Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(77)
In the garage he closed and locked the door and crossed toward the kitchen. He thought he detected a faint odor of cigarette smoke. Maybe a neighbor had stepped outside for a midnight smoke. Surely Tommy hadn’t sneaked a quick one earlier in the evening? Huston paused for an instant and sniffed the air. Was it really cigarette smoke he smelled? Maybe the odor had come from the bag of chicken bones. Maybe he was just imagining things.
He locked the inside garage door behind himself and crossed toward his study. He knew what he had to do, he thought, and repeated the sentences again, working on the cadence, the pauses, getting them just right. Sometimes a comma made all the difference.
He sat at his desk and laid his journal open and wrote down the sentences. A few more sentences followed. He worked on each one in his head until it sounded just right, then he wrote it down. She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Maybe twenty minutes passed, not long, certainly no more than thirty. A creak of footsteps upstairs. Tommy taking a leak probably. Maybe sneaking in some time on his laptop. Huston read over what he had written, was pleased with the sound of it. Then he closed up the journal and returned it to the bookshelf.
Suddenly the scent of cigarette smoke intruded again, this time he was sure of it. He had never smoked, always abhorred the stupidity of the habit, its selfishness and self-destructiveness, and his sensitivity to its stink had always been keen. But he felt no anger, only sadness, because now he would have to go upstairs and catch Tommy in the act and read him the riot act. The boy would be embarrassed. Maybe he would cry. And Thomas Huston’s only desire was to fill his house with happiness. Disciplining his children was a duty he accepted but never enjoyed.
Just outside Huston’s office, a man he had never before seen was waiting in the unlit foyer at the bottom of the stairs. The man stepped into the doorway before Huston reached it, a big man, not as tall as Huston but broad shouldered, thick necked. His head was shaved and gleaming with perspiration. The scent of cigarette smoke clung to his tight black T-shirt and jeans.
Huston gave a small start of surprise at the sight of him, an involuntary chuff of air, a barely audible “unh.” It was as if all the rest of the house went dark around him but the man remained clearly illuminated in the light from the office. In that first instant Huston took in everything about the man, the broad, round face and gray eyes that seemed too small for his head, the black nylon batting gloves, the black enameled pistol in his right hand, the chef’s knife in his left. That’s my chef’s knife, Huston thought, and was suddenly disoriented by his recognition of the knife, the dreamlike incongruities of stranger, knife, gun, my home. For several moments, all he could understand, all that registered on him, was the soreness of every breath, the sudden heavy hurt in his gut. It was not fear that paralyzed him but this sudden interjection of the inexplicable, and in the dark congestion of his mind, he could think only of his mother and father.
“Back up,” the man told him.
Huston only stood there. He tried to swallow but could not. The smell of stale smoke was nauseating.
The man raised the pistol. Huston stepped back.
“Keep going. Back further.”
Three halting steps. The movement broke something loose in Huston’s chest and he sucked in three desperate breaths. The man was fully inside the room now, and now the room felt tight to Huston, a carpeted cage. “Who are you?” he said.
“I’m the man whose baby you killed.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t fuck with me, man. You know what I’m talking about. You took her to Cleveland and you killed my fucking baby.”
In a distant part of his brain, Huston thought Bonnie, he thought the abortion pill, he thought of the long night in the motel room while she waited for the cramping and the flow of blood to begin. He thought of the silence as they drove back to Pennsylvania Friday morning. Yet even those thoughts would not cohere to explain that pistol, that knife, this man whose presence choked like a hand around his throat.
From that point on, the night warped into a gelatinous blur for Huston. He was not sure how long it lasted. Maybe an hour, maybe more. The knife pressed into his hand. The horrific choice. Your baby for mine. Either that or your whole fucking family. Every last fucking one of you.
He remembered leaning over little Davy’s crib. The soft sibilance of breath. The sweet, powdery smell. Then the tears and the terrible ache that mushroomed through his every cell. Now, the man whispered from the doorway. Or else I start shooting.
The baby looked to Huston like a small, pale fish underwater. Asleep at the bottom of an ocean of tears. The first push of the blade was too tentative and off the mark. The second was an act of mercy. It carried all the terrible weight of a father’s inestimable love.
Fifty-Two
Huston was bent double now and sobbing convulsively, hands to his face, his back bucking hard against the lighthouse rail. DeMarco climbed to his feet an inch at a time, closed the distance between them. He laid a hand on Huston’s back, felt the searing heat between his shoulder blades, felt the chill of lake air on his face. He stood like that without moving, staring into the long darkness. The broken necklace of lights in the distance blurred. They seemed to float and wobble, yanked back and forth in a current of grief.
Then DeMarco too bent forward, his forehead against the other man’s back.
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