The boulevards were wide and open, but the farther west he went, the less imposing the houses became. Modest one-floor ranches drifted toward him out of the haze and slipped away again. The makes of other cars were almost unidentifiable in the filthy murk. Headlights bobbed up out of the soup and sailed past, attached to shadows. In the movies the man with a license to kill pressed a button and released a cloud of smoke from the back end of his Aston Martin to blind his pursuers and make an escape. Kellaway was stuck with a Prius instead of a British sports car, but his smoke cover was much more effective.
Frances’s silver BMW wagon was in the driveway, parked nose-in to the garage, so Kellaway could read the COEXIST sticker on the back end. He pulled in right behind it, blocking her, and got out. The wind sheared across the lawn, and his eyes stung in the billowing smoke. Kellaway held the Glock in one hand. He popped the hatchback of his Prius and threw aside the sleeping bag that covered the weapons he’d lifted from Jim Hirst’s garage. He considered the Bushmaster, the Webley, and the .45, then picked up the single-barrel Mossberg with the pistol grip. He loaded it with PDX1 rounds, squeezed five in the tube, one in the chamber. The matte finish on the gun barrel was a flawless black. It looked as if it had never been fired.
Kellaway cut across the front yard, headed for the door. Frances’s ranch was guacamole green, the walls all rough, spiky stucco. She had cacti for border plantings, which he thought fit her personality. The front door was flanked by tall, narrow sidelights with cheap white panel curtains.
As he approached, he saw one of the curtains twitch. He couldn’t tell who’d been watching him, Holly or Frances, but just as he reached the door, he heard the bolt turn. It was almost funny, the idea that she thought she could lock him out.
He lowered the Mossberg and pulled the trigger, and the shotgun went off with a thunderous slam and blew a hole through the lock and the wood surrounding it. He planted his boot in the center of the door and shoved, and it flew open, and he followed it in and almost stepped on George.
Along with a fist-size chunk of the door, the Mossberg had blown away the upper right half of George’s face and a large portion of his skull. A splinter the size of a kitchen knife had gone through his left eye. The boy opened and closed his mouth, gurgling strangely. Kellaway could see his brain, glistening pinkly. It seemed to pulse, to beat, not unlike a heart. George tried to say something but could make only wet, smacking sounds.
Kellaway looked down at him in perplexity. It was like an optical illusion, something that didn’t make sense to the eye.
Holly stood six feet away, holding a cell phone up to her cheek. She wore white slacks and a sleeveless green blouse, and her hair was turbaned in a towel. Like George, she was opening and closing her mouth without making any sound.
The shot seemed to go off again, and then again, only inside Kell away, in his head. He was screaming for a while before he realized it. He didn’t know when he dropped to one knee. He didn’t know when he set aside the Glock to put a hand gently on his son’s chest. Time just skipped forward, and he found himself bent over his child. Time skipped again, and Holly was kneeling by George’s head, cupping the red ruin of his skull in her hands. Blood squirted on her white pants. George had stopped trying to talk. Holly had put the phone down next to her knee, and someone on the other end was saying, “Hello? Miss? Hello?” A 911 operator, calling to them from another galaxy.
Kellaway took another deep breath and found he was done screaming. His throat was ragged and sore. He kept his hand on his son’s chest, had slipped it under his shirt to place a palm against his warm skin. He could feel George’s heart beating rapidly, a furious, frightened stammer in his chest. He could feel when it stopped.
Holly wept, tears plinking onto George’s face. George’s expression was stunned and blank.
“You told him to lock me out,” Kellaway said to her. It seemed incredible to him that his son had been alive and complete less than two minutes ago and now, abruptly, was dead, his face obliterated. It was too sudden to make sense.
“No,” Frances said.
Frances stood in the living room, on the other side of a pony wall. She held a vase in one hand. He assumed she had heroic notions of smashing it over his skull, but she seemed unable to move. All of them were stuck in place, shocked by the non sequitur of George dying in a single shot.
“He saw you coming before any of us. He saw you coming, and he was scared,” Frances said. She was quivering. “You had a gun.”
“I still do, you foolish cunt,” Kellaway said.
It turned out Frances’s fag of a husband, Elijah, was hiding in the bedroom. By the time Kellaway found him, the shotgun was empty. He had put three into Frances and two into Holly when she tried to run out the door. But there were still fourteen rounds in the Glock, and he needed only one before his work was done.
11:03 A.M.
He might’ve sat with George forever.
He went over it again and again in his head, what should’ve happened.
In his mind Kellaway crossed the front yard to the door and blew a hole through the lock and shoved the door in and George was there but fine, ducked down, hands over his head. Kellaway scooped him up in one arm and leveled the shotgun at Holly as he backed out the door. You had your turn with him. Now it’s mine.
Or try this: He crossed the yard to the front door and blew a hole through the lock and Frances’s stomach at the same time. She was the one standing on the other side of it, not George. Why would it be George? That didn’t make any sense. Why would George be afraid of him?
He imagined crossing the yard to the front door and George threw it open before he could get there and ran to him, yelling, Daddy!, arms open wide. That was how it was when George and Holly still lived with him. George yelled Daddy! whenever he got home from work, as if he hadn’t seen him for months instead of just hours, and always came running.
What brought Kellaway up and out of his thoughts was the sound of someone saying his name in the next room, in a low, distant voice. He wondered if Frances was not dead, although he didn’t see how she could still be alive. Her guts were all over the carpet. Two blasts from the shotgun had all but cut her in half, just above the waist.
He’d been holding George’s small hand—it was already cold, the extremities cooled off so quickly once circulation ceased—and now he folded it across the boy’s small, slight chest and stood. Frances was splayed on her back on the other side of the pony wall. Where her stomach belonged was a red-and-black slime of mutilated intestines. A third shot had ripped a hole in the left side of her neck. It looked like her throat had been partly torn out by an animal. He supposed in some ways this was exactly what had happened, and he was the animal.