Эд Горман - Riders on the Storm

My gun now residing on the staircase, I began to wonder if this was his confession before he decided to kill me.

“So she was never on her own; and when she fell in love with Will Cullen and promised to marry him, you realized that this time she’d be gone for good.”

“Oh, you don’t think this was the first time, do you? I made the mistake of putting her through college so she could be a psychologist like me. We’d have a husband-and-wife practice and everything would be fine. But three different times she started sleeping with clients. Two of them happened to be married, so when I confronted them they agreed not to say anything. They wanted to save their marriages. One was single and he blackmailed me. I had to dig into my inheritance again. He had nothing to lose and he could have destroyed us. They’d all had backgrounds like hers; they’d been seriously molested. She identified with them. I always kept a close eye on any male she dealt with who’d been molested.

“Cullen was a war victim. I didn’t think he was a prospect for her but I was very wrong, wasn’t I? After the last one she promised that she’d never do it again. But she not only did it again, she fell in love with him. When I found out I started wondering how I could get rid of him. When I heard about the argument he’d had with Steve Donovan I saw my opportunity. I started following him around and the rest was pretty easy.

“But just a few hours ago she said she was going to call you and tell you everything, including that she was sure I’d killed Donovan. Then she told me that she hated me and he was going to leave his wife and that they were going to move from Black River Falls and get married. The other ones she’d slept with, she never talked about being in love with them. I think she believed she was healing them in some way — and healing herself as well. But this—”

He stopped talking and then he shot me twice.

For a second there was no pain and then there seemed to be nothing but pain and the blindness of injury, confusion and rage. I’d been hit just below my left shoulder and my right ribs.

I fell to my knees and then I fell to the floor.

Running; he was running hard through the house. He obviously assumed I was dead or soon would be anyway. Running. The back door opening and slamming.

I knew I wouldn’t be conscious much longer. I needed to grab on to the lowest of the staircase spindles and somehow pull myself up. To my feet. The idea burned in my brain with the fever of a brilliant immortal thought. Of course. Get up and somehow make my way to the closest office.

It took three tries to get on my feet and what seemed like two or three hours to make it to the receptionist’s desk and the telephone and even then when I got to the desk the first thing I did was fall across it and bang my chin hard against its surface.

But somehow the phone got in my hand and somehow I told 911 what had happened.

And just before I passed out I had the pleasure of hearing Randall Shepard trying to start his car. Grinding and grinding and grinding.

But he wasn’t going anywhere.

Not without a distributor cap he wasn’t.

I wasn’t able to attend Steve Donovan’s funeral. I was in the hospital. The docs were optimistic about my full recovery. As bad as being shot had been, my military accident had been much worse. I was surprised that I didn’t have the headaches that had followed the crash. It was a damned nice surprise.

Kenny showed up a few times, as did Foster. My mom and sister called frequently. Two days into my stay I saw on the TV that Niven had passed. I wished I’d known him in his younger days. If even half the stories were true he would have been a hoot to have hung out with. And learned from.

I thought about Donovan some. He was the good-bad person most of us are but he’d taken his good-bad to epic size. He’d been a brave soldier and sometimes a generous man but I would never understand why he forsook Al Carmichael for a psychotic Anders.

As for Will and Karen, who knew? The only certain thing was that he’d need to find another psychologist.

I drifted in and out of sleep. Half the time I woke up I saw Mary sitting in a chair next to my bed smiling at me.

I remember one time she said, “You’re a hero all over again. You’re all over the news.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear so I didn’t fight sleep this time. I dove deep into it.

The time I woke up just as they were bringing me my tiny, tiny dinner I got the best news of all, except the news that I was going to live, of course.

Mary said, “I just heard the news on the radio. There’s a new poll. Senator O’Shay is eighteen points behind.”

I laughed with the same boisterous pleasure I’d once reserved for Bugs Bunny cartoons. Eighteen points behind. There was, after all, a God.