Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

Inside, with his son watching him from the bedroom floor, Nick empties all of Jackson’s clothes from his drawers into a small suitcase. Downstairs, Nick stops at the living room sectional, picks up Jackson’s stuffed black dog, and says nothing to Phoebe before they leave.

The arched front door of the house on Juniper Street is thick white oak with a wrought-iron knocker. The greenery that surrounds the cottage is lush from the steady cool breeze off the ocean. The house is a foreclosure in Redondo. It took them forty minutes to get here through light traffic. Nick signed a six-month lease with Bank of the West just after Halloween. Jackson is asleep and doesn’t see the glistening white lights Nick strung up on the short palms and eucalyptus trees that line the sidewalk and the front of the house. Jackson doesn’t see the soft orange recessed light inside or the yellow leather Formula One race-car bed Nick claimed from a miniature mansion during an initial assessment in Calabasas (two days after Phoebe left and didn’t return home for three nights). He doesn’t see the billowing sheer curtain or smell the cool fragrant wind or the fresh sky-blue paint on the walls. He opens his eyes only when Nick draws the blanket over him. He asks if he can have a story. Nick says it’s late, but then he picks up Harry the Dirty Dog from the nightstand, and before he turns the second page, Jackson is sleeping again.

Where is he?”

“With his nanny.”

“Mai’s in Houston,” she snaps.

“His new nanny.”

“I’d like to know where my son is.”

“He’s with me.”

“And where are you?” she presses.

“Gone.”

“You’re not taking him from me.”

Nick is thumbing through the countless images of his son stored on his iPhone until he finds the picture he’s looking for: Mallory. “You’re asking where he was last night? I’ll tell you where the hell he was—”

“I’m not letting you take him.”

“—when you were passed out at one o’clock in the morning—”

“You won’t get him. You’ll never get him. I will never let you have him.”

“—our son was on the verge of falling into the goddamn pool!”

If she could sleep in Jackson’s crib without breaking it or feeling insane, she would. Instead she curls up next to it as she has in the past, since they arrived here, and pretends he’s in it. She hums a couple of the songs she used to sing to him and keeps one arm raised, her fingers between the smooth wooden slats.

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nick says.

“I’m going to find you.”

“I doubt it.”

“Come home,” she says after a long pause.

“You’re high,” Nick says. “I can hear it.”

“Bring him home.”

“Are you scared now? Now that you realize how unnecessary you are?”

“Nothing scares me,” she says.

“You know what I just realized? You’re alone. In that house on Carousel Court. No husband. No son. No dog.”

“I’m fine.”

“No benefactor. No one,” he says.

“I’m just getting started. I don’t need a thing.”

“You don’t even have a job. You’re neck-deep.”

“I’ll find you,” she says.

“Do him a favor: Keep your distance.”

“He needs his mother.”

“He has what he needs.”

The pounding is the front door. The chiming is the doorbell. The noise is simultaneous, and when she sits up, she hears it: laughter. She peers out the window and sees five vehicles: an SUV, three motorcycles, and a Nissan Maxima. She calls 911. She’s put on hold. The house shakes from whatever bursts through the front door and lands on the floor downstairs. Seconds later it reaches her: a putrid egglike stench, and she sees the thick blue haze of smoke when she moves through Jackson’s doorway to the hall. From the top of the stairs Phoebe sees the white masks: three, four? The head of a sledgehammer comes down on the coffee table, splitting and splintering the oak.

“Moving day!” a voice announces from under one mask.

From the top of the stairs, she rushes the men. Four of them. “No. No,” she’s saying, her voice rising. “No!” She’s cursing and pushing and hears laughter. She kicks and she’s pushed and she staggers back, collides hard with the head of the banister. She screams and charges again and swings wildly until a gloved hand grips her neck, tosses her aside, flips her over the sectional.

Another explosion, the sickening cracking sound of the sledgehammers on the living room furniture. Two men stomp upstairs. There is so much noise. Phoebe is covering her ears. The front door. She could walk or crawl to it, leave the house. Furniture is tossed over the winding staircase, crashing on the floor. Jackson’s dresser, rocking chair, lamps. Two other men haul the stuff out the front door and toss it on the lawn.

That’s when she feels it. The cold metal tip of something pressing into her neck. A thick hand around her mouth. The smells of latex and stale cigarette smoke. The man is breathing through his nose, pressing his mouth to her ear, behind her. He says nothing. The hand drops to her breast, over and then inside her dress.

The sectional is in pieces; foam and springs spill out like guts. A masked man takes a chainsaw to the ottoman, rips through it, pauses only to look at Phoebe and the man with his hands on her, then continues.

The man forces her to the floor. His knee and body weight grind her face into the carpet. She’s flipped over and two men pull duct tape forcefully across her mouth. Her arms are ripped behind her back and wrists bound. The house is suddenly hushed.

Two other men watch as the two who have hold of her hoist her to her feet. One of the men has Phoebe by the jaw. She is still. He squeezes too hard. She tries to wrest herself free. Her white sundress is lifted over her underwear, then torn from her body.

She gags. The nausea is a wave. A surge she can’t swallow. The vomit has nowhere to go. The tape forces it back down. She’s flailing, vomit burning as it passes through her sinuses and out of her nostrils. She kicks violently until a fist lands on the side of her head, which hits the wall, where she collapses.

From the floor, the blur of faint yellow light is the glow from the pool. She tries to sit up. Shadows close in. They drag her through the kitchen, where two more men — she has counted five so far — stop using crowbars to pry loose the granite countertops and watch the other two pick her up and press her too hard against the sliding glass door. One of them slaps her ass. She’s nude, cut, and bleeding.

A decision is made. They drag Phoebe from the kitchen, through the smoke, up the stairs. The question that forces its way through the vapors is this: What are you fighting for? The answer is instinctive and comes as they lift her body from the floor: Jackson. At once she is weightless and free.

Someone says, Enough . Someone else says, Go . She is dropped. She is deadweight. She slides down, awkwardly, along the winding staircase until she comes to a stop against the wall. She is stepped on by one of the men on his way down to join the rest, who convene in the foyer.

She frees her wrists and ankles and moves quickly up the stairs. In the bedroom closet she is reaching for and loading Marina’s gun. It feels heavy and cold in her trembling hands, and at the top of the stairs she’s lying on her stomach and squeezing the trigger. The earsplitting blasts ring out, and with each round, a shock of white light until there is nothing but a thinning bluish haze of smoke, echoes, and stillness.