Boys Life

back. At the top of the stairs, Dr. Lezander put his hand on my shoulder again and held me. “Wait,” he whispered.
    We heard the front door opening.
    “Tom!” Mrs. Lezander said. “What may I do for-”
    “Dad!” I shouted. “ Help-” Dr. Lezander’s hand clamped over my mouth, and I heard him give a muffled cry of anguish that it had all come to this end.
    “Cory! Get outta my way, you-!” Dad started into the house, with Mr. Steiner and Lee Hannaford behind him. He shoved the big woman aside, but in the next instant Mrs. Lezander bellowed, “Nein!” and slammed a forearm across the side of his face. He fell backward into Mr. Steiner, blood trickling from a gashed eyebrow. Only Mr. Steiner could understand the things Mrs. Lezander shouted to her husband: “Gunther, run! Take the boy and run!” As she was shouting, Mr. Hannaford grabbed her around her throat from behind and with all his weight and strength he wrestled her to the floor. She got up on one knee and fought back, but suddenly Mr. Steiner was on her, too, trying to pin her flailing arms. A coffee table and lamp crashed over. Mr. Steiner, his hat flown off and his lower lip burst open by one of her fists, yelled, “It’s over, Kara! It’s over, it’s over!”
    But it was not over for her husband.
    At her warning cry, he had picked me up with one arm and scooped the car keys off the kitchen counter where his wife had left them. As I thrashed to get free, he dragged me out the back door into the falling sleet, the wind whipping his red silk robe. He lost a slipper, but he didn’t slow down. He flung me into the Buick, slammed the door almost on my leg, and came close to sitting on my head when he leaped behind the wheel. He jammed the key into the ignition, turned it, and the engine roared to life. As he put the gears into reverse and the Buick’s tires laid rubber on the driveway, I sat up in time to see Dad run out the back door into the glare of the headlights.
    “Dad!” I reached for the door handle on my side. An elbow crashed into my shoulder and paralyzed me with pain, and when the hand gripped the back of my head and flung me down onto the floorboard like an old sack I lay there dazed and hurting. Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke, the murderer-whom I still knew as Dr. Frans Lezander, the murderer-crunched the gearshift into first and the Buick’s engine screamed as the car tore away.
    Behind us, my father was already running back through the house to get to the pickup. He jumped over the struggling bodies of Mr. Steiner, Mr. Hannaford, and Kara Dahninaderke. The woman was still fighting, but Mr. Hannaford was using his fists on her horsey face and the results were not on the side of beauty.
    Dr. Lezander was racing through the streets of Zephyr, the Buick’s tires shrieking at every turn. I started to crawl up from the floorboard, but Dr. Lezander shouted, “Stay there! Don’t you move, you little bastard!” and he slapped me in the face and I slid back down again. We must’ve passed the Lyric; I wondered how much hell a hero could stand. We roared onto the gargoyle bridge, and when the steering wheel slipped out of Dr. Lezander’s frantic hands for an instant, the Buick sideswiped the left side of the bridge and sent sparks and pieces of chrome flying into the air, the car’s frame moaning with the impact. Then he seized control again and, his teeth gritted, he aimed us onto Route Ten.
    I saw light leap from the rearview mirror and stab Dr. Lezander in the eyes. He shouted a curse in German that was louder than the Buick’s wail, and I could just imagine what the parrots had had to endure that night. But I knew whose lights those were, ricocheting off the mirror. I knew who was behind us, right on the Buick’s tail, pushing that old pickup truck to its point of explosion. I knew.
    I reached up and grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel, jerking the car to the right. It went off the road onto loose gravel, the tires slipping. Dr. Lezander gave me another Germanic oath, hollered at the velocity and volume of a howitzer shell to the skull, and pounded my fingers loose with his fist. With that same fist, he knocked me in the forehead so hard I saw purple stars and that was the end of my heroics.
    “Leave me alone!” Dr. Lezander screamed to the pickup truck whose headlights filled the rearview mirror. “ Can’t you leave me alone?” He fought the wheel around Route Ten’s snaky curves, the force of gravity trying its