sharply, “I need a word with you, please. ”

Later, before the drugs shoved me back into unconsciousness, I found myself remembering the night my mother announced she was divorcing my father.

During their nine-year marriage, my mom miscarried twice.

I learned about the first time long after the fact. It was just one of those things when the uterus rejects the fetus.

The second miscarriage was different. I was nine years old, and one warm spring evening, my dad told me I was going to have a little brother or sister. He announced the news at the dinner table while pounding down the last can of a six-pack. My mom was washing dishes at the sink, and I remember her turning around with a look of utter horror, which confused and frightened me. They must have had some tacit agreement not to tell me about the pregnancy.

My mother hurled the bowl in her hands at my father’s head, but he ducked, and it shattered against the fake-wood wall of the trailer. Usually, when my mom did something like that, she would scream and rage at him, sometimes even claw his face. This time, she just walked out of the kitchen while my father laughed softly to himself. He seemed to be enjoying a cruel joke.

A few days later, my mom took me to stay with the Coles, who lived down the road. They were a nice retired couple who sometimes baby-sat me when my mom attended one of her Dale Carnegie courses in Farmington or visited my aunt in Portland. She didn’t trust my dad to watch me for any length of time, because sometimes he would just stay out all night, drinking at his favorite roadhouse, the one where the waitresses became strippers after dark.