“Dammit, Jeff,” I muttered, threading between the Toyota and the shrubbery. “Don’t take your half in the middle.” The driveway was sixteen feet wide—more than enough for two vehicles to pass, with room to spare—but Jeff had parked the old Corolla we’d bought him smack in the center. If I detoured around him on the right, I’d make ruts in the lawn; hugging the left side of the driveway, as I was doing, meant raking the fingernails of the boxwoods down the side of the truck. The screeching set my teeth on edge and sent involuntary shivers up my spine.
My irritation gave way to relief, though, as the garage door ratcheted upward to reveal Kathleen’s Camry tucked in the near bay of the garage. I eased in alongside and hopped out, feeling gladder to be home than I could remember feeling in . . . when? Forever? As I trudged up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, I said a prayer of thanks.
Kathleen was at the sink, pouring pasta from a steaming pot into a colander. Jeff was at the stove, stirring sauce; to my surprise, Jenny Earhart was at the table, setting places for four. “Hello, hello,” I said, “Jenny, how nice to see you.”
The pot clattered into the sink as Kathleen whirled toward me. “Bill. Oh, thank God. Are you all right?” She wiped her hands on her apron, then wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands as she hurried to me and folded against my chest.
“Oh, honey, I’m fine,” I said, taking her in my arms. “Didn’t your watchdog tell you I was okay? He was supposed to.”
“He did,” she said, “but I didn’t believe him. The way he said it—‘Don’t you worry, ma’am, your husband is fine, just fine’—it sounded like the opposite of fine. Like you were alive, but paralyzed or something. He wouldn’t tell me anything else. I thought about turning on the news, but I was afraid to.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Still holding her in my arms, I stroked her head to soothe her. “I’m so sorry you worried. Things got bad—not for me, but for the police, at his house. Satterfield’s house.” I squeezed her tightly. “The good news is, he’s dead.”
She leaned back to look at me, her eyes wide. “The police shot him?”
I shook my head. “He killed himself.”
“Good.” Her quick vehemence surprised me.
“But he did some damage on his way out. He was holding a bomb or a hand grenade or something. He set it off when the SWAT team went in. Blew himself up.”
Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God! He killed the SWAT team?”
“No. No, not them. It was stranger than that. Bizarre. Like a nightmare.” I led her to the table and motioned for all of them to sit, partly so I could see them all while I told the story, but also so that I could sit down, too. I drew a breath and began to tell what I knew, or at any rate what I’d heard—possibly at third hand, possibly at thirteenth hand—about the blast, and the bomb squad, and the snake and the dog and the dog’s dead handler. About how Satterfield had reached up from the grave, or from hell itself, to take more innocent people down with him.
CHAPTER 45
Satterfield
SATTERFIELD REACHED UP TO scratch an itch on his head, and the dial of his watch swam past his face in a smear of luminescence. Beneath the cargo hatch, the space was low and pitch black, and it smelled faintly of death. Like a coffin, he thought. A family-sized coffin. On wheels. Should he put them in here, once he was finished with them? No. Leave them out—on display—for all the world to see. He raised his left hand, the luminous dial floating upward a few more inches in the blackness, until his fingers brushed the lid, eighteen inches above his face.
It had been easy—so easy, he thought—but then, he’d had a big advantage: He had known they’d be coming, but they hadn’t known he knew. Fools. They should have known better. They should have done better.
The pizza guy, on the other hand—no way that poor bastard could have known better. A quick, lethal snap of the neck, administered by someone who ordered pizza once or twice a week, and always tipped five bucks? No way to see that coming. Swapping clothes, slapping on the fake beard, stenciling the tats on the arms, tightening the trip wire on his way out the front door, tripping the timers on the lights and TV and the recording of the woman’s screams—all that had taken less than ten minutes. Practice makes perfect, he praised himself.
Driving away from the house in the kid’s piece-of-shit Escort, he’d checked the rearview mirror repeatedly, smiling every time he looked and found it empty. Half an hour after answering his front door and beckoning the unsuspecting pizza guy inside, Satterfield had parked the Escort near the stadium, jimmied the latch on Brockton’s cargo hatch, and clambered in, pulling the hatch closed above him.
Now—after three hours of patiently lying in wait in the pitch-black bed of Brockton’s truck—Satterfield was ready to emerge from the coffinlike blackness; ready to rise from the dead and rejoin the land of the living. Ready to take Brockton and his family out of it.