The girl lying on her back by the center island had been tall, but both her pigtails and the angular lines of her body suggested a child two or three years younger than Alice. Her head was cocked at a strenuous angle, almost a parody of interrogation, and her dead eyes bulged. Her hair had been broom straw-blond, but all of it on the left side of her head—the side that had taken the blow which had killed her—was now the same dark maroon as the stains on the floor.
Her mother reclined below the counter to the right of the stove, where the handsome cherrywood cabinets came together to form a corner. Her hands were ghost-white with flour and her bloody, bitten legs were indecorously splayed. Once, before starting work on a limited-run comic called Battle Hell, Clay had accessed a selection of fatal-gunshot photos on the Web, thinking there might be something he could use. There was not. Gunshot wounds spoke a terrible blank language of their own, and here it was again. Beth Nickerson was mostly spray and gristle from her left eye on up. Her right eye had drifted into the upper orbit of its socket, as if she had died trying to look into her own head. Her back hair and a good deal of her brain-matter was caked on the cherrywood cabinet against which she had leaned in her brief moments of dying. A few flies were buzzing around her.
Clay began to gag. He turned his head and covered his mouth. He told himself he had to control himself. In the other room Alice had stopped vomiting—in fact he could hear her and Tom talking together as they moved deeper into the house—and he didn't want to get her going again.
Think of them as dummies, props in a movie, he told himself, but he knew he could never do that.
When he looked back, he looked at the other things on the floor instead. That helped. The gun he had already seen. The kitchen was spacious and the gun was all the way on the other side, lying between the fridge and one of the cabinets with the barrel sticking out. His first impulse on seeing the dead woman and the dead girl had been to avert his eyes; they'd happened on the gun-barrel purely by accident.
But maybe I would have known there had to be a gun.
He even saw where it had been: a wall-mounted clip between the built-in TV and the industrial-size can-opener. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts, Tom had said, and a wall-mounted pistol in your kitchen just waiting to leap into your hand . . . why, if that wasn't the best of both worlds, what was?
"Clay?" That was Alice. Coming from some distance.
"What?"
There followed the sound of feet quickly ascending a set of stairs, then Alice called from the living room. "Tom said you wanted to know if we hit paydirt. We just did. There must be a dozen guns downstairs in the den. Rifles and pistols both. They're in a cabinet with an alarm-company sticker on it, so we'll probably get arrested . . . that's a joke. Are you coming?"
"In a minute, hon. Don't come out here."
"Don't worry. Don't you stay there and get grossed out."
He was beyond grossed out, far beyond. There were two other objects lying on the bloody hardwood floor of the Nickerson kitchen. One was a rolling pin, which made sense. There was a pie tin, a mixing bowl, and a cheery yellow canister marked FLOUR sitting on the center island. The other object on the floor, this one lying not too distant from one of Heidi Nickerson's hands, was a cell phone only a teenager could love, blue with big orange daisy decals plastered all over it.
Clay could see what had happened, little as he wanted to. Beth Nickerson is making a pie. Does she know something awful has started to happen in greater Boston, in America, maybe in the world? Is it on TV? If so, the TV didn't send her a crazygram, Clay was sure of that.
Her daughter got one, though. Oh yes. And Heidi attacked her mother. Did Beth Nickerson try to reason with her daughter before driving her to the floor with a blow from the rolling pin, or did she just strike? Not in hate, but in pain and fear? In any case, it wasn't enough. And Beth wasn't wearing pants. She was wearing a jumper, and her legs were bare.
Clay pulled down the dead woman's skirt. He did it gently, covering the plain working-at-home underwear that she had soiled at the end.
Heidi, surely no older than fourteen and perhaps only twelve, must have been growling in that savage nonsense-language they seemed to learn all at once after they got a full dose of Sane-B-Gone from their phones, saying things like rast and eelah and kazzalah-CAN! The first blow from the rolling pin had knocked her down but not out, and the mad girl had begun to work on her mother's legs. Not little nips, either, but deep, searing bites, some that had driven all the way to the bone. Clay could see not only toothmarks but ghostly tattoos that must have been left by young Heidi's braces. And so—probably screaming, undoubtedly in agony, almost certainly not aware of what she was doing—Beth Nickerson had struck again, this time much harder. Clay could almost hear the muffled crack as the girl's neck broke. Beloved daughter, dead on the floor of the state-of-the-art kitchen, with braces on her teeth and her state-of-the-art cell phone by one outstretched hand.
And had her mother stopped to consider before popping the gun from its clip between the TV and the can-opener, where it had been waiting who knew how long for a burglar or rapist to appear in this clean, well-lighted kitchen? Clay thought not. Clay thought there would have been no pause, that she would have wanted to catch up with her daughter's fleeing soul while the explanation for what she had done was still fresh on her lips.
Clay went to the gun and picked it up. From a gadget-boy like Arnie Nickerson he would have expected an automatic—maybe even one with a laser sight—but this was a plain old Colt .45 revolver. He supposed it made sense. His wife might feel more comfortable with this kind of gun; no nonsense about making sure it was loaded if the gun was needed (or wasting time fishing a clip out from behind the spatulas or spices if it wasn't), then racking the slide to make sure there was a hot one in the chamber. No, with this old whore you just had to swing the barrel out, which Clay did with ease. He'd drawn a thousand variations of this very gun for Dark Wanderer. As he'd expected, only one of the six chambers was empty. He shook out one of the other loads, knowing just what he would find. Beth Nickerson's .45 was loaded with highly illegal cop-killer bullets. Fraggers. No wonder the top of her head was gone. The wonder was that she had any left at all. He looked down at the remains of the woman leaning in the corner and began to cry.
"Clay?" That was Tom, coming up the stairs from the basement. "Man, Arnie had everything! There's an automatic weapon that would have gotten him a stretch in Walpole, I bet. . . . Clay? Are you all right?"
"I'm coming," Clay said, wiping his eyes. He safetied the revolver and stuck it in his belt. Then he took off the knife and laid it on Beth Nickerson's counter, still in its homemade scabbard. It seemed they were trading up. "Give me two more minutes."
"Yo."
Clay heard Tom clumping back to Arnie Nickerson's downstairs armory and smiled in spite of the tears still running down his face. Here was something he would have to remember: give a nice little gay guy from Malden a roomful of guns to play with, he starts to say yo just like Sylvester Stallone.
Clay started going through drawers. In the third one he tried, he found a heavy red box marked AMERICAN DEFENDER.45 caliber AMERICAN DEFENDER50 rounds. itwas under the dishtowels. he put the box in his pocket and went to join Tom and Alice. He wanted to get out of here now, and as quickly as possible. The trick would be getting them to go without trying to take Arnie Nickerson's entire gun collection along.
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