I stared at the batteries for a long time, letting them roll back and forth in my palm. Five of them. My first thought was of Zach Gaffaney and our quick exchange in the dark outside his trailer. But I’d seen the bullets—I’d looked in the cylinder, unloaded them, taped them beneath the seat myself. So there were only a few possibilities—the Ellis brothers, Sam, Olivia or even Kathleen.
If it had been Olivia...
Would she have thought one was meant for her, or Kathleen, or me? It was hard to argue, having driven cross-country with the sole purpose of killing Robert Saenz, that I wasn’t a danger to society. But I never meant to be a danger to my daughter; I couldn’t even conceive of the idea. Whoever had switched out the bullets had believed I was capable of something, had seen something in me that I could barely see in myself until now—until this moment.
There was no time to execute a Plan B, even if I had an alternative. Maybe I could have called Zach Gaffaney, although I’d promised to lose his number, to ask what he knew about gun laws in Ohio, about the best places to buy ammunition. I’d figured on having a loaded gun, on taking all the shots I needed.
And then I remembered.
I fished into the pocket of my pants. I’d been carrying one bullet with me since our breakdown outside Lyman; that just-in-case for a case I couldn’t imagine at the time.
One bullet, one shot—like Russian roulette.
But that should be all I needed. If I couldn’t kill Robert Saenz with one bullet, then I wasn’t worth anything.
The first light was breaking by the time I was back in Oberlin. I slowed to a crawl down Main Street. The streets were still quiet, but a diner was open; inside, a few patrons sipped coffee and read newspapers. An empty plastic bag blew past the spot where Daniel had died. I nearly jumped when a station wagon pulled out of the gas station. For a frightening moment, it looked like Kathleen behind the wheel. But that was just the sleeplessness at work—coupled with the understanding that I was about to become a cold-blooded murderer—because it was a newer model Volvo with an Ohio plate, and Kathleen was hundreds of miles away, unaware of what I was going to do.
I turned again onto Morgan Street, every sense alert. Down the street, one of Jerry Saenz’s neighbors walked from his front door to a spot halfway down the lawn. He glanced up as I passed, and in the rearview mirror I saw him bend to retrieve the paper. What constituted big news in Oberlin—an athletic championship for a local high school? A ribbon cutting at a new drugstore? A visiting lecturer? I could imagine the headline tomorrow, in a giant font: Murder in Oberlin. Maybe a subheading: Man Exacts Revenge on Son’s Killer. But it might not be that at all. It might be California Man, in Wake of Mental Breakdown, Kills Oberlin Resident.
It didn’t matter. Or it did—but only to me.
There was no sign of life at Jerry Saenz’s house. A glance revealed that the upstairs apartment was dark, the curtains still pulled. The sun was rising a clear and brilliant yellow on the horizon, but it was possible no one was awake inside the house yet.
I parked down the street, watching 1804 Morgan in my rearview mirror. I was definitely too far away to take a shot—to risk my single bullet—but even if I’d been a trained sniper, that wasn’t my plan.
I needed Robert Saenz to know exactly what had hit him and who had fired the shot. I suddenly remembered a slogan from a long-ago history class, maybe as far back as junior high school: Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. That was from the Revolutionary War, probably, but it applied here, too. I wanted Robert Saenz to see the whites of my eyes. When he had killed Daniel, it had been random—I knew that. It might have been any person walking down the street, but it just happened to be Daniel, my son, who was in that place at that exact time. When I killed Saenz, it was going to be deliberate in every way, and I wanted him to know it, to feel the difference.
I started as the front door opened, and a man came out, wearing jeans and a bulky winter coat. He had a baseball cap pulled low, the brim shielding his face. Curly dark hair stuck out like wings on either side of his head. I remembered Robert Saenz’s disheveled hair from his mug shot—curly on the sides, the top flattened. Hat hair.
My first instinct was to shrink lower in the seat, hiding from view—but this was pointless, because if he was far enough away that I couldn’t make out his facial features, then I was far enough away that he couldn’t make out mine. I reached for the Colt, held it without knowing exactly what I would do.
The man—Robert? Jerry?—crossed the sidewalk to the driveway and unlocked the door to the truck. He stepped up, started the ignition. I squinted hard, trying to decide who it was. The truck, leaking gray puffs of exhaust, reversed in the driveway and backed onto Morgan. While I pretended to be reaching for something on the passenger seat, it passed me.
I straightened, watched as the Saenz & Co. truck slowed at the end of the street, turned left and accelerated, heading out of town. He was getting away.
I tucked the Colt into the console and followed.