Mr. Murder

until it can't make a sound of any kind, until it finally stops crying, stops struggling, just stops, stops -and abruptly the engine chugs, turns over, purrs sweetly.
        "I'll be right back," Paige said as Marty put the suitcase on the floor behind the driver's seat of the BMW.
        He looked up in time to see that she was heading into the house.
        "Wait, what're you doing?"
        "Got to turn off all the lights."
        "To hell with that. Don't go back in there."
        It was a moment from fiction, straight out of a novel or movie, and Marty recognized it as such. Having packed, having gotten as far as the car, that close to escaping unscathed, they would return to the house to complete an inessential task, confident of their safety, and somehow the psychopath would be in there, either because he had returned while they were in the garage or because he had successfully hidden in some cleverly concealed niche throughout the police search of the premises.
        They would move from room to room, switching off the lights, letting darkness spill through the house where upon the look-alike would materialize, a shadow out of shadows, wielding a large butcher's knife taken from the rack of implements in their own kitchen, slashing, stabbing, killing one or both of them.
        Marty knew real life was neither as extravagantly colorful as the most eventful fiction nor half as drab as the average academic novel-and less predictable than either. His fear of returning to the house to switch off the lights was irrational, the product of a too-fertile imagination and a novelist's predilection to anticipate drama, malevolence, and tragedy in every turn of human affairs, in every change of weather, plan, dream, hope, or roll of dice.
        Nevertheless, they weren't going back into the damn house. No way in hell.
        "Leave the lights on," he said. "Lock up, raise the garage door, let's get the kids and get out of here."
        Maybe Paige had lived with a novelist long enough for her own imagination to be corrupted, or maybe she remembered all of the blood in the upstairs hall. For whatever reason, she didn't protest that leaving so many lights on would be a waste of electricity. She thumbed the button to activate the Genie lift, and shut the door to the kitchen with her other hand.
        As Marty closed and locked the trunk of the BMW, the garage door finished rising. With a final clatter it settled into the full-open position.
        He looked out at the rainy night, his right hand straying to the butt of the Beretta at his waistband. His imagination was still churning, and he was prepared to see the indomitable look-alike coming up the driveway.
        What he saw, instead, was worse than any image conjured by his imagination. A car was parked across the street in front of the De lorios' house. It wasn't the Delorios' car. Marty had never seen it before. The headlights were on, though the driver was having difficulty getting the engine to turn over, it cranked and cranked. Although the driver was only a dark shape, the small pale oval of a child's face was visible at the rear window, staring out from the back seat. Even at a distance, Marty was sure that the little girl in the Buick was Emily.
        At the connecting door to the kitchen, Paige was fumbling for house keys in the pockets of her corduroy jacket.
        Marty was in the grip of paralytic shock. He couldn't call out to Paige, couldn't move.
        Across the street, the engine of the Buick caught, chugged consumptively, then roared fully to life. Clouds of crystallized fumes billowed from the exhaust pipe.
        Marty didn't realize he'd shattered the paralysis and begun to move until he was out of the garage, in the middle of the driveway, sprinting through the cold rain toward the street. He felt as though he had teleported thirty feet in a tiny fraction of a second, but it was just that, operating on instinct and sheer animal terror, his body was ahead of his mind.
        The Beretta was in his hand. He didn't recall drawing it out of his waistband.
        The Buick pulled away from the curb and Marty turned left to follow it.
        The car was moving slowly because the driver had not yet realized that he was being pursued.
        Emily was still visible. Her frightened face was now pressed tightly to the glass. She was staring directly at her father.
        Marty was closing on the car, ten