From the Corner of His Eye

brightness.
        Kid's room. Bartholomew's room. Furniture in cheerful primary colors. Pooh posters on the wall.
        Surprisingly, dolls. Quite a few dolls. Apparently the bastard boy was effeminate, a quality he sure as hell hadn't inherited from his father.
        Nobody here.
        Unless under the bed, in the closet?
        Waste of time to check those places. More likely, woman and boy were hiding in the last room.
        Swift and yellow, Angel flew to her mother, grabbing at one of the bunched drapes as if she might hide behind it.
        The window was French with small panes, so Celestina couldn't simply break the glass and climb out.
        A deep-set casement window. Two latches on the right side, one high, one low. Detachable hand crank lying on the foot-deep sill. Mechanism socket in the base casing.
        Celestina jammed the shaft of the crank into the casing socket. Wouldn't fit. Her hands were shaking. Steel fins on the shaft of the crank had to be lined up just-so with slots in the socket. She fumbled, fumbled.
        Lord, please, help me here.
        The maniac kicked the door.
        A moment ago, he'd slammed into Angel's room, and that was loud, but this boomed louder, thunderous enough to wake people throughout the building.
        The crank engaged. Turn, turn.
        Where was the patrol car? Why no siren?
        The window mechanism creaked, the two tall panes began to open outward but too slowly, and the cold white night exhaled a chill plume of breath into the room.
        The maniac kicked once more, but because of the bracing dresser, the door wouldn't budge, so he kicked harder, again without success.
        "Hurry," Angel whispered.
        Junior stepped back and squeezed off two shots, aiming for the lock. One round tore a chunk out of the jamb, but the other cracked through the door, shattering more than wood, and the brass knob wobbled and almost fell out.
        He pushed on the door, but still it resisted, and he surprised himself by letting out a bellow of frustration that expressed quite the opposite of self-control, though no one listening could have the slightest doubt about his determination to commit and command.
        Again he fired into the lock, squeezed the trigger a second time, and discovered that no rounds remained in the magazine. Extra cartridges were distributed in his pockets.
        Never would he pause to reload at this desperate penultimate moment, when success or failure might be decided in mere seconds. That would be the choice of a man who thought first and acted later, the behavior of a born loser.
        A plate-size piece of the door had been blasted away. Because of the light shining through from the room beyond, Junior could see that no part of the lock remained intact. In fact, he peered through the hole in the door to the back of a piece of furniture that was jammed against it, whereupon the nature of the problem became clear to him.
        He tucked his left arm tight against his side and threw himself against the door. The obstructing furniture was heavy, but it moved an inch. If it would give one inch, it would give two, so it wasn't immovable, and he was already as good as in there.
        Celestina didn't hear gunfire, but she couldn't mistake the bullets for anything else when they cracked through the door.
        The blocking dresser, which doubled as a vanity, was surmounted by a mirror. One bullet drilled through the plywood backing, made a spider-web puzzle of the silvered glass, lodged in the wall above the bed-thwack-and kicked out a spray of plaster chips.
        When the two vertical panes of the casement window were still less than seven inches apart, they stuttered. The mechanism produced a dismal grinding rasp that sounded like a guttural pronunciation of the problem itself, c-c-c-corrosion, and seized up.
        Even Angel, mere wisp of a cherubim, couldn't squeeze through a seven-inch opening.
        In the hall, the maniac roared in frustration.
        The hateful window. The hateful, frozen window. Celestina wrenched on the crank with all of her strength, and felt something give a little, wrenched, but then the crank popped out of the socket and rapped against the sill.
        She didn't hear gunfire this time, either, but the hard crack of splintering wood attested to the passage of at least two more bullets.
        Turning away from the window, Celestina