Grunting, the man staggered forward. There was a ragged patch torn through the shoulder of his shirt and the spreading stain of blood.
Hannah lowered Randall to the floor and angled in front of him. Beside the bed, Misty groaned and hammered the floor with her fist.
Hannah watched the man inch closer, a grim smile playing on his face. His eyes were dark and they seemed dazed as if he had been staring too long into a bonfire.
“This is a nice place you have, Hannah. Big yard, lots of trees. Very private.”
“I’m so pleased you like it, Hal.”
“The kid’s lucky, growing up like this. Plus, he doesn’t have a father, which might be a good thing too.”
Randall took hold of her hand and moved to her side, facing the man.
“So what do you want to do,” Hannah said, “sit down and trade recipes?”
The man looked perplexed. His face was running with sweat. He stood between her and the bed where the pistol was propped against the pillow.
“A happy childhood is important,” he said. “Not everyone is so lucky. Some kids grow up around dead people. They see naked bodies every day lying on metal tables. Naked women and children and they have to wash and disinfect their dead skin. That’s not a good childhood. Not like this place, with the trees and the grass and the birds.”
Hannah watched him glance around Randall’s room, taking it all in, the desk, the smashed monitor, Spunky in his cage. His smile tinged by a hazy sadness as if perhaps this room was what he’d been yearning for all these years.
“That’s your story, is it?”
“My story?”
“What you tell yourself to justify what you do, all the killing.”
“It’s not a story. It’s the truth.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure, it is. You were traumatized, unloved, molested, whatever it was, it rewired your brain. So none of it’s your fault. You’re just another victim. The great moral escape clause.”
He stared at her, face sheened with sweat. His eyes were vague, drifting in and out of focus.
“I had to wash the dead bodies.”
“Big deal,” Hannah said. “I’m not impressed.”
“He cut off their nipples, saved their pubic hair. Made me smell it. Made me do things to their bodies.”
“Lots of kids had it worse,” she said. “And they turned out fine.”
Hal stared blankly at her for several moments, then shook his head as if to clear it.
“I know a boy,” she said, “who saw his own father shoot down his grandparents.” Hannah kept her eyes on Hal, but she could feel Randall stiffen at her side. “Six years old and he witnessed his father murder two people that he loved dearly.”
She looked down. Randall was staring up at her. His face was crimped with grief but Hannah couldn’t stop. Drawing out the last trickle of poison.
“And this boy kept the secret to himself because he didn’t want his father to go to prison. He kept silent even though it hurt him terribly to do it. And even after all that suffering and pain, the boy turned out fine. He’s a wonderful child, a good son, an honest, brave boy.”
Randall held her gaze, something loosening in his eyes, a softening of the tension in his brow. Relief, gratitude, the faint beginnings of a new resolve. And any lingering doubt Hannah had about what happened that morning five years ago vanished as she looked into her son’s sharp green eyes.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Randall said.
She patted him on the back.
“You did fine, Randall. Just fine.”
“Hey,” Hal said. “Cut it out, you two.”
Hannah turned back to Hal and watched his eyes roam the air around him as though he were tracking a swarm of invisible bees. Then he raised his hand and wiped the sweat from his eyes, gave her another wounded and befuddled look, then trudged across the room to stand over Misty.
The wounded girl peered up at him, groaning.
“An ambulance, Hal. I’m hurt bad. I’m bleeding to death. Please, Hal. Help me.”
“Give me the eye,” he said. “Give it back.”
“Christ, Hal. Help me.”
Hal squatted down beside her. He wedged a hand into the pocket of her overalls and came out with a glass marble. He looked at it briefly, then put it in his own pants pocket.
He rose and turned to Hannah.
“Now where’s the money?”
“There isn’t any,” she said. “It’s all been a hoax.”
“A hoax? What’s that?”
“A trick,” she said. “A sting. None of it was real. Fielding is dead. He died last August. The money’s gone. It was all an FBI operation.”
Misty moaned.
“Then where are they? Why aren’t they here, the G-men?”
He took a step toward her, his right hand rising.
“You’re lying,” he said. “You’re making up a story.”
“It’s the truth,” Hannah said. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Hannah was watching his right hand, hovering like a sightless snake sensing the air. She nudged Randall away from her, separating. Taking a half step to the right toward the open floor. Hal outweighed her by at least fifty pounds. He had the wide-shouldered rawboned look of a farm boy who dug postholes all day. Work muscles. She needed a serious weapon for any kind of chance, but the pistol was across the room. Maybe Erin Barkley could fight her way past Hal to get to it, but Hannah couldn’t.
She took another half step to the right.
“I’m going to crush your heart,” Hal said. “You first, then the kid, then the girl on the floor.”
Hal held his right hand before him like a blind man feeling his way.
“Leave her alone!”
Before Hannah could react, Randall charged the man, fists tight, arms windmilling.
Hal took two steps forward and snatched Randall by the collar, lifted him off the floor, and shook him hard while Randall pummeled Hal’s arm.
Hannah spun around to Randall’s desk, searching frantically for a weapon. Her gaze lit on the largest, heaviest object she saw, the metal birdcage, Spunky’s home, and she gripped it by the sides, and spun back around, and while Hal was distracted by Randall’s feeble blows, she lifted the cage above her head, took two quick steps, and slammed it against Hal’s skull.
He went rigid, dropped his grip on Randall’s collar, and the boy lost his balance and tumbled backward to the floor.
Again, Hannah hammered the bottom of the cage against the crown of his head. The floor of the cage was nothing but a plywood insert, a circle of thin wood. Not enough weight to knock him unconscious, but when she slammed Hal a third time the plywood shattered and the cage snugged down neatly over his head.
Hal threw up his hands and tried to wrench the birdcage off. But his head was trapped inside the helmet of bars, shredded strips of newspaper fluttering in his face as Spunky scrambled for cover. Hal strained against the edges of the cage, pushing upward to lift it off, but he couldn’t budge it. The splintered wood was caught against his throat, gouging his flesh with each tug.
Lying on his back, Randall began to kick at Hal’s legs. Fierce swipes with his heels at Hal’s shinbones and knees.
As Hal took a step toward Hannah, one of Randall’s kicks caught Hal’s right kneecap and it crumpled him.
Hal staggered to his right, then caught himself, and swung around, lashed out and seized the boy’s left ankle. Then he reeled back to Hannah. Dragging Randall with him, he took a lumbering step toward her. His right hand outstretched, coming at her like a man in a deep-sea diving bell moving dreamily across the ocean floor.
The rat was climbing Hal’s right cheek, seeking higher ground. Hal shook his head but Spunky held on, tightening his grip on Hal’s flesh.
Hannah dodged to her right and Hal stumbled, trying to follow her movements through the confusion of narrow gold bars and shredded paper, and Spunky’s panicked scrabbling. With each step, Hal towed Randall behind him, the boy clawing at the floor, trying to pull himself free.
There was no calculation in Hannah’s lunge. Simple instinct, blind and furious. She growled and threw herself at him, going for his wounded shoulder, the bloody tear in his shirt. Clubbing it with her fist, then clubbing it again.
Deadly silent, Hal floundered backward. Somehow he managed to keep his grip on Randall’s ankle, bumping the boy’s head across the hardwood floor.
Hannah went for the wound again. Gouging it now with both hands, digging her thumbs into the damp opening, levering them deep into tissue and gristle. Hal was utterly silent, his face vacant, not even a grunt as he tried to brush her away. But she held on, prying the wound wider, tearing open the flesh.
Then his hand was at her throat. The piercing slash of his thumbnail against her flesh. She tried to wrench away, but Hal held on, stumbling forward, dragging Randall with him. She dug her own thumbs deeper into Hal’s bullet wound, deeper through the sinews and sticky webbing of his musculature.
But it was no good. The pain didn’t faze him, while Hannah felt herself beginning to drift, felt the numbness seeping into her throat as if she’d gargled Novocain. The blade of his thumbnail had broken her skin, and Hannah could no longer breathe, she felt very very tired. Old and used and worn out. A thick mist rose inside her, spreading through her limbs. She let go of his shoulder and felt herself sinking.
“Mother! Mother!”
At Randall’s voice, her eyes drew open. But Hal’s thumb dug deeper into her throat, and yellow light flared inside her skull.
Hal brought his face close, peering through the thin gold bars. He gave her a narrow smile, then abruptly he recoiled, his face twisting. He let go of her and began to slap madly at the cage.
Gasping, rubbing her throat, Hannah stepped back and stared through the gold bars. Spunky had sunk his claws into Hal’s nose and from that perch the big black lab rat was munching on Hal’s right eyelid.
Hal roared and danced backward, shaking his head and clawing at the bars of his helmet.
Then a blast shook the room and Hal Bonner’s chest bucked forward as if he’d been slammed by a baseball bat between the shoulder blades, and he stumbled to the right, let go of a long moan, and toppled facedown onto Randall’s narrow bed.
Frank Sheffield was crouched in the doorway. He panned his pistol back and forth, then slowly lowered it.
“Are you okay, Hannah? You all right?”
She nodded, then bent down and swept Randall up into her arms, lifting him into an embrace. Her vision was going muddy. With his arms slung around her neck, Randall held on tight as she turned to Frank.
“Good lord, Hannah, why didn’t you call me? What the hell were you thinking, staging something like this? You both could’ve been killed.”
She pressed her lips into Randall’s damp tangle of hair. She kissed him and kissed him again, then lifted her eyes to Frank Sheffield. She was still flushed with rage. But even then, even with that jittery heart, she could feel a faint smile rising to her lips as she looked at Sheffield. This FBI guy who so obviously should’ve chosen some other career path. This guy holding his gun with both hands, the pistol lowered, pointing at the floor, but his arms still tensed.
“Is this the guy you’ve been looking for, Frank?” Getting some quiet irony in her voice, starting to come down a little from the wired pulse, the ragged breathing.
He walked across the room toward her, giving Hal a quick look.
“Yeah, I feel fairly certain that’s our boy. But who’s that? Who’s the girl?”
“That’s Fielding’s daughter,” Hannah said. “She and Hal had struck up some kind of friendship.”
Hannah watched as Spunky squirmed his body between two bent bars of his cage, then scooted across the floor to the corner of the room. There he stood for a moment, surveying the scene, then he lifted a paw to his mouth, licked it, and began to clean his soiled cheeks.
Randall clung to her, melting against her body. Frank reached out and touched the back of his fingers lightly against Hannah’s cheek. He shook his head solemnly.
“Christ, you’re not Erin Barkley,” he said. “This could’ve gone the other way. Gotten real messy.”
“But it didn’t, Frank. It went this way.”
“Man, you’re something else. You’re really something else.”
She blinked her eyes clear. Smiling at him, feeling a tingle on her cheek where he’d grazed it with his fingers. Something inside her relaxing for the first time in years.
“Yeah, you’re something else too, Frank. I’m just not sure yet what that something is.”