A few minutes later, Bobby was kneeling in the overgrown bushes at the rear of the house, his provisions beside him. He had parked on the opposite side of the block, across from a completely dark house, and slipped quietly through the backyard to the Byrne house. Robert would have taken far better precautions, but Bobby sensed that the time for such care was coming to an end, and he was glad of it. No longer would he skulk about as if ashamed of the darkness, he was ready to maraud like a berserker.

A dim outside light was on. The Datsun glowed with a dark bloody red at the back of the driveway. It wasn’t a mystery how the boy had gotten inside, one of the small rear windows was out of its sill, leaning against the wall, and the back door was ajar. The upper windows of the house were dark, but the kitchen light was on, and, more interestingly, from the lowest windows an uneven white light shone faintly. So the Byrne boy was in the basement. It had seemed completely empty when Robert had searched it. Obviously, he had missed something, but he wouldn’t miss anything now.

As quietly as he could, he moved along the edges of the bushes that lined the driveway, angling to get a view of the front door. While he assumed it was still locked, he wanted to be sure which way the boy would run.

But wait a second, what the hell was that?

A figure, at the front door, a male figure in what appeared to be a suit jacket, his face in shadow. There was something about his posture, bent at the waist and slightly hunched, by either age or caution, but something that tolled familiar. The figure tried the front door, found it locked, and then, with an almost arthritic sidestep, arms akimbo, scurried off the far side of the front porch.

Bobby hurried around the house to his spot in the rear bushes and watched as the figure darted around the back of the house, scampered up the rear steps of the porch, slipped inside the open door. Who the hell was he? What was he doing there? And why did he seem so damn familiar?

Bobby thought about it for a moment and then decided it didn’t much matter. The man was obviously in cahoots with the boy, had been called in for some unknown reason. If the file was somewhere down in the basement, which only made sense, then the man would learn about it and would also have to be destroyed. Robert would have been greatly concerned about another casualty, but Bobby simply figured this made up for the one he missed out on fourteen years ago. Fine. He’d wait for the man to join Byrne down in the basement and take care of both of them together.

Then a break. The dim outdoor light went off, and the kitchen and basement lights, too. Suddenly the house was in utter darkness.

The power must have died for some reason. The other houses still were lit, so this was just the Byrne house. All the better. Rushing to take advantage of this almost magical opportunity, Bobby gathered up the two jerry cans and the box he had taken from One-Eyed Pete’s. Staying low like a soldier, he quickly made his way to the rear steps, the jerry cans sloshing as he moved.

He climbed the steps, lowered the jerry cans, and placed the box to the side of the door. He peered through the screen and could spy nothing but the slight unbroken glimmer of the streetlight slipping in the front windows and bouncing unobstructed across the bare wooden floors. Perfect. There was no time to dally. Maybe the main circuit had simply snapped closed. It wouldn’t be long before the boy found the circuit box and clicked it back.

Time to go.

He opened the screen door, grabbed the jerry cans and rushed inside. He took a deep breath, stuck a handkerchief into his mouth, twisted the first cap off, the second.

And then, freed from any concern about the sound he was making, Bobby took the first can and stomped like a motorcycle madman on his way to the front of the house, slopping the liquid over the walls and floor with abandon. The dark, gaseous smell almost overwhelmed him, but he forced in a breath through the handkerchief and kept going.

One can done, he went back for the second and kept stomping and pouring, stomping and pouring, concentrating now on the kitchen and the steps to the basement. He heard shouting from below, footsteps on the stairs, saw the large shadow of the Byrne boy and a beam of light. He took out the gun and fired a shot that rang down the dark stairway, followed by a howl of pain. He must have hit him. Lovely. That will slow the little bastard down, he thought as, with the dregs of the second jerry can, he traced a path out the rear door and to the box he’d taken from Pete’s.

As the screen door slammed shut, he took the beer bottle from out of the box, its rag now soaked and stinking. He pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it to life, lit the rag.

“A shes to ashes,” said Bobby as he opened t he screen door a nd tossed the flaming bottle into the vapor-filled house. “Like father, like son.”

Next thing Bobby knew, he was flying off the porch like a batted shuttlecock.

He fell with a painful thud onto the unyielding lawn. Something cracked in his back. The handkerchief blew out of his mouth. He was blinded, his eyebrows were singed right off his skull, his face felt like he had bobbed for apples in a boiling soup pot, like the skin was peeling from his cheeks. Smoke rose from his smoldering clothes.

He struggled to sit up. His vision was a red blot, but slowly the outlines of the house emerged, and then, within the outline, the dancing, boiling flames. A wild inferno was barely contained within the house’s walls. Fire shot out of broken windows, out the now-melting screen door. It wouldn’t be long before it burst through the roof like a signal flare into the night sky, declaring the final victory of the Spanglers.

The bitch said she wanted initiative.

Like a wounded crab, Bobby slunk back into the bushes. He now had a view of the rear door and the boy’s car. Soon the boy would come charging out the back. And if he ran out some other exit, he’d still head straight for the Datsun. Either way he’d be toast.

Bobby reached into his pocket, pulled out his gun, and waited for the fireworks.

CHAPTER 29

KYLE’S HEART JUMPED like a nervous rabbit flushed from hiding before taking off with a burst of terror. Something was terribly wrong. The sight of his father’s face, pinned in the flashlight’s beam like a moth in a lepidopterist’s display, seemed to turn the ironclad rules of time and space in on themselves in a loopy, Möbius kind of way.

It was as if the flashlight were somehow allowing him to peer into the past. Cheesy science-fiction television shows were the only frame of reference he could grab hold of to understand what was happening: Stargate or Star Trek or Lost in Space. There was an anomaly in the universe, a rent in the time-space continuum, a wormhole. This vision of his father was either a miracle or a harbinger of doom, and either way it scared the hell out of him, as if everything in the universe, along with every certainty he held about his life, were quivering just then on the knife edge of annihilation.