I ran from my room to my car.
Except for the streetlights, the night was dark and empty. The windless air smelled of exhaust and oil. I saw no cops or unmarked police cars, but as I turned the key in the ignition, two men, shouldering black rifles, emerged from behind the ends of the motel. I hit the gas and sped out on to the highway. Two more armed men came from behind buildings on the other side of the road, one of them yelling into a radio.
I charged south, passing two pickup trucks and a delivery van. Two women in skin-tight yellow skirts stood on the highway shoulder, giving me big obscene smiles, and a hundred yards farther their pimp watched and waited.
Then the phone that Holt gave me rang.
I answered, ‘He’s at Lynn Pritchard’s house.’
Holt had no idea what I was talking about.
‘Rick Melsyn’s sister,’ I said. ‘Duane Bronson’s old girlfriend. The judge is—’
‘What are you—’
‘I called her,’ I said. ‘The judge answered.’
‘Where?’ Holt said.
A stoplight in front of me turned yellow and then red, and I punched the accelerator and hoped.
I gave Holt the name of the Ponte Vedra street where Lynn Pritchard lived and described the house.
‘I’ll call it in,’ she said. ‘We’re heading there too.’
‘He’ll kill her.’
Streetlights streaked the windshield like brilliant whips.
‘You’ve got to pull over,’ Holt said. ‘You’ve got to stop. If you walk in on the judge, what’ll you do? He’ll kill you too.’
I could’ve answered. I could’ve told her that the judge was mine. I could’ve told her that there would be no me if I stopped now, that the possibility of my existence rested on my going to Lynn Pritchard’s house. Instead, I hung up. And I shoved the gas to the floor.
Except for a single front porch light at the end of the block, the neighborhood around Lynn Pritchard’s house was dark. There were no streetlights, no landscape spotlights shining up at the fronds of the palm trees or the Spanish moss that hung from oak branches, no low pathway lights along the walks from the street to the front doors. The moon had set or hadn’t risen. If stars burned somewhere in the heavens, I couldn’t see them.
I slowed and turned on to Lynn Pritchard’s driveway. A bright light showed inside a second-story window. A warning and welcoming beacon. I stopped when my headlights shined on a gray SUV.
I got out. Sirens were coming from somewhere, cutting the night. Lynn Pritchard’s babies wailed inside the house. But the yard outside was silent.
I went to the front door – a slab of hardwood. I threw my weight against it.
Nothing.
I stepped to the edge of the porch by the concrete planters so I could build momentum. I ran at the door, hit it.
Nothing.
Then Lynn Pritchard screamed inside.
I went down to the walkway and stared at the house. The light in the second-floor room seemed to flicker as if a fire was burning. The babies cried. Over the roof of the house, the night hung black and heavy. The curtained first-floor windows faced me like blind eyes. I pulled out the pistol and shot at one of them. The bullet made a hollow sound, as if the glass sucked the metal into it. I went to the window, ran my hand over it. A dimple sank in where the bullet had gone through.
I ran back to the front porch. The concrete planters were full of soil and flowers.
I put my foot on one of them, tried to budge it.
Heavy.
I tried to lift it anyway.
Too heavy.
Lynn Pritchard screamed. The sirens came closer.
I tipped the planter so the soil and flowers tumbled out. I tried lifting it again.
Too heavy.
I lifted it anyway.
I stepped off the porch, cradling it. I stumbled in the dark toward the window that I’d shot. I heaved the planter. It fell short – sinking into the grass – then tipped hard against the bottom of the pane. A fracture rippled through the glass.
If I hit it with my shoulder, shards would rain over my face and body.
I kicked it.
The window exploded into the house. I ran through the empty frame into the living room. The room was blacker than the night outside and smelled like metal and salt – the jagged odor of blood.
Somewhere nearby, Lynn Pritchard’s babies cried. Outside, the sirens whined.
I moved through the dark toward the front hall. The babies were only a room away. I went up the stairs.
One light was on, in the room I’d seen from outside.
I stopped at the second-floor landing and tried to see into the dark at the ends of the hall. I saw only blackness – deep as the deepest hole.
Lynn Pritchard made a sound in the lighted room. A low sound. The sound of someone at the black bottom of the deepest hole.
I went in. I held the pistol in my sweating hands.
Lynn Pritchard was alone. The judge had tied her wrists and ankles to the bed. She stared at the ceiling and made that sound. She had wounds on her legs and hips. I pulled my eyes away and looked at her face – pale except for the wet red lipstick. Her tongue lolled against her lips.
The judge had taken the shade off a table lamp, converting the space into a kind of theatrical stage, as if he wanted to see everything, the way you see it in a burst of brightness before the world goes dark.
‘Lynn,’ I said.
She stared at the ceiling.
‘Where is he?’ I said.
She was lost in her pain and fear.
I said, ‘I’ll get—’
She turned her face toward me, sensing what I couldn’t see. In the moment between her turning and the butt of the judge’s pistol crashing against the back of my head, I knew that I was too slow – that I was already falling into a black tunnel even as my feet stood on the floor.
Then I saw a flash, as if the gun metal sparked against my skin.
I seemed to fly upward – my muscles jolting, my legs no longer mattering – and then I fell and kept falling.
I woke again – seconds or minutes later.
I lay on the floor next to the bed.
Crushed.
Fingers of blood caressed my neck and probed my ears.
I wondered if the judge had already shot me in the forehead.
I wondered if I was dead.
I touched my lips, my nose, my eyes. They felt like the lips, nose, and eyes of a dead man. I ran my fingers over my forehead. I found no hole.
Sounds came from the bed. Lynn Pritchard. The judge.
I tried to sit up to see. The edges of my vision collapsed, and blackness rained down on me.
I woke again to the sound of Lynn Pritchard. The sound of the judge.
The babies crying in a far-off room.
Sirens.
I felt my face. My forehead.
Then all went silent. Inches from me. Miles from me.
I pushed myself to my elbows. My vision narrowed – widened.
My ears flooded with sound. Babies. Sirens. The judge speaking softly, tenderly, incomprehensibly.
He straddled Lynn Pritchard. He wore pants but had removed his shirt. The graying hair on his chest was dabbed with blood. Blood wrapped a clownish mask around his lips.
He hung over her. His pistol lay on the mattress, touching her cheek, where she could have grabbed it if he hadn’t tied her hands.
The babies cried.
The sirens came.
I sat on the floor by the bed, watching.
The judge seemed blind to all but the scene he’d created, deaf to all but his own pleasure. Whatever he was telling her. Whatever he was telling himself. Whatever judgment came from the hole that was his mouth.
I watched for the longest time.
Then he reached for the gun.
And I reached to my belt for mine.
It was gone.
The judge pressed his gun barrel against Lynn Pritchard’s forehead.
I looked around the room for my pistol. It glinted in the light of the shadeless lamp – inches from me on the floor.
The judge was enjoying himself. He caressed the trigger as if he could give it a sexual thrill.
He spoke softly, tenderly, lovingly, his words creating worlds.
I drew the pistol into my hand.
I understood his words then. What he would do to Lynn Pritchard. In the minutes or hours before he shot her in the forehead. Or maybe – maybe – he would just shoot her now. He leaned and kissed her forehead. Gently. Like a loving father. Then he sat up and held his pistol barrel against the wet kiss stain he’d left on her skin.
I spoke to him. ‘Judge.’ The word felt like twisted wire in my throat.
He turned. Surprised to see me among the living. Irritated by the interruption.
So I shot him in the belly.
He whirled, as if I’d lashed him. He looked at his ribs – the blood streaking – and looked at me. Uncomprehending.
He raised his gun in an unsteady hand and aimed it at my face.
I shot him in the chest.
He looked down. Amazed at the new wound. His gun fell to the mattress, and he put a hand over the torn skin. If only he could stuff it back inside. He looked stricken and bewildered. And then he fell. Toward Lynn Pritchard – as though he would crush her in his own death – then sideways and down and down, over the side of the bed, on to the floor.
I pulled myself up and stood. More or less stood.
Lynn Pritchard stared at me.
‘It’s OK,’ I tried to say, and my words sounded as incomprehensible to my ears as the judge’s words. ‘It will be.’
As if to answer me, the judge made a sound of pain and righteous anger. He seemed to think he might live to win another battle.
Lights strobed through the window then. Police cars and vans came up the driveway, and the sirens drowned out the crying babies and my mumbling and the judge’s fury.
I set my pistol by the judge’s gun on the bed and untied Lynn Pritchard’s ropes. She drew her hands around her body as if she could pull them inside her and make herself disappear.
Downstairs, the cops hammered at the front door.
I untied one ankle and then the other.
‘It’ll be OK,’ I said, and I made myself look her in the eyes.
But she picked up my pistol, wrapped a finger over the trigger, and aimed at me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No,’ she agreed.
She turned and aimed the gun at the judge. He lay on the floor, his hand covering his chest wound. He stared back at her. Smiling stupidly.
She pulled the trigger. Once. Twice.
When the noise of the second gunshot rang in my ears, the judge no longer had a face – none that anyone would know.
Lynn Pritchard raised the gun, considered it, and put the barrel against her own temple.
‘No,’ I said, and I crawled over the bed to her. ‘No.’
She looked at me with anguish, with eyes that seemed to ask the same question I’d asked a thousand times when looking in a mirror. Why not?
‘No,’ I said.
I eased the gun from her hand. It seemed to weigh nothing now. It had become bird bone.
Boots pounded up the stairs. A dozen men and women, led by Bill Higby and Deborah Holt. Shouting incomprehensible words.
As they burst into the room, I wrapped Lynn Pritchard in a bed sheet. She stared at them as if they’d come too late and she and I were already dead.