The Guest Room(90)
“What?”
“He was about to shoot Sonja. Was going to kill her for killing Pavel for sure. Was going to kill her right in front of everyone in your very nice living room. But it doesn’t matter. I go.”
“Give me your gun,” he said. “Give me your gun and go back inside. My wife and my daughter will come inside, too.” He turned toward his wife and met Kristin’s eyes; for a moment he couldn’t read them. But then she nodded ever so slightly.
“I promise you,” he told the girl, “you’ll be safe. Someone was talking to Crystal. That means someone knows what those men were doing to you. Demanding of you. Someone is investigating them. You’re not the criminal here.”
“They won’t believe I didn’t shoot Kirill.”
“Let’s go inside. You can tell me exactly how it happened. But give me the pistol first.”
He felt his wife and his daughter watching him. He had his wife back; he never again wanted to lose her. But he knew just how fragile that new bond was. How delicate. At the same time, he wanted his daughter to view him with neither disdain nor disgust. Maybe she understood he was a little clumsy, but let that be his gravest fault in her eyes. Wouldn’t any father sign up for that rep? Pure and simple, he wanted everything to be the way it had been seven days ago. God, seven days. One week. How had all he had taken for granted evaporated in the roaring, animal heat from one bachelor party? But he knew the answer to that. He needed only to glance at this Armenian girl to remember. But now he wanted only to make amends, to make things right. To caulk the hollow in the heart of his family. To make sure this poor girl whose soul had been battered almost since birth was safe. (And after viewing that body on the slab this morning, never again would he question the actuality—arguably, even the tangibility—of the soul, because without it he had seen that we are all just decomposing flesh.)
“Are we good?” he asked Alexandra, and he extended his hand to her, palm open.
“We’re fine,” she answered, her gaze oddly far away. “But it doesn’t matter. They still have last laugh.”
He followed her eyes. They were no longer on his wife and his daughter. She was looking beyond them, beyond the car and the driveway, down to the corner where their little street met Pondfield Road. There, at the very intersection where almost every day of his life he or his wife made a left-or a right-hand turn in their vehicles, and where—just once—his Audi had rolled backward and driverless, a ghost car, was a black Escalade. It was just like the one that had brought this Alexandra into his life. It was emerging from the driveway beside the now empty house where their neighbors, the Habeggers, had once lived. Where, apparently, it had been parked. Waiting. Watching. It hadn’t been there when Richard had returned home; he would have noticed it. It must have arrived in the last hour or two. But none of that mattered, none of that mattered at all, because now it was moving inexorably toward him, toward them, rolling almost in slow motion past the realtor’s blue and white “For Sale” sign on the Habeggers’ front lawn.
“Run!” He barked the word at Kristin and Melissa, and he pointed toward the trees on the side of their home, denuded and autumnal now, and the houses behind theirs. For a second they didn’t move, not understanding what he saw or why he was yelling. But then, either because he yelled once more to Go! Go now! or because Kristin had spotted the car and understood that this was connected to the girl and the dead who were now forever a part of their family’s life story—dead men (two), a dead girl (one)—she pulled her child by the hand like she was but a small dog on a leash and started to run.
And then, almost at the same instant when once more he was wishing he had brought home a rifle, words crossed his mind the way that subtitles flash across the bottom of a foreign film: God. This is how it ends. This is how I am going to die.
But then the girl opened the glass storm door and used both her hands to push him so hard back inside the house—through the doorway and into the front hall—that he fell into the colonial side table and then onto the floor. A ceramic bowl with an autumn-scented potpourri fell beside him and broke, the spices and scraps of evergreen and faux pumpkin scattering onto the floor like confetti. She pulled shut the wooden front door so she was outside alone on the steps. He was just starting to push himself back to his feet to get her, to drag her inside, too, when the world seemed to explode and he heard the gunshot and the door above him was splintered.
Alexandra
Richard yelled like crazy person for his wife and his little girl to run. Maybe because he didn’t deserve to die—none of them deserved to die, this wasn’t his fault, this wasn’t their fault—I pushed him hard as I could back inside the house and slammed the door. I shouldn’t have come. Big selfish decision on my part.
I saw his wife and daughter turning to go, racing around the side of the house, and I could see on the poor girl’s face such confusion and such terror. I had heard her call me a sex slave through the front door. I guess because I was watching them, I never saw the gun—I took my eyes off the Escalade for just long enough. So I only heard the shot.
It’s so strange what you remember and what you don’t.
The girl from the party? The sex slave?
…
Kirill wore a shoulder holster. Pavel used the kind that straps onto a belt loop. Think American cowboy or police guy. It meant that he kept his shirt untucked sometimes when he wasn’t wearing his black blazer so you couldn’t see the gun, but he liked that look. Thought he looked cool. Different tastes, that’s all. But it meant the two guys drew guns in different ways, even though they were both right-handed, because Pavel kept his gun on his right side and Kirill kept his on his left. Kirill liked to cross-draw. His right arm had to cross his chest to pull Makarov from beside his left ribs. From almost under his armpit.