Last Dance, Last Chance

here with my children all day, and I haven’t had the radio on and all that’s been on the TV is cartoons. I don’t even know your name.”
    “You can call me Denny,” he said.
    She looked around the room covertly, looking for possibilities of escape. If she had to, she could take the children out through the bedroom window. But “Denny” never left her side; he stayed within a foot or so from her, constantly.
    It made her more nervous the way he kept emptying and reloading the rifle. He asked her if she knew anything about guns, and she told him she didn’t.
    “See that wall behind your head? This will make a mighty big hole in that wall. Don’t make any noise, because it’s cocked and ready.”
    Now she was more afraid. Her children weren’t really safe in their room. And she was scared to death that one of them would come out to see where she was. She prayed silently that they would obey her, this most important time of all.
    “What does your husband look like?”
    “He’s big—tall and pretty muscular. He works in construction.”
    “What kind of a car does he drive? What’s he gonna do when he comes in and finds me here in his house?”
    She lied to him about the make of car, too. Pat knew that her husband, Roy, would probably try to jump on the stranger and take the gun away from him. She was afraid of a struggle in which Roy might get shot. If he had any warning at all that Denny was inside, Roy could take him easily—but if he just walked in unaware…
    The minutes crawled by.
    Pat continued to speak gently to the gunman. It quieted him down quite a bit, and she tried to use whatever worked. He seemed very unhappy, and he told her that he had a lot of problems in his romantic life.
    “People are interfering with my life,” he said bitterly. “You can’t trust anybody.”
    He was alternately sorry for himself and threatening, and he kept glancing at the television set as if he expected some major news bulletin to flash across the screen at any moment.
    Pat’s overwhelming purpose was to get him out of her house. She didn’t want him there when Roy came in, and she could hear her children beginning to whimper. That was making him more jittery.
    Finally, Pat suggested that Denny take her car so that he wouldn’t have to wait for her husband to drive him.
    “I won’t call anyone,” she said.
    He gave her a look, and sarcastically said, “I’ll bet you won’t.”
    It rained harder, and Pat Jacque froze every time she heard the sound of a car out on the street. She longed to have her husband there to protect them, but she was so afraid he would be shot and wounded—or killed.
    And so they waited. She tried not to suggest too many alternatives for Denny because that seemed to make him antsy, too. But she took her car keys from her purse and put them where he could see them.
     
    Pat’s captor was telling the truth when he said that other people were interfering with his life. He had taken care of that earlier in the day and only now was beginning to panic about what he had done.
    Almost three years earlier, he had met the woman who was to become both his obsession and his frustration. Her name was Cherie Mullins * , and she was a buxom blonde in her thirties, who worked as a nurse’s aide. Denny LeeTuohmy * and Cherie Mullins were immediately attracted to each other, and early on their relationship seemed wonderful.
    Cherie and Denny began living together in April, 32 months before he crashed into Pat Jacque’s home. They took a long trip to California, and it was like a honeymoon, with no responsibilities and no worries about jobs or money. It didn’t even matter that Denny was still married to another woman and their trip couldn’t be a real honeymoon. The trouble began when they returned to regular, everyday life.
    They moved into a small cabin in a trailer park, and Cherie became the breadwinner in the household. Denny’s resistance to getting a job was one of the biggest sore points for Cherie.
    “I wanted him to get a job and be a decent, upright human being,” Cherie said later. “I wanted him to see about getting his divorce through. I told him if he ever hit me, I was finished. Then he hit me in November, and I had two broken ribs. I left that night, but then I went back for my things and he begged me to stay and I felt sorry for him, so I stayed; but only for about a week. He was using my car to date other women.”
    It was the all-too-familiar pattern of domestic