That afternoon Lieutenant Denise Nuñez led a squad of seven cars to Charles’ house. They’d picked me up in a Percocet daze from the ER, saying they wanted a friend of Charles to negotiate with him to come out. I wore bandages as thick as mittens on my hands.
A large police officer snapped the chain on the security gate with bolt cutters and we rolled up the driveway to within thirty or forty yards of the house. The window shades were down. Charles’ Dodge was parked on the spot in the driveway where he usually left it. Locusts hummed in the trees. A single cardinal flew across the driveway and landed in the branches of a cypress.
More police cars were parked a block away on streets facing houses whose backyards touched Charles’ property. Officers had rushed to the neighbors’ houses and explained that they would need to evacuate, then accompanied them to vans that took them to wait at a community center. Only then did Denise Nuñez speak into a megaphone telling Charles to come out.
No sound came from the house.
The shades remained down.
The front door remained shut.
For an hour and a half Nuñez spoke into the megaphone and made telephone calls into the house, all to the same silent response. An officer received word that Daniel Turner had lived through surgery and probably would survive, and happiness surged through the crowd. Then Nuñez ordered tear-gas canisters to be shot through the windows. Glass broke and gas filled the house and spiraled into the yard.
More silence.
Another forty minutes passed.
A tactical helicopter rattled the air overhead.
Nuñez told a group of four SWAT members to break down the front door. They approached the front steps behind handheld ballistic shields, one of them carrying a hydraulic battering ram. They stopped and spoke to each other. Nuñez talked to one of them on a radio. He climbed on to the porch and removed something from the front door and all four backed away.
It was a white envelope. Nuñez looked inside and brought it to me. ‘A gift for you apparently,’ she said. Inside the envelope was a photograph of me twenty years ago as I sat inside Worman’s Deli on the day that Charles introduced himself. He must have taken the picture as he’d entered, though I couldn’t imagine how without my seeing him do it. I looked young and sure of myself though I didn’t remember myself that way.
I gave the photograph back to Nuñez. I said, ‘I don’t want to look at it.’
The four SWAT officers crept toward the house again. They climbed the front porch steps, and the one with the battering ram positioned it so that its bolt would strike the door lock. They gave a silent count, the lead man triggered the ram and two of the others kicked the door off its hinges. The fourth covered them with an automatic rifle.
For a moment nothing happened. Then Charles’ calico cat leaped over the threshold, dashed down the front steps and darted across the driveway. The man with the automatic rifle spun and shot it dead.
The house was vacant. The furniture was gone. The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator were bare. The green SUV was missing from the garage. The counters and bathrooms smelled like bleach and industrial cleaners. The floors gleamed as if no chair had ever scraped across them. Our footsteps and voices echoed in the empty rooms and every echo told us that Charles was gone and never would return.
‘Damn,’ Nuñez said and turned to me. ‘Who was this guy?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Ask Daniel Turner when he wakes up.’
She shook her head. ‘If.’
An officer approached. ‘What about the car in the driveway?’
Nuñez looked at me.
‘I gave it to him eight years ago,’ I said. ‘He might’ve decided he no longer wanted it.’
‘Check it out,’ Nuñez said to the officer. ‘Carefully.’
The officer left and two evidence technicians approached. One of them said, ‘At first look there’s no trace of him. Not a drop of blood. Not a hair.’
Nuñez smiled grimly. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
The technicians went to make a second sweep. I gazed out the front window and discovered that Charles had left a second gift in the Dodge Charger. As the officer opened the door a fireball rolled from the hood across the front yard. It lit up the trees and sky. The explosion rocked the walls. The heat of it washed over my face and arms. A deep, slow silence followed the blast and then the screaming, crying and sirens started. When those sounds passed too the whole world rang in my inner ears and kept ringing.
A week of wetland searches turned up bloody rags but no Charles. The police issued a national and then an international alert and newspapers and magazines featured Charles’ tear-scarred face. How do you hide a face like that? The best lead had him holed up in the Hillside neighborhood of Laredo, Texas, but when the police raided the house they found a one-eyed Mexican immigrant with an old knife wound on his cheek in bed with his fifteen-year-old wife. The police arrested him out of pure spite on charges of statutory rape.
Charles was gone, as he’d said he would be, but without a body buried or incinerated I felt his presence always behind me and expected to hear his voice each time the phone rang. I put his broken front tooth in a dish on my desk at my Best Gas station in case he came looking for it. After the bandages came off, my right hand had three puncture scars and my left had two. Everyone in town knew how I got them. But when children or visitors asked, I said I burned myself with battery acid.
Daniel Turner improved to fair condition after two weeks in intensive care. I visited and we sat together quietly in his room because there was nothing we could say that would do any good, but Charles had wounded us both and we’d wounded each other before saving each other and so sitting together quietly seemed fine. After a month the hospital released him and we promised that we would get together for dinner though the idea turned my stomach and from the sound of his voice I knew it turned his too.
After I got back from Charles’ house late in the evening of the day that Thomas shot him and after the ringing dulled in my inner ears, Susan came to me in my bedroom. She’d bathed and put on a yellow cotton dress as if insisting furiously that Charles’ attempt to violate her and our family could do nothing to change who she was. I leaned against a pillow on my bed where Charles had stripped and bound her and she sat beside me and kissed me on the forehead as if I were a child. ‘I’ll be leaving you,’ she said.
‘I understand,’ I said, though that was a lie. ‘Are you going tonight?’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘In the morning.’
Then she stood and unfastened the dress hooks behind her neck, and her dress slid to the floor.