Devoted(50)
53
A few minutes past midnight, Megan closed the novel and put it on the nightstand. She was about to switch off the lamps when she realized that she hadn’t gotten her pistol from the gun safe that was attached to the rail of the bed frame.
She slid out of bed and knelt and entered the four digits of her wedding date. The door of the small metal box clicked open, and she retrieved the 9 mm Heckler & Koch—and went suddenly, absolutely still.
Always, she stowed the pistol with the muzzle toward the wall, toward the head of the bed. That was how the box was designed. The safe could accommodate the weapon in either position, but it was specifically designed for the grip to be toward the foot of the bed. Now the gun was reversed.
Never before had she locked the pistol away in this position.
Verna Brickit didn’t have the combination. Only Megan could open the gun safe.
The weapon didn’t feel right, either. Fear fine-tuned her senses, so that she could hear distinctly every instrument of the wind’s symphonic performance and every response of the house, see her ghostly reflection in the farthest window and the dark lashing yard trees and the darker woods that should have been beyond her ken, feel every subtle current of air that breathed across her bare legs and also feel a lightness to the gun.
She practiced at a shooting range monthly, often two hundred rounds in a session, and she knew what the Heckler felt like when it was fully loaded. She released the magazine. Empty.
The pistol had held ten rounds when she put it away the previous morning. Someone had come into the house before the alarm had been activated for the evening. Someone was still here. But who?
Although she felt naked in her sleepwear, she went first to the walk-in closet. As she turned the knob, she realized that she hadn’t entered the closet when she’d come to bed, and she thought, He’s in there! That was an irrational thought, and she knew it for what it was, fear borne, and indeed no one lurked in the closet. She turned on the light.
The metal canister was stored at the back of a deep drawer filled with running shorts and sweatpants. She retrieved it, screwed off the lid, took out a box of Gold Dot ammunition, opened both ends of the box, pressed out an egg-crate plastic container in which were nestled twenty bullets, and hurried back to the bed.
Hands trembling, she fumbled bullets out of the container and dropped three on the carpet. She told herself to get a grip, shape up. She thought, Woody, nothing can happen to Woody, please God. Her hands steadied, though inserting the rounds in the magazine wasn’t as easy under these circumstances as on a shooting range. Come on, Megan, load the damn thing, all ten rounds, might need every one.
When it was done, she glanced at the phone on the nightstand. The numbers for fire and police and ambulance were printed on a community-supplied card adhered to the cradle, between the handset and the keypad. No. Woody first. Sheriff’s deputy would take five minutes, maybe ten, to get here. No time to pull on the jeans she’d laid out, either. Straight to Woody, bring him back here, lock the door, brace it with a chair, call the police, then slip into the jeans and the crewneck.
She went to the hallway door, grabbed the knob with her left hand, holding the pistol with her right. She couldn’t do this and keep a preferred two-hand grip on the gun.
Doors were the worst. No way to know what waited beyond one. If an intruder stood ready on the other side, if he rushed her as she pulled open the door, he could unbalance her, strike her, tear the gun out of her hand. Except he thought the gun was unloaded, not a threat, so even if he knocked her off her feet, she still had her own advantage of surprise.
Maybe it shouldn’t have taken her this long to understand, but she only now realized that he hadn’t come in her room and somehow opened the gun safe and unloaded the Heckler if his intention was to burglarize the house without risk to himself. He had disarmed her and bided his time, hiding somewhere in the residence, waiting for her to go to sleep, so that he could easily overwhelm her and rape her.
Her heart knocked violently against its caging ribs as she opened the door to the hall.
54
Kipp erupted from a dream about riding in a car with Dorothy and Rosa. The boy was screaming on the Wire.
He was a boy, no doubt about that now, not another dog but a special boy who could use the Wire, whether he knew it or not, a boy like no other, and he was in peril.
Springing to his feet on the bed, Kipp barked twice.
Startled, Ben Hawkins switched on a nightstand lamp and sat up, blinking away a residue of sleep. “Hey, what?”
Kipp jumped down from the bed and padded to the motel room door and reared up on his hind legs and pawed at the deadbolt.
But that wasn’t good enough. He seemed to be saying that he needed to potty. He didn’t need to potty.
He dashed to the nightstand, where Ben had left his wallet and the electronic key for the Range Rover.
He stood on his hind legs again, bit the key chain, and hurried back to the door with the key dangling from his mouth.
Getting out of bed, Ben said, “What’s gotten into you?”
Not having an alphabet wall and a laser pointer made life a lot more difficult.
Kipp dropped the key at the door.
He hurried to the small table by the window, stood again, and got his mouth on the hardcover book Ben had been reading.