Sanjay also thought of truth serum, movie scenes involving interrogation, but that didn’t compute, either, because he didn’t have any valuable information to withhold from anyone.
He had asked them what they wanted, what they were doing, what this was all about, but they had ignored his questions even though he answered theirs. Maybe they intuited that his answers were not truthful, which was why they responded to his inquiries only with silence. He’d told them that Tanuja was on a date with her boyfriend and that he didn’t know when they would return. He hoped that his sister, who didn’t currently have a boyfriend, who had been outside somewhere, standing in the rain, engaged in one of her eccentric quests for authentic details to enhance her writing, had seen these men coming, realized their malicious intent, and gone for help.
Because conducting an agitated one-sided conversation would only make him seem desperate and likely to make a break for freedom, Sanjay matched their silence with silence and slumped in the chair, as if sliding into hopelessness, just a skinny Indian boy with a pair of golis no bigger than chickpeas, if he had any golis at all between his legs. The more certain they were that he’d submitted to them, the more likely he might surprise them and escape.
The man wearing gloves opened the metal box, from which wafted a pale odorless mist, as if perhaps the contents rested on a bed of dry ice that began to evaporate when exposed to the air.
The guns and syringe were frightening, but the shared attitude of the three intruders was even more intimidating: the sense of authority with which they invaded the house and forcibly escorted Sanjay to the kitchen and pressed him into this chair and pushed aside the bowl of roses, slopping water on the quartz; the arrogant silence with which they responded to his protests and questions; their faces without expression; their stares direct and pitiless, as though they regarded him as belonging to a different—and inferior—species from them. Linc Crossley was not himself, lacking his usual humor, and there was something machinelike about all of them.
The metal box appeared to contain numerous sleeves of silvery insulation, each perhaps an inch in diameter and seven inches long. As the gloved man removed three of these and put them on the table, his frown brought his caterpillar eyebrows together as if in an act of bristling conjugation.
Crossley put his pistol on the counter by the refrigerator and from a jacket pocket produced a length of rubber tubing of the kind that phlebotomists used as a tourniquet to make it easier to find the vein of a patient from whom blood was to be drawn.
The unhurried movements of the mute and solemn men, like mimes engaged not in entertainment but in the conveyance of some truth with a terrible consequence…Razor-keen light gleaming off the edges of the stainless-steel box as it was pressed shut…A few last feathery emissions from the smoking ice, as ephemeral as the secrets of the deceased issuing from the death-throttled throats of spirits…Moment by moment, the scene became more dreamlike yet hyperreal in its detail.
The gun on the counter seemed to be an opportunity. If Sanjay chose the right moment when the men were distracted, twisted his chair to the left, reared back from the table, bolted up, moved fast, he surely could reach the pistol before the deputy seized it, though it was important to remember that Linc had police training.
Crossley also produced a foil packet that might have contained an alcohol-saturated pad to sterilize the skin before pricking it with a needle.
Sanjay’s attention was drawn again to the three silvery tubes. Caterpillar Man peeled open the Velcro closure on one, and into his hand slid a glass ampule containing a cloudy amber fluid.
The fragile thread of delight woven through Sanjay’s dread had withered away. In the past few minutes, he had experienced enough threat and violence to inspire his writing for the rest of his career, assuming that he lived long enough to have one.
As Caterpillar Man pierced the membrane of the ampule with the needle and drew the amber fluid into the barrel of the syringe, the man standing near the mudroom holstered his gun and approached, perhaps to restrain Sanjay should that be necessary. He yawned as though he must be so experienced in this work that it bored him.
For an instant, it seemed as if a thick jet of glistering gastric acid erupted from his mouth. But recognizing the smell, Sanjay turned his head to follow the stream of hornet-killing insecticide to its origin.
Only five feet four, a hundred pounds, wet, and no doubt cold, Tanuja seemed to be a towering menace when she entered from the downstairs hall, her pretty face contorted by wrath, as if she were a terrible manifestation of Kali, goddess of death and destruction, minus two of Kali’s four limbs, a can of Spectracide held at arm’s length. The highly pressurized container did not provide a spray, but instead produced a thick stream that projected up to twenty feet from the nozzle.
Ironically, it was Linc Crossley who had once mentioned that wasp spray and bear repellent were effective home-defense weapons.
The first man, gagging on the insecticide and unable to get his breath because of the volatile fumes, stumbled toward the kitchen sink perhaps to rinse out his mouth, which would make things worse.
Lithe as a dancer, Tanuja pivoted toward Lincoln Crossley, who reached for the pistol on the counter, and she triggered the can again. At a distance of only eight feet, the stream splattered forcefully into his eyes and nose, rendering him temporarily blind and in even greater respiratory distress than her first target.
As the man in white gloves cursed and dropped the ampule with the hypodermic, Sanjay slid out of his chair and under the table and onto his hands and knees, to get out of the line of fire.
Now all three of the men were wheezing, coughing, issuing wordless cries of misery, colliding with furniture and one another.
Pushing between steel-legged chairs, crawling out from under the table, Sanjay heard his sister call his name. He saw her at the door between the kitchen and garage, which was when gunfire erupted. The glass window in the microwave shattered. A round ricocheted off the refrigerator. An upper cabinet door pocked and cracked, and the dishes within exploded in a rattle-jangle of shrapnel.
If not blinded, with tears and insecticide flooding down his face, Linc Crossley must have seen a world blurred beyond all recognition. He drew breath in raw gasps, exhaling explosively as each inhalation contained more suffocating flatus than air, swaying in place as if his legs were rubberizing. Yet he held fast to the pistol, firing at phantoms evoked by his stinging, bloodshot eyes.
Crawling frantically, Sanjay stayed wide of the gloved intruder, who was lying on his right side, bearded with vomit. Hands clutching his stomach, the man now foamed at the mouth as though rabid.
The guy who had been by the mudroom door, having taken a few ounces of the hornet-killing concoction straight in the mouth and having reflexively swallowed it, sprawled on his back, clawing his throat with such urgency that his fingernails scratched bloody furrows in his flesh, perhaps desperate for air, perhaps poisoned and dying. Beside him lay a smartphone, which must have slipped out of a jacket pocket when he fell.
Although frantic to escape the kitchen and the blind man’s Hail Mary gunfire, Sanjay had the presence of mind to confiscate the phone on his way to the open door through which Tanuja had vanished.
After dogging it into the laundry room, where his sister had put down the Spectracide and waited at the entrance to the garage, Sanjay clambered to his feet. In his terror, he heard himself praise her with a Hindi expression of their dad’s—“Shabash!”—which meant “Well done!” Switching on the phone as he followed Tanuja into the garage, he said, “I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“Screw that,” she said. “We’re outta here.”
7