Alone in the motel room, with the door locked and the shades pulled, I went right for the gun. I was going to confront Robert Saenz in a few days, so I needed to be ready. This was my first free moment without Olivia since buying the gun.
I’d watched a few how-to videos, although on the three-inch screen of my cell phone most of the details were too small to fully appreciate. Along with the lineup of prime time police dramas, this was the extent of my experience with guns. We’d never been gun people. Mention the NRA at a cocktail party, and Kathleen practically had to be restrained; it went without saying that there wasn’t a gun in our house.
Until that night at Zach Gaffaney’s trailer, the last time I’d touched a gun had been close to forty years ago, a one-time hunting excursion with my dad and a buddy of his, somewhere northwest of Chicago, and that had been a shotgun, of course. Dad had shown me how to hold it, how to sight along the barrel, but he’d been the one who fired. The rabbit had been bounding along, but then it stopped, ears alert, and a second later it was nothing more than a smear of blood and fur against the snow. Forty years later and the memory still made me sick.
But that rabbit had been innocent, and Robert Saenz was not.
My hands were shaking as I took the single bullet from my pocket. The Colt wasn’t a complicated piece of equipment, but I fumbled pulling back the latch and pushing the cylinder to the side, and my hands sweated as I inserted the bullet into the chamber and then popped the cylinder back into place. How did criminals do this? How were they so sure of their movements, their aim? I reversed the motions, tipping the bullet into my palm, then reloaded, unloaded.
I didn’t have a human silhouette as a target, but I picked a nail hole on the wall and dry fired, imagining Robert Saenz’s face as I’d seen it in his mug shot—the jowls, the bloodshot eyes looking at nothing. I moved closer, fired at what I figured would be his chest. It would be at close range. Robert Saenz would see me, would know who I was and what I was going to do. I could only fire six rounds with the Colt, but this wasn’t real yet, and in the silence of the motel room, I could take all the shots I wanted. Saenz wasn’t going to survive it. He didn’t deserve that chance.
When my arms began to ache, I wrapped the Colt in two shirts and tucked it into my suitcase, slipping the unloaded bullet back into my pocket. It couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees in our motel room, but I was sweating. At the sink, I splashed water on my face, refusing to meet my own eyes.
The digital alarm clocked read 8:17 p.m. in red block letters. Unless things went horribly wrong, Olivia wouldn’t be back for quite a while. It was maddening to be stuck in a motel room, waiting, while five states to the east Robert Saenz went calmly about his life.
Restless, I stepped outside into the parking lot of The Drift Inn. There was only one car in the lot, which probably belonged to the owner. “Betha Caldwell,” she’d introduced herself, with the sort of bone-crushing handshake that seemed appropriate in a Wild-West sort of way. A light was on in the office, and I could make out her silhouette in the ambient glow of a television screen. I imagined a laugh track unspooling, housewives who weren’t really housewives screaming at each other.
Close by, an engine accelerated and I startled, thinking of Olivia with Sam Ellis. But this truck was loaded down with rangy-looking teenagers, none of whom had been visible in Lyman during the day. I relaxed; they were just kids, doing the stuff kids did. Normal kids—not like Olivia, who had spent far too long not being a kid at all.
I hoped, fiercely, that she was having a good time with Sam Ellis, the best time in the world. Maybe this would be the start of something for her—not a relationship, necessarily, but a new phase of confidence. The Olivia Kaufman who had squealed with delight, not terror, on the Bonneville Salt Flats would do just fine in the world, would grow into a quirky, funny, intelligent woman, not held back by thousands of fears.
Robert Saenz’s death would set her free, too—I believed that with everything in me.
If nothing else, she would see that I was a father who took action, who loved his kids so much he would do anything for them. I owed this to her, and I owed it to Daniel. I owed it to Kathleen, even though she might never understand. I owed it to myself as a father, as the man who’d been there in the delivery room, watching their bodies pink with breath. I’d promised to protect them, although I hadn’t known this promise might mean to the death.
But if a promise had contingencies—if it had caveats and stipulations, if it was only applicable under a certain set of circumstances, like a complicated math problem where the variable applied if and only if—then what good was the promise? What good was it to only do the easy things, the tasks that required no effort at all? Love wasn’t easy; it was, to paraphrase a Bible verse Kathleen’s mother had cross-stitched and framed for us, tenacious and assertive and protective, and it never failed.
I wasn’t going to fail them again.