He thought about it for a minute, two minutes. Shit. He put his hand in the pocket, gripped the pistol, took it out once to make sure he wouldn't snag the pocket, put it back in, and walked up to the porch.
MARTHA WEST HAD just crawled into bed when she heard the knock at the door. She thought the knock was Letty, upstairs, until it came a second time. She looked at a clock. Almost midnight. Who was it, at this time of night?-and a sudden chill went through her shoulders and she thought: Deon Cash and Jane Warr. Just at midnight. The knock came a third time, and she picked up a ratty old terrycloth robe and threw it on, and walked through the darkened front room to the front door.
The porch light was burned out, so she turned on the interior light and looked out through the glass cut-out on the front door. The first thing she saw was the embroidered star on the parka, and then Loren Singleton's face. No ghosts, anyway. Had something happened?
Puzzled, she opened the door. "Hi… "
"Martha, sorry to bother you," Singleton said. "I know it's late, but Loretta Grupe called in and said she was worried about Reese-he'd been drinking some and she was worried about whether he got home. I happened to see his truck out here."
"He, uh, was drinking, and, uh, well-Letty drove him home, and he told her to go ahead and bring the truck up here, so she'd have a ride. You know how she is." Singleton kept looking past her, looking for something else. She didn't care for him, and pushed the door closed an inch or so, ready to go back to bed. "Anything else?"
"Okay. So he's home. And Letty's home, everything's all right."
"Yeah, she's asleep, everything's okay." She smiled, not her best smile. "Okay?"
NO POINT IN messing around. Singleton put his left arm out and straight-armed the door, and it flew open, bouncing Martha West straight back. She was startled, just beginning to get scared, and he pulled the pistol out of his pocket and pointed it at her eyes and said, "Tell Letty to come down here. She's under arrest."
Martha hesitated just a second, looking down the barrel of the gun, and knew in her heart that Letty wasn't under arrest, that something terrible was happening here and she thought she knew what. She mimed a turn, as if to shout up the stairs, and then instead, she threw herself at Singleton, avoiding the gun barrel, grabbing his arm, going right straight into his body, screaming and spitting at him, clawing at him; the sleeve of his coat jerked up and she got some skin, saw some blood. He fought back and she realized that she was going to lose him, and she screamed, "LETTY RUN LETTY RUN LETTY RUN… " and Singleton hit her and she went over a loveseat and crashed through a glass-topped coffee table, still screaming and saw Singleton coming, reaching out to her, and then she realized, just in a tiny fragment of time that she had left that he was pointing, not reaching, and she screamed "RUN LETTY… "
THE BOOM OF the gun was deafening in the small room, but the noise stopped instantly. Singleton had never liked that kind of noise, that high-emotion squealing that women did, and when he shot Martha West in the forehead and the squealing stopped, his first feeling was that of sudden relief-and he thought, Letty, and looked at the open door to the second floor. Martha West had been screaming at the stairway… He went that way, taking the stairs two at a time.
LETTY HAD FINISHED the last of the social studies problems and was packing her bag when she heard the knock on the front door. She couldn't see the front yard from her room, so she paused, listening. Was it her mother? Then she heard the knock again, and stepped toward the door, heard her mother's footsteps leaving the downstairs bedroom.
She listened, heard her mother's voice and a male rumbling-maybe it was Lucas and Del, with something important?-and then the voices went up, and her mother began screaming RUN LETTY and Letty turned and stepped across the room and picked up her rifle, which was unloaded because her mother made her swear to keep it unloaded except when she was using it, and she fumbled in the pocket of her trapping parka for a box of shells and then heard a crash of breaking glass and a RUN LETTY and she broke the gun open and there was a sudden tremendous boom and the sounds of fighting stopped…
Too late.
She looked wildly around the room, flipped the old turn-lock on the door, grabbed the steel-legged kitchen chair at the foot of her bed, and without thinking about it, hurled it through the east window. There were two layers of glass, the regular window and the storm, but the chair was heavy and went through. Running footsteps on the stairs, like some kind of Halloween movie-and Letty threw her parka over the windowsill to protect herself from the broken glass, and still hanging onto the rifle, went out the window.
She hung on to the coat with her left hand and she dropped, pulling it after her; the coat snagged on glass and maybe a nail, held her up for just a second, then everything fell. She landed awkwardly, in a clump of prairie grass, felt her ankle twist, and hobbled two steps sideways, her ankle on fire, clutching the parka in the cold, and saw a silhouette at the window and she ran, and there was a crack of light and noise like a close-in lightning strike, and something plucked at her hair and she kept hobbling away and there was another boom and her side was on fire, and then she was around the corner of the house and into the dark.
Hurt,she thought. She touched her side and realized that she was bleeding under the arm, and her ankle screamed in pain and something was wrong with her left hand. She kept going, half-hopping, half-hobbling. Cold, she thought. She pinned the rifle between her legs and pulled the parka on. She had no hat or mittens, but she pulled the hood up and began to run as best she could, and her left hand wasn't working right…
She was only a hundred feet from the house when she realized that she wasn't alone in the yard. There was a squirt of light and then she heard movement, a crunching on the snow. He was coming after her, whoever he was.
Shells. As she hobbled along, she dug in her coat pocket, and found a.22 shell, but her hand wasn't working and she dropped it. Lost in the dark. Dug out another one with the other hand, broke the rifle, got the shell in, snapped it shut. A squirt of light, then the man called, "Letty. You might as well stop. I can see you."
Bullshit,she thought. She could barely tell where he was, and he had the partly lit house behind him. And she was moving as fast as he was, because he was having trouble following her footprints through the grass that stuck through the shallow snow, and there was nothing behind her but darkness. If he kept coming, though… She had to do something-she didn't know how badly she was hurt. Had to find someplace to go.
His silhouette lurched in and out of focus in front of the house, and she remembered something that Bud, her trapper friend, had told her about bow-hunting for deer. If a deer was moving a little too quickly for a good shot, you could whistle, or grunt, and the deer would stop to listen. That's when you let the arrow go.
She turned, got a sense of where the man's silhouette was, leveled the rifle and called, "Who are you?"
He stopped like a deer, and she shot him.
SINGLETON RAN UP the stairs, and at the top looked around, heard the crash of breaking glass, looked back, thinking somehow that it might be Martha West, who was sprawled in the wreckage of the glass table, and realized in the next instant that it had to be Letty, because Martha was definitely dead.
He spotted the door with light leaking beneath it, stepped over to it, and said, "Letty?" and tried the knob. Locked. He kicked it once and it bent, without breaking. He kicked it a second time, a cop-kick, and it flew open. Letty was gone. Window broken, with movement-the jacket going out. He stepped on a notebook and almost fell, got right, hurried to the window and saw a dark figure on the ground, hobbling down the side of the house. He fired once, missed, and, blinded by his own muzzle flash, let go another shot, and then he couldn't see her anymore.