David put the cigar into an ashtray and folded his hands on the tabletop. Something in his eyes shifted, and he was seeing her again, not just seeing through her. “You’ve been talking, Marta.” He made a tsking sound. “But no, that’s OK. You did what you had to do. I’ll do what I have to do.” She didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. “Besides, listen. I’ve learned some things this last year. I’ve been educating myself. And you want to know what I’ve figured out? Fear sells better than hope. In business and in politics. So yes, again, thanks but no thanks. No deal. Not now. Not ever. So. Where does that leave us?”
Typing. Marta, voice shaking, read the words. “Can you mount a political campaign while trying to explain how your wife died west of the Wall?”
There was a murmur, a shuffling, and then Marta felt the barrel of a gun against her temple. She pinched her eyes shut against the image of David’s calm face, his dark, empty eyes. Her mouth started to move, shaping the words of a prayer that she was hardly conscious of making.
“You think that touches me? Scares me?” she heard her husband say. “As far as all of the documentation shows, Marta traveled to London with our sons. If anything happens to her, it happens over there. An accident, or an incident of random street violence. There are a lot of different ways to make it look right. All of them would only help me if I ran for office.”
“The boys would never go along with that,” Marta blurted out.
“You have no idea what the boys would do for me,” David said.
She was saved from contemplating that by a sudden, ear-splitting crack, and a heavy thud to her left. A smell wafted up in the wake of this double boom: acrid, but also coolly ozone.
Marta, surreally aware that she still had a head, still had a brain, opened her eyes. She was left staring at not even the waterfall animation or the app icons but three ordinary panes of smoke-colored glass. A nickel-sized hole in the left pane marked the center of a spider’s web that expanded across the width of the display, but the trifold shape still somehow held. Marta froze, hands vibrating against each other, afraid to turn around.
“Violet?” June’s voice. “Honey, what on earth is this?”
Marta risked a look behind her.
Violet had her rifle trained on Andy, who was still seated in front of the laptop, hands up in the air. Edie also had a gun—a handgun, the one Violet had said she would try to bring along—and she was pointing it at Randall, who had his palms raised halfheartedly in front of his chest. Berto, Wes, and Ken were standing but unmoving, their wrists no longer bound by zip ties. Joe was slumped on the floor beside Marta.
“Big guy,” Violet said, not taking her eyes off Andy. “Get Joe’s gun.”
Berto did as he was told.
“Point it at June.”
He did that, too. He looked, in fact, like he wanted nothing so much as to pull the trigger.
“Andy,” Violet said, “I want you to take off your gun by the strap. Just the strap. Move slow. I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to.”
Andy snagged the strap in the web of flesh between his forefinger and thumb, lifted it, and wove his head out from the loop. The gun dangled at the end of it.
“Lay it on the ground. Slowly.”
Slowly, he did.
“OK, that one’s yours, Feingold.”
Looking almost embarrassed, Wes took it, drawing the strap over his own head and shoulder.
“Point it at Andy.”
Wes did.
“What are you doing?” June asked again. “Talk to me, Violet. Look at me.”
“Randall, your turn. Just like Andy did it. Move slow and put the gun on the floor.”
“Violet, for God’s sake. I’m your mother.”
Randall dropped the gun roughly to the carpet and kicked it out of reach, making Marta wince.
“That’s mine?” Ken asked, and Randall snickered.
“It is,” said Violet. “You’re going to point it at Randall. Randall knows you’re probably not as good a shot as I am, but he also knows you’re a lot more scared than I am, and that makes a sudden move very risky. Right, Randall?”
“Violet. Violet! Why won’t you talk to me? Why are you doing this to me? I don’t understand any of this.” There was real anguish in June’s voice, and Marta couldn’t help feeling a reluctant kinship with her. “I love you. Roz loves you. We’ve done everything we know to do for you. What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“OK. Now you, Marta,” Violet said.
She jumped in her seat a little.
“June’s gun. You take it.” Marta spotted it on the couch cushion by June’s hip. She darted forward quickly, grabbed it, and shouldered the strap, disturbed by the rifle’s cool, heavy weight against her chest.
“There’s a bedroom in the back corner that has one window. Go and make sure the door is unlocked.”
“Now?” Marta asked.
“Yes.”
The room was dark and close, the couches and chairs arranged around a scattering of pieces of electronic equipment and snarls of cords. June, Andy, and Randall were all closer to Marta than any of the others; she would have to squeeze between Andy and Joe’s dead body to get to the doorway to the back part of the house. She moved carefully, choosing her footing, and still she caught her toe on something and plunged forward, barely catching herself before she fell onto Joe’s body, and she couldn’t stop herself before expelling a disgusted sob. Why Joe? she wondered. He was the one who’d listened to her the day she asked to speak to June. Randall, she knew, probably wouldn’t have. It might have been odd for her to care about this man’s fate—this man who had done nothing but harass her from the safe side of a weapon, who might have shot her had Violet not intervened—but she did. The smell of his blood filled the air, warm and flat, and her eyes fixed on a grayish piece of tissue—bone or brain matter, something that had been inside him only moments before—snagged on a loop of the green carpet.
And then, beside that: a tick.
“Oh my God,” she said. “There’s a tick in here. On the floor.”
“Check the back room, like I said!” Violet barked.
“I don’t think we packed a single Stamp,” Randall said with false remorse. “That’s too bad.”
In a fog that she registered, from somewhere outside herself, as protective, as saving her from an all-out panic, she found the corner room. The door was cracked, and Marta pushed it open the rest of the way. The room was empty, save a scrim of dust on the hardwood floors. “It’s unlocked,” she called.
“Drag three chairs in there from the kitchen. Be quick.”
She made two trips, dragging the chairs by their back rungs and banging the hell out of the walls along the way. She deposited them all into the middle of the room and returned to the where the others still stood, with their raised hands and raised guns.
“I don’t know why we don’t just shoot them like you did the one guy and leave,” Berto said. “She killed my wife.”
“If you shoot her, I’ll shoot you,” Violet said. “You don’t touch her.”
“Violet—” June tried again.
“Shut up!” Violet yelled at her. Sorrowful, petulant—Marta remembered this tone of voice from her sons when they were teenagers, when their passions and furies hadn’t yet found subtler modes of expression.
June pressed her lips together. Her eyes were bright and damp.
“Big guy, you’re going to watch her while we take care of Andy and Randall. You aren’t to hurt her. Can I trust you?”
“Yeah,” Berto said dully.