Dead Aim Read Free Page B

white shutters and a green, well-tended lawn. He hoped it looked respectable to her, and that the front windows he had enlarged for light made it seem open enough to be safe. “Come inside,” he said. It was irrational, desperate.
    “All right.” She followed him up his driveway, while he marveled at the exchange: why he had dared to say it, why she had acquiesced.
    He unlocked the door and let her in first. She moved slowly around the living room while he slipped off his backpack and carried it to the laundry room off the kitchen. He knew she was examining his things and drawing conclusions about him. “Would you like tea or coffee or a soft drink, or … whatever?”
    “I’d like a glass of water, and then I would like to sleep for an hour.”
    He opened the refrigerator and took out one of the cold bottles of water he kept there for his walks. Then he climbed the stairs and showed her to the spare bedroom. “This is it. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a bathroom attached, with clean towels and everything, so you can take a hot shower. There’s a robe hanging on a hook behind the door. In the dresser there are T-shirts, sweatshirts, some shorts. None of them will fit you, but you can tighten a belt around the shorts to keep them up until yours dry. Anything else you need, holler.”
    She stepped into the room and closed the door. As he reached the stairway, he heard the lock click into place. He didn’t blame her. Who the hell was he, anyway? And he supposed his behavior had struck her as at least mildly peculiar. She could not know why he wasn’t able to give up and leave her alone. She didn’t know that this was not his first try. He had been the last one in the family to talk to Nancy. It had been more than thirty years ago, but today the desperate, panicky feeling of regret that always came when he thought about Nancy had come back, almost as though he were getting a second chance but still didn’t know what to do.
    Mallon sat in the living room, waiting. He stared at the empty staircase for minutes at a stretch, listening for the young woman to dosomething unexpected that he would need to oppose very quickly and flawlessly. When his eyes had stayed there for a very long time without anything happening, he turned and stared out the front window, still listening for sounds from above. He was not sure what he expected to see out there, but he knew what he wished he could see. He longed for the nonexistent, the impossible: an ambulance would pull up that was unmarked, and out would come a municipal team of specially trained psychiatrists—female psychiatrists at that, strong-minded but soft-voiced—who had been dispatched because somebody on the bluff above the beach had seen what had happened and reported it. They would gently bundle the girl in a blanket and rush her off to some discreet, ultramodern clinic for the suicidal. By bedtime there would be so many antidepressants in her bloodstream that she would be incapable of imagining herself dead.
    He heard the faint sound of water running in the pipes below the room, then a distant hiss of spray from above. She was in the shower. He glanced at his watch and half-smiled, then realized that the knotted muscles between his shoulders had just relaxed a bit. She had slept for two hours, and now she was in the shower, feeling the hot water pelting her skin, warming her and soothing her. She was recovering.
    The thought slowly curdled. He always left supplies in the guest bathroom, still in their packages from the store: soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, combs and hairbrushes, shaving cream, razors. Could she hurt herself with a disposable razor? If she broke off the plastic and sawed away at an artery, she could probably cut her way through. Maybe the hot water was to keep the blood flowing.
    He told himself that it was foolish to think of such a thing, and retorted that it was foolish to think of anything else after seeing her try to kill herself. Bright blood