wanna throw it out either.” He chuckled. “Maybe your husband secretly enjoyed his experience. You think?”
Dena’s right hand moved slightly, almost involuntarily, and Keller’s voice turned hard as the shotgun lifted. “Drop...the damn...pistol! Or I’ll turn you inside out with this thing.”
Dena’s eyes swallowed the cold gleam of the 12-gauge and she knew the man would enjoy using it. She let the Browning slide from her fingers to clatter on the floor.
“Where’s Jeremy you son of a bitch?” she demanded.
“Sleeping.” The calm had already returned to Keller’s voice. “I gave him a Valium to make sure he won’t wake up for a while.”
“If you’ve hurt my son—”
Keller chuckled again. “Don’t worry. That was more Marge’s line of work. I like my humps a little older.”
“You raped Troy?”
“I’ve got the tattoo. And I have to tell you, it was a hell of a lot of fun watching your husband dying inside while I was right there on top of him. He had been bullshitting himself too long; that was his problem. It’s always worse for the ones who lie to themselves. Because they can’t lie anymore while I’m there with them.”
“You’re sick.”
“And you’re just full of original observations. Way I see it, I did your husband a service. I could tell by the way he looked at me he was a homosexual. God, I hate those scum.”
Though not a psychologist, Dena sensed more than a paranoid homophobia behind Keller’s words. She might have called it evil if she’d had time to think about it. But right now she had to keep him talking while she figured a way out of this mess. “So why come here tonight?” she asked. “You know Troy’s gone.”
“Oh, I’m afraid your hubby was a bit smarter than I’d hoped. I think he figured out the mask I wore on the big night was Marge’s work. I got a little note yesterday telling me you and Jeremy would be going to your mom’s for the hurricane, like you always used to. Hell, I thought you were gone too. Never even looked in your garage for the car.”
“My parents are in Vegas.”
Keller shrugged. “Too bad. I guess Troy didn’t know they’d gone. Anyway, he sent me this note inviting me over. Said he knew what I’d done and it was payback time. He wanted to kill me. Scare me first, then kill me. That’s why the chimes and the tattoo on the glass door. He just didn’t realize that Marge was my huntin’ buddy. That threw him off.”
“Troy was in the house tonight?” Dena interrupted, her chest tightening as she realized what Keller was saying.
“Who you think killed Marge? While I played tag with shadows. I never thought he’d be that good, and when you came down it was two against one. Course, I didn’t know it was you. Figured he’d hired a professional and it was time for old Morgan to go home.”
Keller was grinning widely now, as if he’d just heard the punch line to a dirty joke. “I know you saw him, though. Dressed sort of like I was that first night he and I were together. Mask. Wig. Didn’t you tell me you shot somebody like that upstairs?”
Dena had known what Keller was going to say, but actually hearing the words still spiked nails into her soul. She slid to her knees, throat heaving but nothing running out. Keller sat his flashlight on the floor and took a step forward to kiss the 12-gauge to Dena’s forehead. The metal was cold. “Guess I’ll have to adopt Jeremy,” he said. Then the door behind him blew open and wet leaves and rain swirled in on a rushing wind. Chimes rang and Morgan turned halfway around in surprise. Dena hurled herself into his legs.
Keller fell backward, the shotgun discharging, spraying the ceiling with pellets. Chimes shattered, and Dena came to her knees and smashed the Maglite across the man’s face with all her might. Glass popped and the bulb winked out, but Keller’s flash still burned and its light showed the man’s head snap to the side from the blow. She would have thought it was enough to knock him out. It wasn’t. The ex-marine lashed out with his left leg, his booted foot crashing into her chest with enough force to knock her loose from her air. She fell back against the wall, throat aching as she tried to draw in just a little of the wind that raced all around her.
Keller started to lift the shotgun and Dena kicked out as hard as she could, knocking the gun from his grasp and sending it spinning against the wall. As he lunged after it Dena’s hand found something angular and cold on the linoleum. The pistol!
She grabbed the automatic by the butt and swung it around, starting to fire before the barrel even aligned with her target. Two shots walked across the wall; the rest began to hit meat. The 9mm cartridges weren’t very powerful, but the gun held fifteen of them, minus the two misses and the three she’d used earlier. The other ten bullets kept snapping and snapping and snapping, and Keller kept jerking and jerking and jerking. He was dead before the last shot took him in the throat.
But Troy might still be alive, Dena thought, as she picked up Keller’s flashlight and ran for the stairs.
Behind her as she ran, the house seemed full of the hurricane’s boom and roar, full of wild chiming, but Dena ignored it all as she stepped into her son’s room and listened for the sound of breathing. She heard none, and Keller’s flash lit up a space that was empty of her husband’s body. Then the front door slammed downstairs and the house fell still.
Dena turned, listened, the empty gun useless in her fist. She heard movement downstairs, heard a sound like cloth ripping, and a moment later footsteps came up toward the second floor. Dena wasn’t surprised when Troy walked into the room. She didn’t run into his arms, though.
Her husband had removed the mask and wig, and Dena could see dried blood on his face where one of her shots had creased him. She figured the other two slugs had hit the bulletproof vest Troy was wearing beneath his now opened shirt. Covering the front of that vest was a badly tattered symbol that dripped red mucous. Morgan Keller’s tattoo didn’t look much like a heart and a cobra anymore.
Dena lifted the flash slightly, light spattering off the knife in Troy’s hand and then falling into his eyes. The pupils constricted but the lids didn’t blink, and the face behind the eyes was a pale oval etched in white wax. A phrase came to Dena from a college class in abnormal psychology, “flattened affect,” no facial expression at all. Her husband was over the edge, long gone into a Freudian landscape from which there would be no easy return.
“Troy.... Troy!”
Dena’s voice seemed to hot-wire Troy’s emotions and he looked at her with hatred dripping from his lips. “You watched him didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Troy. You’re hurt. You need a hospital.”
“You watched him use me! I know you did! Maybe you and him were doing it together yourselves. Is that right?”
“You’re talking crazy, Troy.” Dena fought the tears that wicked toward her eyes. “You’ve gotta calm down and let me help you.”
“Where’s Jeremy?”
The abrupt change of subject startled Dena but she quickly recovered. “That’s right. You’ve gotta think about Jeremy. He needs you.”
“Don’t
