Except, of course, after what she had seen, nothing could ever be normal for her again.
The night grew very dark. Without Danny it was the blackest night of her life. Only one light remained to illuminate her struggle toward some distant hope of happiness: Chris. He was the last light in her darkness.
Later, at the top of the hill, a car appeared. Headlights bored through the gloom and the heavily falling snow.
She struggled to her feet and took Chris into the middle of the roadway. She waved for help.
As the descending car slowed, she suddenly wondered if when it stopped another man with another submachine gun would get out and open fire. She would never again feel safe.
Four
THE INNER FIRE
1
On Saturday, August 13, 1988, seven months after Danny was shot down, Thelma Ackerson came to the mountain house to stay for four days.
Laura was in the backyard, conducting target practice with her Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special. She had just reloaded, snapped the cylinder in place, and was about to put on her Hearing Guard headset when she heard a car approaching on the long gravel driveway from the state route. She picked up a pair of binoculars from the ground at her feet and took a closer look at the vehicle to be sure it was not an unwanted visitor. When she saw Thelma behind the wheel, she put the glasses down and continued firing at the target—an outline of a man’s head and torso—that was lashed to a hay-bate backstop.
Sitting on the grass nearby, Chris plucked six more cartridges from the box and prepared to hand them to her when she had fired the last round currently in the cylinder.
The day was hot, clear, and dry. Wildflowers by the hundreds blazed along the edge of the yard where the mown area gave way to wild grass and weeds near the forest line. Squirrels had been at play on the grass a while ago, and birds had been singing, but the shooting had temporarily frightened them away.
Laura might have been expected to associate her husband’s death with the high retreat and to sell it. Instead she had sold the house in Orange County four months ago and moved Chris to the San Bernardinos.
She believed that what had happened to them the previous January on route 330 could have happened anywhere. The place was not to blame; the fault lay in her destiny, in the mysterious forces at work in her strangely troubled life. Intuitively she knew that if her guardian had not stepped in to save her on that stretch of snowy highway, he would have entered her life elsewhere, at another moment of crisis. At that place Kokoschka would have shown up with a submachine gun, and the same set of violent, tragic events would have transpired.
Their other home had held more memories of Danny than did the stone and redwood place south of Big Bear. She was better able to deal with her grief in the mountains than in Orange Park Acres.
Besides, oddly enough, the mountains felt much safer to her. In the highly populated suburbs of Orange County, where the streets and freeways teemed with more than two million people, an enemy would not be perceived among the crowd until he chose to act. In the mountains, however, strangers were highly visible, especially since the house sat almost in the center of their thirty-acre property.
And she had not forgotten her guardian’s warning: Arm yourself. Be prepared. If they come for you ... there’ll be a squad of them.
When Laura fired the last round in the .38 and pulled off the ear guards, Chris handed her six more cartridges. He removed his muffs, too, and ran to the target to check her accuracy.
The backstop consisted of hay bales piled seven feet high and four deep; it was fourteen feet wide. Behind it were acres of pine woods, her private land, so the need for an elaborate backstop was questionable, but she did not want to shoot anyone. At least not accidentally.
Chris lashed up a new target and returned to Laura with the old one. “Four hits out of six, Mom. Two deaders, two good wounds, but looks like you’re pulling off to the left a little.”
“Let’s see if I can correct that.”
“You’re just getting tired, that’s all,” Chris said.
The grass around her was littered with over a hundred and fifty empty brass shell casings. Her wrists, arms, shoulders, and neck were beginning to ache from the cumulative recoil, but she wanted to get in another full cylinder before quitting for the day.
Back near the house, Thelma’s car door slammed.
Chris put on his ear guards again and picked up the binoculars to watch the target while his mother fired.
Sorrow plucked at Laura as she paused to look at the boy, not merely because he was fatherless but because it seemed so unfair that a child two months short of his eighth birthday should already know how dangerous life was and should have to live in constant expectation of violence. She did her best to make sure there was as much fun in his life as possible: They still played with the Tommy Toad fantasy, though Chris no longer believed that Tommy was real; through a large personal library of children’s classics, Laura also was showing him the pleasure and escape to be found in books; she even did her best to make target practice a game and thereby divert the focus from the deadly necessity of being able to protect themselves. Yet for the time being their lives were dominated by loss and danger, by a fear of the unknown. That reality could not be hidden from the boy, and it could not fail to have a profound and lasting effect on him.
Chris lowered the binoculars and looked at her to see why she was not shooting. She smiled at him. He smiled at her. He had such a sweet smile it almost broke her heart.
She turned to the target, raised the .38, gripped it with both hands, and squeezed off the first shot of the new series.
By the time Laura fired four rounds, Thelma stepped up beside her. She stood with her fingers in her ears, wincing.
Laura squeezed off the last two shots and removed her ear guards, and Chris retrieved the target. The roar of gunfire was still echoing through the mountains when she turned to Thelma and hugged her.
“What’s all this gun stuff?” Thelma asked. “Are you going to write new movies for Clint Eastwood? No, hey, better yet, write the female equal of Clint’s role—Dirty Harriet. And I’m just the broad to play it—tough, cold, with a sneer that would make Bogart cringe.”
“I’ll keep you in mind for the part,” Laura said, “but what I’d really like to see is Clint play it in drag.”
“Hey, you’ve still got a sense of humor, Shane.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
Thelma frowned. “I didn’t know what to think when I saw you blasting away, looking mean as a snake with fang decay.”
“Self-defense,” Laura said. “Every good girl should learn some.”
“You were plinking away like a pro.” Thelma noted the glitter of brass shell casings in the grass. “How often do you do this?”
“Three times a week, a couple of hours each time.”
Chris returned with the target. “Hi, Aunt Thelma. Mom, you got four deaders out of six that time, one good wound, and a miss.”
“Deaders?” Thelma said.
“Still pulling to the left, do you think?” Laura asked the boy.
He showed her the target. “Not so much as last time.”
Thelma said, “Hey, Christopher Robin, is that all I get—just a lousy ‘Hi, Aunt Thelma’?”
Chris put the target with the pile of others that he had taken down before it, went to Thelma, and gave her a big hug and a kiss. Noticing that she was no longer done up in punk style, he said, “Gee, what happened to you, Aunt Thelma ? You look normal.”
“I look normal? What is that—a compliment or an insult? Just you remember, kid, even if your old Aunt Thelma looks normal, she is no such a thing. She is a comic genius, a dazzling wit, a legend in her own scrapbook. Anyway, I decided punk was passe.”
They enlisted Thelma to help them collect empty shell casings.
“Mom’s a terrific shot,” Chris said proudly.
“She better be terrific with all this practice. There’s enough brass
here to make balls for an entire army of Amazon warriors.”
To his mother, Chris said, “What’s that mean?”
“Ask me again in ten years,” Laura said.
When they went into the house, Laura locked the kitchen door. Two deadbolts. She closed the Levelor blinds over the windows so no one could see them.
Thelma watched these rituals with interest but said nothing.
Chris put Raiders of the Lost Ark on the VCR in the family room and settled in front of the television with a bag of cheese popcorn and a Coke. In the adjacent kitchen Laura and Thelma sat at the table and drank coffee while Laura disassembled and cleaned the .38 Chief’s Special.
The kitchen was big but cozy with lots of dark oak, used brick on two walls, a copper range hood, copper pots hung on hooks, and a dark blue, ceramic-tile floor. It was the kind of kitchen in which TV sitcom families worked out their nonsensical crises and attained transcendental enlightenment (with heart) in thirty minutes each week, minus commercials. Even to Laura it seemed like an odd place to be cleaning a weapon designed primarily to kill other human beings.
“Are you really afraid?” Thelma asked.
“Bet on it.”
“But Danny was killed because you were unlucky enough to wander into the middle of a drug deal of some kind. Those people are long gone, right?”
“Maybe not.”
“Well, if they were afraid that you might be able to identify them, they’d have come to get you long before this.”
“I’m taking no chances.”
“You got to ease up, kid. You can’t live the rest of your life expecting someone to jump at you from the bushes. All right, you can keep a gun around the house. That’s probably wise. But aren’t you ever going to go out into the world again? You can’t tote a gun with you everywhere you go.”
“Yes, I can. I’ve got a permit.”
“A permit to carry that cannon?”
“I take it in my purse wherever we go.”
“Jesus, how’d you get a permit to carry?”
“My husband was killed under strange circumstances by persons unknown. Those killers tried to shoot my son and me—and they are still at large. On top of all that, I’m a rich and relatively famous woman. It’d be a little odd if I couldn’t get a permit to carry.”
Thelma was silent for a minute, sipping her coffee, watching Laura clean the revolver. Finally she said, “This is kind of spooky, Shane, seeing you so serious about this, so tense. I mean, it’s seven months since ... Danny died. But you’re as skittish as if someone had shot at you yesterday. You can’t maintain this level of tension or readiness or whatever you want to call it. That way lies madness. Paranoia. You’ve got to face the fact that you can’t really be on guard the rest of your life, every minute.”
“I can, though, if I have to.”
“Oh, yeah? What about right now? Your gun’s disassembled. What if some barbarian thug with tattoos on his tongue started kicking down the kitchen door?”
The kitchen chairs were on rubber casters, so when Laura suddenly shoved away from the table, she rolled swiftly to the counter beside the refrigerator. She pulled open a drawer and brought out another .38 Chief’s Special.
Thelma said, “What—am I sitting in the middle of an arsenal?”
Laura put the second revolver back in the drawer. “Come on. I’ll give you a tour.”
Thelma followed her to the pantry. Hung on the back of the pantry door was an Uzi semiautomatic carbine.
“That’s a machine gun. Is it legal to have one?”
“With federal approval, you can buy them at gunshops, though you can only get a semiautomatic; it’s illegal to have them modified for full automatic fire.”
Thelma studied her, then sighed. “Has this one been modified?”
“Yes. It’s fully automatic. But I bought it that way from an illegal dealer, not a gunshop.”
“This is too spooky, Shane. Really.”
She led Thelma into the dining room and showed her the revolver that was clipped to the bottom of the sideboard. In the living room a fourth revolver was clipped under an end table next to one of the sofas. A second modified Uzi was hung on the back of the foyer door at the front of the house. Revolvers were also hidden in the desk drawer in the den, in her office upstairs, in the master bathroom, and in the nightstand in her bedroom. Finally, she kept a third Uzi in the master bedroom.
Staring at the Uzi that Laura pulled from under the bed, Thelma said, “Spookier and spookier. If I didn’t know you better, Shane, I’d think you’d gone mad, a raving paranoid gun nut. But knowing you, if you’re really this scared, you’ve got to have some reason. But what about Chris around all these guns?”
“He knows not to touch them, and I know he can be trusted. Most Swiss families have members in the militia—nearly every male citizen there is prepared to defend his country, did you know that?—with guns in almost every house, but they have the lowest rate of accidental shootings in the world. Because guns are a way of life. Children are taught to respect them from an early age. Chris’ll be okay.”
As Laura put the Uzi under the bed again, Thelma said, “How on earth do you find an illegal gun dealer?”
“I’m rich, remember?”
“And money can buy anything? Okay, maybe that’s true. But, come on, how does a gal like you find an arms dealer? They don’t advertise on Laundromat bulletin boards, I presume.”
“I’ve researched the backgrounds to several complicated novels, Thelma. I’ve learned how to find anyone or anything I need.”
Thelma was silent as they returned to the kitchen. From the family room came the heroic music that accompanied Indiana Jones on all of his exploits. While Laura sat at the table and continued cleaning the revolver, Thelma poured fresh coffee for both of them.
“Straight talk now, kiddo. If there’s really some threat out there that justifies all this armament, then it’s bigger than you can handle yourself. Why not bodyguards?”
“I don’t trust anyone. Anyone but you and Chris, that is. And Danny’s father, except he’s in Florida.”
“But you can’t go on like this, alone, afraid...”
Working a spiral brush into the barrel of the revolver, Laura said, “I’m afraid, yeah, but I feel good about being prepared. All my life I’ve stood by while people I love have been taken from me. I’ve done nothing about it but endure. Well, to hell with that. From now on, I fight. If anyone wants to take Chris from me, they’re going to have to go through me to get him, they’ll have to fight a war.”
“Laura, I know what you’re going through. But listen, let me play psychoanalyst here and tell you that you’re reacting less to any real threat than you are overreacting to a sense of helplessness in the face of fate. You can’t thwart Providence, kid. You can’t play poker with God and expect to win because you’ve got a .38 in your purse. I mean, you lost Danny to violence, yeah, and maybe you could say that Nina Dockweiler would have lived if someone had put a bullet in the Eel when he first deserved it, but those are the only cases where lives of people you loved might’ve been saved with guns. Your mother died in childbirth. Your father died of a heart attack. We lost Ruthie to fire. Learning to defend yourself with guns is fine, but you’ve got to keep perspective, you’ve got to have a sense of humor about our vulnerability as a species, or you’ll wind up in an institution with people who talk to tree stumps and eat their belly-button lint. God forbid, but what if Chris got cancer? You’re all prepared to blow away anyone who touches him, but you can’t kill cancer with a revolver, and I’m afraid you’re so crazy determined to protect him that you’ll fall to pieces if something like that happens, something you can’t deal with, that no one can deal with. I worry about you, kid.”
Laura nodded and felt a rush of warmth for her friend. “I know you do, Thelma. And you can put your mind at ease. For thirty-three years I just endured; now I’m fighting back as best I can. If cancer were to strike me or Chris, I’d hire all the best
specialists, seek the finest possible treatment. But if all failed, if for example Chris died of cancer, then I’d accept defeat. Fighting doesn’t preclude enduring. I can fight, and if fighting fails, I can still endure.”
For a long time Thelma stared at her across the table. At last she nodded. “That’s what I hoped to hear. Okay. End of discussion. On to other things. When do you plan to buy a tank, Shane?”
“They’re delivering it Monday.”
“Howitzers, grenades, bazookas?”
“Tuesday. What about the Eddie Murphy movie?”
“We closed the deal two days ago,” Thelma said.
“Really. My Thelma is going to star in a movie with Eddie Murphy?”
“Your Thelma is going to appear in a movie with Eddie Murphy. I don’t think I qualify as a star yet.”
“You had fourth lead in that picture with Steve Martin, third lead in the picture with Chevy Chase. And this is second lead, right? And how many times have you hosted the Tonight show? Eight times, isn’t it? Face it, you’re a star.”
“Low magnitude, maybe. Isn’t it weird, Shane? Two of us come from nothing, Mcllroy Home, and we make it to the top. Strange?”
“Not so strange,” Laura said. “Adversity breeds toughness, and the tough succeed. And survive.”
2
Stefan left the snow-filled night in the San Bernardino Mountains and an instant later was inside the gate at the other end of Lightning Road. The gate resembled a large barrel, not unlike one of those that were popular in carnival funhouses, except that its inner surface was of highly polished copper rather than wood, and it did not turn under his feet. The barrel was eight feet in diameter and twelve feet long, and in a few steps he walked out of it, into the main, ground-floor lab of the institute, where he was certain that he’d be met by armed men.
The lab was deserted.
Astonished, he stood for a moment in his snow-flecked peacoat and looked around in disbelief. Three walls of the thirty-by-forty-foot room were lined floor to ceiling with machinery that hummed and clicked unattended. Most of the overhead lamps were off, so the room was softly, eerily lit. The machinery supported the gate, and it featured scores of dials and gauges that glowed pale green or orange, for the gate—which was a breach in time, a tunnel to anywhen—was never shut down; once closed, it could be reopened only with great difficulty and a tremendous expenditure of energy, but once open it could be maintained with comparatively little effort. These days, because the primary research work was no longer focused on developing the gate itself, the main lab was attended by institute personnel only for routine maintenance of the machinery and, of course, when a jaunt was in progress. If different circumstance had pertained, Stefan would never have been able to make the scores of secret, unauthorized trips that he had taken to monitor—and sometimes correct—the events of Laura’s life.
But though it was not unusual to find the lab deserted most times of the day, it was singularly strange now, for they had sent Kokoschka to stop him, and surely they would be waiting anxiously to learn how Kokoschka had fared in those wintry California mountains. They had to have entertained the possibility that Kokoschka would fail, that the wrong man would return from 1988, and that the gate would have to be guarded until the situation was resolved. Where were the secret police in their black trenchcoats with padded shoulders? Where were the guns with which he had expected to be greeted?
He looked at the large clock on the wall and saw that it was six minutes past eleven o’clock, local time. That was as it should have been. He’d begun the jaunt at five minutes till eleven that morning, and every jaunt ended exactly eleven minutes after it began. No one knew why, but no matter how long a time traveler spent at the other end of his journey, only eleven minutes passed at home base. He had been in the San Bernardinos for nearly an hour and a half, but only eleven minutes had transpired in his own life, in his own time. If he had stayed with Laura for months before pressing the yellow button on his belt, activating the beacon, he would still have returned to the institute only—and precisely—eleven minutes after he had left it.
But where were the authorities, the guns, his angry colleagues expressing their outrage? After discovering his meddling in the events of Laura’s life, after sending Kokoschka to get him and Laura, why would they walk away from the gate when they had to wait only eleven minutes to learn the outcome of the confrontation?
Stefan took off his boots, peacoat, and shoulder holster, and tucked them out of sight in a corner behind some equipment. He had left his white lab coat in the same place when he had departed on the jaunt, and now he slipped into it again.
Baffled, still worried in spite of the lack of a hostile greeting committee, he stepped out of the lab into the ground-floor corridor and went looking for trouble.
3
At two-thirty Sunday morning Laura was at her word processor in the office adjacent to the master bedroom, dressed in pajamas and a robe, sipping apple juice, and working on a new book. The only light in the room came from the electronic-green letters on the computer screen and from a small desk lamp tightly focused on a printout of yesterday’s pages. A revolver lay on the desk beside the script.