I think it was what happened at the mall, finally made me brave enough to do this thing. When it mattered, you had the balls to stand up and put a bullet where you knew it could do some good. You were ready to die to stop something that needed stopping. And that’s how I feel, too, man. I can’t live like this anymore. It needs to stop, and I need to be brave enough to stop it. To put a bullet where it can do some good.
I couldn’t of done this if I had to figure out how to hang myself or if I had to cut my wrists and bleed out slow. I know I couldn’t. I’d lose my nerve at the last minute. My brain is my enemy. Thank God there’s a way to switch it off quick.
Oh, hey, if you want any of my weapons, they’re all yours. I know you’ll appreciate them and take care of them. Ha ha ha why don’t you test them out on Mary! You make it look like I killed her in a murder-suicide, and I’ll gay-marry you in heaven.
Not being gay at all when I say I love you, Rand. You were the only person who ever came to visit me. You were the only person who cared. We had some times, didn’t we?
Best,
Jim Hirst
Earlier, when Kellaway was outside, it had seemed to him that Jim was close, that his old friend was somehow, impossibly, walking alongside him. Now he felt Jim near him again. He wasn’t in the bed. That was just ruined meat and thickening, cooling blood. Kellaway thought he could see Jim at the edge of his vision, just outside the doorway, a big, dark shape lurking in the corridor.
Before, the idea of Jim walking alongside him had frightened him, but now it didn’t bother Kellaway at all. He was instead comforted by the notion.
“It’s all right, brother,” he said to Jim. “It’s all right now.”
He folded the note and put it in his pocket. He uncorked the scotch and had a swallow. It blazed inside him.
For the first time since the morning of the mall shooting, he felt calm, centered. He was sure, if their positions had been reversed, he would’ve shot himself years and years before, but he was glad Jim got there eventually.
He did not think it would be best to be the person who discovered the body. Let Mary find him. Or Jim’s sister. Or anyone. If the press connected him with yet another gunshot victim . . . well, what had Rickles told him? They’d make a meal out of him for sure.
But Kellaway was in no rush to leave. No one was coming by Jim Hirst’s house at nearly ten in the evening. No one was going to bother the two of them. It was good scotch, and Kellaway had slept on Jim’s couch before.
And besides: Before he left in the morning, he could step into the garage and have a look at Jim’s guns.
9:32 P.M.
She heard her cell phone ringing and kissed Dorothy on the nose, stepped out of her daughter’s dark bedroom and into the hall. She got it on the third ring, didn’t recognize the number.
“Lanternglass,” she said. “Possenti Digest. What’s up?”
“I don’t know!” called a merry voice with a faint Latin accent through the hiss of a signal bouncing off a satellite a third of the way around the world. “You called me. Lauren Acosta, sheriff’s department. Whoo!” That whoo! didn’t seem to be directed at her. Other people were whoo-ing in the background.
“Thanks for returning my call. You’re in Alaska?”
“Yeah! We’ve got whales breaching here! Whoo!” Off on the other end of the line, from up in the Arctic Circle, Lanternglass heard yells and scattered applause and a sound like someone playing ugly notes on a tuba.
“I hate to interrupt your vacation. Do you want to watch your whales and call me another time?”
“No, I can talk and still admire a thirty-ton sexy beast doing backflips.”
“What kind of whales?” asked Dorothy. She had crept to her bedroom door and stood holding the doorframe, staring into the hall, her eyes glittering at the bottom of dark hollows. She was wearing a red-and-white-striped nightcap that looked like it had been swiped from Waldo.
“None of your business,” Lanternglass said. “Get back in bed.”
“What did you say?” Acosta asked.
“Sorry. I was speaking to my daughter. She’s excited about your whales. What kind?”
“Humpbacks. A pod of eighteen.”
“Humpbacks,” Lanternglass repeated. “Now, scoot.”
“I have to pee,” Dorothy announced primly, and sashayed past her mother, down the hall, and into the bathroom. She clapped the door shut behind her.
“Lauren, I’m calling about Randall Kellaway. You’ve probably heard—”
“Oh, that guy.”
Lanternglass stiffened, felt a curious crawling sensation up her spine, as if someone had breathed on the nape of her neck.
“You know him? Did you serve papers on him?”
“Yeah, I delivered the restraining order. I had to collect up about half his arsenal. My partner, Paulie, got the rest out of his house. Guy owned a fully automatic Uzi. He drove around with it! You know what kind of person drives around with an Uzi in his car? The evil henchman in a James Bond movie. What’s up with Kellaway? I hope he didn’t shoot anyone.”
Lanternglass leaned against the wall. “Holy shit. You don’t know.”
“Know what? Oh, no,” Acosta said, all the pleasant hilarity draining from her voice. In the background someone blew that awful note on a tuba again. “Please tell me he didn’t kill his wife. Or his little boy.”
“Why . . . why would you think that?”
“That’s why we took the guns. He had a bad habit of pointing them at people in his family. This one time his wife took their son over to her sister’s house to watch a movie. She left a note for him, but it fell off the fridge, so Kellaway didn’t find it when he got back from work. He began to think maybe she took off on him. When she finally got home, Kellaway pulled his little boy up into his lap and asked her if she knew what he’d do if she ever really left him. And he pointed a gun at his son’s head and said, ‘Bang.’ Then he pointed the gun at her and winked. He’s a grade-A fucking psycho. The kid isn’t dead, is he?”
“No. It’s nothing like that.” Lanternglass told her about the mall.
By the time she finished, Dorothy was out of the bathroom, leaning against the wall beside her, cheek resting against her hip. “Back to bed,” Lanternglass mouthed. Dorothy didn’t move, pretended she didn’t understand.
Acosta said, “Huh.”
“Did he have an exception that would’ve allowed him to carry a gun in his place of work? For his job?”
“Not a mall cop. If he was a real cop maybe. Or a soldier. I don’t know. You’d have to track down the transcripts of his hearing.”
“I checked the public-records Web site, and there was nothing in there about a divorce order.”
“No, there wouldn’t be. He never got divorced. The wife is very timid, got a case of Stockholm syndrome. He didn’t allow her to have her own cell phone for years. Or her own e-mail account. The only reason she left him is that she’s more scared of her sister than she is of her husband. And a restraining order would be filed with the courthouse. You can’t pull that offline. I can get someone to e-mail you a copy of the injunction if you want. Tomorrow, day after?”
Lanternglass was quiet, thinking it through. She’d need to see a court transcript before Tim would let her run with the allegation that Kellaway had pointed a gun at his wife and child. But she could at least get something in tomorrow’s edition about the restraining order, get it out that he’d been forbidden to carry a weapon after . . . what? Menacing his wife and child? “Menacing” was a safe verb, she thought. Tim might let her have “menacing.”
“Yeah,” Lanternglass said. “I’d appreciate that. But if it’s all right, I’d like to squeeze something into tomorrow’s edition about this. ‘A source within the sheriff’s department says . . .’”
“Oh, the hell with that. Use my name. Even better, see if you can get my picture. I love to see my face in the paper.”
“It’s all right to directly source you?”
&
nbsp; “By all means. Kellaway and I really hit it off, the one time we met. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear I’m still thinking about him.”
The tuba wailed.
“Is that a foghorn?” Lanternglass asked.
“That’s a whale!” Acosta yelled. There was more cheering in the background. “They’re serenading us!”
Lanternglass didn’t know how Dorothy heard what Acosta was saying, but all at once she was jumping up and down.
“Can I hear? Can I listen?”
“Ms. Acosta? My daughter is wondering if you’d hold your phone up so she can hear the whales.”
“Put her on!”
Lanternglass lowered her phone and pressed it to Dorothy’s ear. And stood and watched her daughter. Eight years old. Eyes very large, face calm, attentive. Listening while the world sang to her.
July 13, 8:42 A.M.
KELLAWAY WOKE BEFORE NINE, PEELED himself off the couch, and padded into the bathroom to take a leak. When he came back, ten minutes later, with toast and coffee, his own wide, bristly, impassive face was on the TV, above a chyron that said GUNNING FOR TROUBLE? He had passed out with the television going and the volume turned all the way down, had slept heavily and well in that silent flicker of uncanny light. He had felt easier with a gun again, had drifted off with Jim’s British Webley & Scott on the floor beside him.
He sat on the edge of the couch now, unconsciously holding the gun in one hand and the remote in the other. He turned up the volume.
“. . . heels of the story that Randall Kellaway was released from the army after allegations that he repeatedly used excessive force in his stint with the military police,” said the morning news anchor. He talked in the style popularized by Wolf Blitzer: in fragmentary sentences, with emphasis on any word that was reasonably dramatic. “Now, the St. Possenti Digest, out with a shock report that Kellaway was forbidden to possess a firearm because of threats he made against his wife and young son. Sheriff’s Sergeant Lauren Acosta confirming to the Digest that Kellaway would not have been granted an exception to carry a weapon because of his job as a mall security guard, and that possession of the .327 would’ve been a clear violation of the injunction against him. No word yet why Mrs. Kellaway applied for the injunction, or the nature of the threats leveled against her by her husband. Mr. Kellaway and the St. Possenti police have yet to return our calls for comment, but we expect Chief Rickles to make a statement today, when he appears at the Miracle Falls Mall for an eleven A.M. candle-lighting ceremony to remember the fallen in the recent attack. Randall Kellaway is scheduled to light the first candle and may also comment, we don’t know, but we’ll be there, live, to cover . . .”
It was her, of course. It was the black, Lanternglass, who had turned up yesterday evening to ambush him when he walked out of the local TV studio. She couldn’t leave him alone. She didn’t care if he ever saw his kid again. For her he was just a character in a nasty story that she could use to sell some papers.
He had not dared to admit to himself until now that a part of him had begun to believe he could leverage his sudden unexpected celebrity into getting it all back: Holly and George, sure, but something else, too. “His rights” were the words that came to him, but that was and wasn’t quite it. It wasn’t his right to have a gun, or not just his right to a gun. That was only part of it. It seemed to him that there was something obscene about an America where a grinning Latina could tell him to stay away from his own son, and never mind he worked fifty hours a week, never mind what he had sacrificed as a soldier representing his nation in a hostile, foreign land. The thought of the tiny black woman grinning at him while she poked her cell phone in his face, asking him her loaded questions, made him feel feverish. It seemed grotesque that he lived in a society where someone like that could make a living out of humiliating him. She didn’t care that George would hear on the TV that his father was a sick man who pointed guns at his own family. She didn’t care what kids said to George at school, if he got teased and harassed. Lanternglass had decided he was a criminal from the moment she laid eyes on him. He was white and male. Obviously he was a criminal.
Kellaway clicked off the TV.
Tires ground on gravel outside.
He rose, twitched aside the curtain, and saw Mary, pulling into the drive in a banana-colored RAV4 that he didn’t recognize. Coils of smoke unwound from the tops of the palms, turned to golden froth in the early light.
Kellaway left the Webley on the couch. He opened the door as she drew to a stop and shut off the RAV.
“What’chu doing here?” she asked.
“Could say the same to you.”
She stood at the front end of the RAV, scrawny and sinewy in a pair of cutoff jeans and a man’s flannel shirt. She held one hand over her eyes as if to shield them from the sun, although there was no particular glare.
“Get a couple of my things,” she said. “He told you?”
“I know about it,” Kellaway said. “You took it easy living off his insurance money till it was all used up, then figured you’d jump ship, huh?”
She said, “You think changing his diapers and pumping up his cock every night is taking it easy, you do it for a while.”
Kellaway shook his head and said, “I don’t know about changing his diapers, but can you come in here and show me where the urine bags are? The one he’s got on now burst, and there’s piss all over the place.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Jesus Christ. How much did you let him drink last night?”
“Too much, I guess.”
“Hire the fucking handicapped. I’ll fix it.”
“Thanks,” he said, stepping back into the house. “I’ll meet you in the bedroom.”
9:38 A.M.
After it was done and she was on the floor with a hole where her right eye had been, Kellaway put Jim’s .44 in Mary’s own hand. He sat for a while on the edge of the bed, his wrists resting on his knees. The ringing echo of the shot seemed to throb inside him, to reverberate long after it should’ve faded. He felt switched off inside. Blank. She’d been crying as she stared into the barrel. She had offered to suck his cock, snot bubbling out of her nose. Some tears and snot were good. It would look like she’d been weeping when she shot herself.
How would the cops take it? Maybe they’d figure that after discovering the body of her former lover, she decided to join him in the afterlife, a shabby, scrawny Juliet racing after her disabled, diabetic Romeo. Then again, maybe her boyfriend couldn’t swear she’d been in bed with him all night. Maybe they’d hang Jim’s murder on her. It wasn’t like they were going to find Jim’s suicide note. Kellaway would take it with him and get rid of it somewhere.
Or maybe the police would smell a put-up job, but who gave a fuck if they did? Try to prove something. Let ’em come fishing. He had wriggled off the hook at the mall, he could wriggle out of this.
He needed some fresh air and went outside to find some. Only there wasn’t any. The day stank like an ashtray. It had almost been better inside.
Kellaway’s thoughts spun like sparks rising from a collapsing fire. He was waiting for them to settle when he heard—almost felt—a faint throb in the air. Fine-grained particles of smoke shivered all around him. The morning was full of strange vibrations and tremors. He tilted his head and listened, heard the distant ringtone of his cell.
He tramped to his car, plucked the phone out of the passenger seat. He had missed seven calls, most of them from Jay Rickles. It was Jay now.
He answered. “Yeah?”
“Where the hell have you been all morning?” Rickles sounded bent.
“I went for a walk. Needed to clear my head.”
“Is it clear now?”
“I guess.”
“Good, because you got a goddamn mess to figure out. In the next hour every news channel in this state is going to be running with the story that you pointed a gun at your toddler and threatened to shoot him if your wife ever left you. Do you know how that looks?”
r /> “Where’d you get that story?”
“Where do you think I got the story? I read the fucking transcript from your fucking court proceedings, two hours ago. I got to it before anyone else did so I could find out what I’m up against. You didn’t feel like mentioning any of this to me at any time?”
“Why would I mention something like that? Something humiliating like that?”
“Because it was going to come out anyway. Because you sat next to me on TV to tell the world what a big hero you were, taking out a shooter with a gun you had no right to possess.”
“Think how lucky it is I didn’t follow the injunction. Becki Kolbert was just getting started when I walked in.”
Rickles took a long, unsteady breath.
“I came back from Iraq with PTSD. I didn’t take antidepressants because I didn’t want to solve my problems with medication. I never pointed a loaded gun at my son, but I did do things I regret. Things I wish I could take back. If I hadn’t done them, my child would still be living with me.” A lot of it was true. He had pointed a gun at George once, to make a point to Holly, but it wasn’t loaded at the time. And for all he knew he might have PTSD. More came back from Iraq with it than not. He wasn’t lying when he said he’d never gotten on antidepressants. He’d never been offered any.
For a long time, Rickles didn’t reply. When he did, his voice was still husky with emotion, but Kellaway could hear he had calmed down. “And that’s what you’re going to tell the press today at the candle-lighting. You say it just like that.”
“You know it’s that reporter trying to stir shit,” Kellaway said. “The black one. Same one who tried to make your department look bad. People don’t believe the blacks can be racist, too, but they can. I could see the way she looked at me. I’m a white man with a gun, and to them we’re all Nazis. To the blacks. She looks at you the same way.”
Rickles laughed. “Isn’t that the truth. Doesn’t matter how many toys for tots I’ve handed out to little pickaninnies with food-stamp mamas and daddies in jail. Black people feel bad about all the things they don’t have, and they resent everyone who’s made out better. It’s never your hard work that got you where you are—it’s always the racist system.”