Mr. Murder

want now is to put an end to this. We shouldn't be here, not with that guy out there somewhere, loose."
        "Do you think we should be worried about the kids?" … need… my Charlotte, my Emily…
        Marty said, "Yeah. I'm worried shitless."
        "But you shot the guy twice in the chest."
        "I thought I'd left him in the foyer with a broken back, too, but he got up and ran away. Or limped away. Or maybe even vanished into thin air.
        I don't know what the hell's going on here, Paige, but it's wilder than anything I've ever put in a novel. And it's not over, not by a long shot."
        "If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there's a cop over there too."
        "If this bastard knew where the girls were, he'd waste that cop, Vic, and Kathy in about a minute flat."
        "You handled him." - "I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a gun in the desk drawer or that I'd use one if I had it. I took him by surprise. He won't let that happen again. He'll have all the surprise on his side."
        He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his tongue.
        "Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load them?"
        Speaking around the ice cube, he said, "I saw how that jolted you. I did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge."
        "Why?"
        As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he'd had that something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.
        He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded unbalanced-if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and precautions.
        "And something was coming," she said. "This dead-ringer. You sensed him coming."
        "Yeah. I guess so. Somehow."
        "Psychic."
        He shook his head. "No, I wouldn't call it that. Not if you mean a psychic vision. There wasn't any vision. I didn't see what was coming, didn't have a clear premonition. Just this… this awful sense of pressure, gravity… like on one of those whip rides at an amusement park, when it swings you around real fast and you're pinned to the seat, feel a weight on your chest. You know, you've been on rides like that, Charlotte always loves them."
        "Yeah. I understand… I guess."
        "This started out like that… and got a hundred times worse, until I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving for the doctor's office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch was here, but I didn't feel anything when I walked into the house."
        They were silent for a moment.
        Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.
        Paige said, "How could he look exactly like you?"
        "I don't know."
        "Why would he say you stole his life?"
        "I don't know, I just don't know."
        "I'm scared, Marty. I mean, it's all so weird. What're we going to "Past tonight, I don't know. But tonight, at least, we're not staying here. We'll go to a hotel."
        "But if the police don't find him dead somewhere, then there's tomorrow … and the day after tomorrow."
        "I'm battered and tired and not thinking straight. For now I can only concentrate on tonight, Paige. I'll just have to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here."
        Her lovely face was lined with anxiety. He had not seen her even half this distraught since Charlotte's illness five years ago.
        "I love you," he said, laying his hand gently against the side of her head.
        Putting her hand over his, she said, "Oh, God, I love you, too, Marty, you and the girls, more than anything, more than life itself. We can't let anything happen to us, to what we all have together. We just can't."
        "We won't," he said, but his words sounded as hollow and false as a young boy's braggadocio.
        He was aware that neither of them had expressed the slightest hope that the police would protect them. He could not repress his anger over the fact they were not accorded anything resembling the service, courtesy, and consideration that the characters in his novels always received from the authorities.
        At the core, mystery novels were about good and evil, about the