BERNIE ROUNDED THE END OF THE POOL, which blazed with reflected sunshine. The bobbling lounge chairs looked as if they were being smelted down so that their aluminum could be recycled.
In spite of the fact that the monkey-quick maniac was smaller than his victim, he had dragged Holden Hammersmith down. He now straddled his prey’s chest like the conjured demon out of that fearsome painting The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, which had haunted Miriam after they had seen it in a museum. Hammersmith couldn’t seem to throw the guy off. The attacker endured the bigger man’s blows as if he no longer had the capacity to feel pain, and he struck blows of his own. Like a vulture pecking at carrion, he darted his head between the flying fists to bite Holden’s face.
The boy, Sammy, hovered close, shouting, in great distress, but he’d suffered bites on a hand and forearm, and he was too terrified to throw himself on the assailant and try to drag him off.
Bernie realized at once that this wasn’t a cease-and-desist stop-or-I’ll-shoot situation, like he hoped it might be. Whether the crazed man might be one of the misfortunates who had been injected with a nanomachine brain implant or was something else altogether, he was for sure a meshugener—insane, obsessed, bizarre. He wasn’t going to respond to either reason or threat.
Back in the day when Bernie pretended to be a hard-boiled hard-ass to prevent the mob pigs from taking a slice of his business, he had never needed to shoot anyone, baruch ha-Shem. He didn’t want to shoot anyone now. But he couldn’t stand by and watch Hammersmith be murdered.
When Sammy dared to grab at the would-be killer, Bernie said, “No, stay back,” and he quickly acted in the boy’s stead. He could not hope to inflict just an arm or leg wound, because he was likely to shoot the struggling victim as well as the attacker. With his left hand, he seized a fistful of the crazed person’s thick dark hair. Twisted. Pulled hard. Forced the madman’s head up, back, away from Hammersmith. “Enough already, enough.” Entreaty proved useless. The demon glared, its twisted mouth wet with blood, its blue eyes as empty of humanity as the eyes of those who long ago operated gas chambers in which millions died and furnaces in which others were burned alive. The thing snapped at him, teeth like chisels. Bernie jammed the muzzle of the Springfield TRP-Pro against the side of its head—“Sholem aleichem, peace unto you”—and with horror but without remorse, he squeezed the trigger. The hollow-point .45 round went clear through the head and struck the thick bole of a palm tree, from which it tore a chunk the size of a fist.
3
HAVING DESCENDED to about a hundred feet, the helicopter approached for a second look. Both front seats were occupied behind the cockpit glass.
“Walk with me, Luther. We’re checking the place out, doing our job, just two Bureau grunts.”
“We’re not dressed FBI, especially me.”
As they hurried toward the house, Jane said, “Yeah, but they know this shit going down today isn’t a legit Bureau operation. It’s an occasion to dress street.”
Inside the house, the truck still screamed like some behemoth floundering in quicksand and raging at its inevitable descent.
As the helo passed over, its fleet shadow shading them for an instant, the back porch collapsed. Sheets of metal roofing sprang loose and were caught in the chopper’s downblast, twanging as they flexed like the great wings of a flock borne out of a dream about bodiless robot birds.
Still the truck engine raced.
Arriving at the front of the house, as the helo arced back to follow them, Jane and Luther surveyed the scene as if they were first responders. She drew her pistol so this might look real. Luther did the same. Together they stepped tentatively into the ruins of the porch, which was still overhung by a damaged roof.
When the front wheels had broken through the living room floorboards, the joists blocked the axle, at least temporarily stopping the truck from diving into the basement. But the vehicle had tipped forward, and the rear wheels, which remained this side of the breech in the wall, had lifted off the rubble; they spun without effect.
Luther raised his voice over the engine roar and the clatter of the hovering Airbus. “What if they put down?”
“They’re not backup,” Jane said. “Just chopper jockeys, search and surveillance.”
They had flown over the house twice, so they must have seen something of the truck through the hole where part of the main roof had fallen in on it. However, because a couple of strategic posts still supported the torn and sagging front-porch roof, the men in the helo were not at an angle to be able to see the rear wheels spinning uselessly. The noise made by the Airbus would, for those aboard it, mask the noise of the truck, and they might also be wearing headphones. If Jane and Luther acted as though whatever crazy thing had happened here was over except for the cleanup, the helo boys would have every reason to believe it.
“Better get out there,” Luther said, “before they decide to call backup for us.”
“Let them see you put away the gun.”
Jane kicked through the ruins and back to the pea-gravel lawn. She holstered her pistol and gave the Airbus guys two thumbs up.
Luther thumbed them, too, and waved them off.
The chopper hovered for a moment, but then it turned in place and faced north and buzzed away.
They watched it until it was no bigger than a fat housefly. Then they sprinted for the Suburban.
4
WITH ONE HAND, the father held his bitten chin together. That was the worst of it. Lesser bites in his left trapezius muscle, left cheek, left brow at the arc of the eye socket, right thumb, right forearm. None of the wounds was mortal. Only the reconstruction of the chin might leave him disfigured. But the pain must have been severe.
Holden was beefy, self-confident, unaccustomed to being afraid, but he was scared now, and angry. On his feet, swaying, he muttered curses at his attacker, even though the man lay dead on the pool deck, his bullet-deformed head half empty.
The son kept trying to call 911 with an iPhone. “They don’t answer.” He was shaken, shaking, frightened by the very fact that his father was afraid. “There’s nobody there. We need an ambulance. Why isn’t anyone there?”
Bernie took the phone from the teenager and wiped the blood-spotted screen on his shirt and entered the three digits. Two rings. An automatic pickup was followed not by a 911 operator’s voice or any version of please hold, but by an electronic twitter and a series of clicks. And then silence.
“Is there someone who can drive you?” Bernie asked the boy.
“My mom.”
The mother was already running toward them from the office.
To the father, Bernie said, “Hold the chin, apply pressure, but with an ice pack if you have one. You want to minimize the bleeding and the swelling. You understand?”
“Yes.”
The boy shouted at his mother to bring the car. “The hospital! We gotta get Dad to the hospital!”
Bernie realized that he didn’t have the burner phone on which Jane would call him. He’d left it in the motor home. He turned away from the Hammersmiths and shoved the pistol under his waistband and concealed it with his Hawaiian shirt and hurried along the pool decking.