Chapter 46

Cold rain beating onto his head, Joshua unlocked the door. He stepped into the foyer, dripping. Droplets had spattered the lenses of his glasses, blurring his vision. He took off the spectacles, intending to take them to the bathroom and wipe them dry with a tissue.

Joshua had been diagnosed with a bad case of nearsightedness when he was an adolescent. Without benefit of glasses or contact lenses, his surroundings were a colorful blur. Merely reading the hands on the face of his watch proved a challenge.

So when he walked through the foyer of his shadowy home, without his glasses, he did not immediately sense that anything was wrong. The house was quiet; the only sound was the pattering rain. Coco usually greeted him at the door, but she might have been asleep upstairs.

He turned to the left, where the half-bath was located. His shoulder thumped against the wall. He was even clumsier than usual without his glasses.

When he walked into the bathroom, his boot crunched across something scattered on the tile floor. It sounded like glass shards.

He looked down. The sight was hazy, but by squinting he could make out pieces of broken glass littering the floor.

Still squinting, he looked up, at the mirror above the vanity.

It had been smashed.

Someone broke in our house, he thought, with sudden clarity. And in the next breath, he thought: Bates.

The sound of a shoe squeaking against hardwood made Joshua spin around in the bathroom doorway. He looked to the entry hall, where the noise had come from.

There was no one there. But Joshua felt a presence in the house as surely as he felt the icy rain water on his jacket trickling down the nape of his neck.

What had Thad told him about Bates last night? Be . . . careful . . . we didn’t see Dexter . . . till it was too late. He’d made it sound as though Bates were some kind of trained assassin, but that was insane, the man was a killer, sure, but not some damned ninja, couldn’t materialize from the shadows . . . yet Joshua’s heart was knocking so hard that deep down, maybe he believed all of those things about Bates to be true.

He had to get the gun. He moved out of the bathroom.

A fist came from nowhere and crashed into his jaw.

Joshua’s head snapped sideways. He teetered and banged against the wall. His mouth lolled open.

In his daze, he could think, only: Where the hell had Bates come from?

Joshua had dropped his glasses while reeling from the blow. But he didn’t need them to see that Bates was close now, looming near him. His appearance was so sudden that Joshua would have thought he was dreaming, if not for his swelling jaw.

Glass crunched; Bates was grinding Joshua’s spectacles under his heel. Joshua had a back-up pair in the bedroom, but Bates was blocking the hallway.

The gun was in the bedroom, too.

Joshua regained his bearings, forced himself to stand. Bates watched him as coolly as a cat watching a hobbled mouse. He wasn’t holding any weapons. He wanted a bare-hands brawl.

Lunging, Joshua threw a punch at him.

Bates nimbly evaded the blow, and Joshua’s miss left him exposed. Bates landed a jab in Joshua’s gut that felt like a detonating bomb. Joshua gasped, gagging on the pain. Bates grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and swung him around, slamming him against the wall hard enough to chip the plaster. A quick uppercut to Joshua’s chin clapped his teeth together, made him bite his tongue. A jab to Joshua’s throat ripped a garbled scream out of him and sent him sliding to the floor on useless legs.

Tears wetted Joshua’s cheeks. His body was a symphony of agony. He had never been in so much pain in his life.

Bates stood over him. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

“What . . . what do you want?” Joshua asked, in a thin voice.

Bates knelt. The inmate photo didn’t do him justice. Gazing into Bates’ dark eyes was like staring into the depths of the grave in which you would one day be buried.

“Where is she?” Bates asked.

“I don’t . . . know,” Joshua said.

Bates seized Joshua’s ring finger on his left hand, adorned with the titanium wedding band. He savagely bent the finger back. Joshua shouted, tried to pull away, but Bates didn’t relinquish his hold. Joshua’s finger broke like a pencil, and Joshua thought he was going to black out from the agony. Blacking out would have been a blessing.

But it didn’t happen. He remained wide-awake. Entire left hand feeling as if he had soaked it in a flesh-dissolving acid. He cradled it to his chest, scooted backward down the hall.

In the act of breaking Joshua’s finger, Bates had removed Joshua’s wedding band. He glanced at it with disgust, dropped it into his jacket pocket.

“Where is she?” Bates asked again, like a robot programmed to speak only one sentence.

The laundry room was at the end of the hall, behind Joshua. Joshua clambered to his feet and made a run for it.

Bates didn’t chase after him. He had a bemused expression, as if this were a game.Joshua hustled into the laundry room, slammed the door behind him with his shoulder.

It was a small, shadowy room, the majority of the space taken up by the washing machine, electric dryer, wire shelving packed with detergents, laundry sheets, and cleaning agents, and a plastic basket on the floor heaped with towels that needed to be laundered.

Murky light sifted inside through a tiny window on the wall opposite the door. The window was much too small for Joshua to squeeze through.

He also might have pushed the washing machine against the door, to bar Bates from entering, but he needed the use of both hands to move the heavy machine, and with his broken finger, such a strenuous task was all but impossible.

He unclipped his cell phone from the holster, thinking of calling the cops. But when he saw the “Network Busy” signal on the display, he dropped the phone on top of the dryer. Bates was coming, and he couldn’t waste his precious time waiting to squeeze a call through a network that was probably overloaded due to the inclement weather.

But running from Bates seemed the only viable option for survival. He had been insane to think he could deal with him. The man was a stone-cold killer. Joshua struggled to even stand up to his mother.

Bates’ footsteps creaked toward the door.

Squinting, Joshua surveyed the items on the shelves. He spotted a cleaning agent in a spray can; the formula contained ammonia. He twisted off the cap, nearly fumbled the can to the floor.

The door exploded inward.

Gripping the spray can in his good hand, Joshua surged toward Bates. He mashed the button.

The jet of spray found Bates’ eyes. He roared, raised his arms to shield his head.

Joshua charged through the doorway and smashed the blunt bottom edge of the can against the man’s skull. Bates slid to the floor, cursing, wounded and temporarily blinded, but not out of the fight. A guy like him would never give up.

Joshua raced past him, back into the main hallway. He squinted.

Bates had trashed the house. Broken glass was everywhere: ceramic figurines, framed photos and artwork, vases. Furniture was overturned. Ripped cushions spilled their stuffing like disemboweled corpses.

There was a landline in the kitchen, mounted on the wall beside the refrigerator. Joshua avoided the glass glittering on the floor, and grabbed the handset.

The line was dead.

Bates had already thought of that, had cut off that option. Now what?

Bates emerged from the hallway. His eyes were red, nostrils crusted with snot. But he now held a long knife with a nasty, razor-sharp edge.

They circled slowly around the kitchen table, like boxers in a ring. Joshua wanted to get upstairs, to get the gun and his back-up pair of glasses. Bates seemed to intuitively sense Joshua’s goal, and barred the way.

“Where is she?” Bates asked, a third time. He twirled the knife in his fingers.

“I wouldn’t tell you if I knew, you crazy motherfucker.”

“You can’t protect her from me,” Bates said. He snarled. “No one can. Not after what they’ve given me . . . the power I have. I could’ve knifed you and you wouldn’t have known a goddamn thing about who did it.”

His words made no sense; it was like listening to the babblings of a drunk.

“But I wanted you to know that her husband was the one who killed you,” Bates said.

“She divorced you, asshole.”

Growling with rage, Bates grabbed a chair and flung it toward Joshua. Joshua moved to dodge the object, but as he did, Bates tossed another chair at him, heaving them as if they were as weightless as tennis balls, and the second chair hit Joshua in the chest. As he staggered backward across the kitchen, Bates came at him, murder in his eyes.

Joshua grabbed the door handle of the freezer and jerked it open. The door smashed into Bates’ face.

Bates bellowed, dropped down as swiftly as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet.

Joshua sidestepped, to rush past him. On his knees, Bates swung the blade in a wide arc. The knife tore through Joshua’s calf.

Howling, Joshua stumbled against the counter. Pain had further impeded his vision, had turned his own house into somewhere alien and dangerous.

Behind him, Bates was getting up again.

Joshua lurched out of the kitchen, and into the family room.

Bates had swept all of their wedding photographs off the walls and smashed them. In some of them, Joshua’s face was torn out. He’d knocked over the Christmas tree by the fireplace, crushed all of the multicolored ornaments. They lay scattered across the carpet like broken eggs.

At the sight of the destruction, fresh anger renewed Joshua. This man had arrogantly shit on the life that he and Rachel had created together, and he wasn’t going to let it stand. No way.

Joshua reached the staircase. In his pain-wracked condition, climbing the fifteen steps seemed as daunting a task as scaling the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Bates was stalking across the family room. Blood poured from his nose, which was probably broken, but he seemed oblivious to the pain.

Joshua grabbed the railing, and started ascending the steps. He used his long legs to take them three at a time, risking a nasty fall if he lost his balance, but he didn’t slow, and miraculously, didn’t fall. He made it to the second floor.

Bates had wrought destruction up here, too. Smashed photos and artwork covered the hallway carpet, and black smears and deep dents marred the walls.

Bates was halfway up the staircase. Coming fast. Knife gleaming.

Joshua ran into the master bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it. He braced his back against it.

He expected Bates to attempt to kick the door down, as he had done in the laundry room, but after a few seconds, nothing had happened.

Warily, Joshua moved away from the door.

* * *

The bedroom was trashed, too. Shards of glass from the mirror covered the dresser and floor. The dresser drawers had been pulled out; clothes were everywhere. The mattress was torn and gouged, stuffing leaking out. The television tube had been smashed, the DVD and cable box dented.

Bates had battered the nightstands, too. Had dumped their contents on the floor and taken his weapon to them. Joshua found the gun case on the floor; the lid was dented, but it had not been opened. Bates clearly hadn’t known what was inside, and in his blind fury hadn’t bothered to pry it open.

Joshua knelt to retrieve the box, wincing at the pain that fanned through his body. He heard a soft whimper from underneath the bed. He looked, squinting.

It was Coco. She cowered far under the bed, large eyes twinkling in the shadows. She looked fine, just scared.

“You stay under there, okay?” Joshua said softly. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Joshua also found his back-up pair of glasses in a case beside one of the dumped drawers. The lenses were intact. He slid them on. The world came back into vivid view.

He opened the gun safe. He began to load the revolver. It was a challenge: his broken finger hampered him, and his hands were shaking. But he managed to plug all of the cartridges into the chambers without dropping any of them. In the heat of battle, with his pumping adrenaline, he’d discovered a dexterity that he hadn’t known he possessed.

He disengaged the trigger lock, rose into a shooter’s stance.

Rachel had foreseen that he would need this gun. Somehow. What else had she predicted?

The future lay beyond the bedroom door. Bates hadn’t tried to break in, but that meant nothing. He wasn’t going to leave the house. He was waiting Joshua out.

Carefully, Joshua opened the door, stepped backward.

The hallway was full of shadows. And empty. He didn’t hear Bates, either. He heard only the plinking rain.

Remember how he materialized from nowhere before. He might pull the same trick again. I don’t know how he did it the first time, but he did. He could do it again.

Joshua swallowed. He crept down the hall. Finger poised on the trigger. Tensed for the slightest noise.

He moved to the guest bedroom, on the right. A glance showed no one inside—just more chaos, courtesy of Bates.

He looked in Rachel’s study. Bates had destroyed the printer and scanner, swept the photos off the bookshelves and crushed them. But he wasn’t inside.

“Where is she?”

Joshua whirled to see Bates coming at him with the knife. Impossible. But he was there. There was blood on his lips. Hatred in his cold eyes. He was leading with the big knife, thrusting the blade at Joshua, intending to deliver a fatal wound, and he would have succeeded, would have gored Joshua right there in the hallway of his own house, if Joshua’s reflexes had not been faster than his.

Joshua squeezed off three shots at point blank range. The first round punched through his shoulder. The next two hit Bates squarely in the chest.

Bates’ eyes widened in apparent surprise. He lost his balance and tumbled down the staircase behind him, rolling all the way to the bottom. He lay there, immobile.

Joshua’s ears rang from the gunfire. His wrists tingled from the weapon’s recoil.

Aiming the muzzle downward, he descended the steps on watery knees.

Bates lay on the floor, eyes glassy and unblinking, lips parted, legs twisted like taffy under him, one arm contorted behind his back. Blood soaked his jacket and shirt. He wasn’t breathing.

Joshua felt his gorge rising. He clapped his hand over mouth, but he couldn’t stop the building tide of nausea. He stumbled into the kitchen and vomited into the sink.

He’d never seen so much blood—blood that he had spilled with his own hands. That Bates had pushed him to do it didn’t make him feel any better. This day was going to haunt his dreams for a long time.

He turned on the faucet, ran cold water to wash his face and rinse out his mouth.

He returned to Bates with a wad of paper towels. Covering his fingers with the towels to keep the blood from getting on them, he reached into Bates’ jacket pocket, and removed his wedding band.

“I’ll be taking this back,” he said in a ragged whisper.

He washed off the ring in the sink. He couldn’t put the ring on his broken finger, so he slid it onto a finger of his right hand.

Then he went to get his cell phone, to call the police.

* * *

Joshua had left his cell in the laundry room. He holstered the gun in his waistband and plucked the phone off the dryer. He dialed 911—he didn’t get a “Network Busy” message this time—and calmly reported that he had shot an intruder in his home. He ended the call without answering any further questions.

When he came back into the kitchen, the patio door was swinging open, rain pattering inside. A trail of blood droplets led from the doorway, across the family room, and to the bottom of the stairs.

Bates was gone.