Mr. Murder

plantation shutters were folded away from the window, so he stayed a couple of steps from the glass.
        The white BMW backed down the driveway, out of the shadow of the house and into the late-November sunshine. Emily was riding up front with her mother, and Charlotte was in the rear seat.
        As the car receded along the tree-lined street, Marty stepped so close to the living-room window that his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He tried to keep his family in view as long as possible, as if they were certain to survive anything-even falling airplanes and nuclear blasts-if he just did not let them out of his sight.
        His last glimpse of the BMW was through a sudden veil of hot tears that he barely managed to repress.
        Disturbed by the intensity of his emotional reaction to his family's departure, he turned away from the window and said savagely, "What the hell's the matter with me?"
        After all, the girls were merely going to school and Paige to her office, where they went more days than not. They were following a routine that had never been dangerous before, and he had no logical reason to believe it was going to be dangerous today-or ever.
        He looked at his wristwatch. 7,48.
        His appointment with Dr. Guthridge was only slightly more than five hours away, but that seemed an interminable length of time.
        Anything could happen in five hours.
        Needles to Ludlow to Daggett.
        Move, move, move. 9,04 Pacific Standard Time.
        Barstow. Dry bleached town in a hard dry land. Stagecoaches stopped here long ago. Railroad yards. Waterless rivers. Cracked stucco, peeling paint. Green of trees faded by a perpetual layer of dust on the leaves. Motels, fast-food restaurants, more motels.
        A service station. Gasoline. Men's room. Candy bars. Two cans of cold Coke.
        Attendant too friendly. Chatty. Slow to make change. Little pig eyes.
        Fat cheeks. Hate him. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
        Should shoot him. Should blow his head off. Satisfying. Can't risk it. Too many people around.
        On the road again. Interstate 15. West. Candy bars and Coke at eighty miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale.
        Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.
        As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking sun.
        Marty owned five guns.
        He was not a hunter or collector. He didn't shoot skeet or take target practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn't armed himself out of fear of social collapse though sometimes he saw signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.
        He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched, minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.
        In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth.38 revolver and a box of cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality, produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.
        Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance.
        In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal and tragic accidents extremely rare.
        He removed the.38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car, a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his one-o'clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.
        A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols-a Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904-were stored in their original boxes inside a locked