Praying for Sleep

asked.
    “Don’t you know? Like SWAT.”
    “No fooling?” The deputy was impressed.
    Heck continued, “They’ll be here in forty minutes, I’d guess. Maybe a little longer.”
    “Why don’t they send them by helicopter?”
    “Helicopter?” Heck snorted.
    Lis looked past the others for a moment as a sheet of lightning canopied the sky. She felt the thunder in her chest. The deputy was asking her something but she didn’t hear a word of it and when she left the room she was running. Portia stepped after her and, alarmed, called, “Lis, are you all right? What is it?”
    But Lis was by then taking the stairs two at a time.
    In the bedroom she found the Colt Woodsman, a thin .22 automatic pistol that Owen kept beside the bed. He’d insisted that she learn to use it and had made her fire the pistol a dozen times into a paper target tacked to a pile of rotten wood behind the garage. She’d done so, dutiful and nervous, her hand jerking unartfully with every shot. She hadn’t touched it since then, perhaps three or four years ago.
    She hefted the gun now and noted that, unlike rose petals, the checkered grip and metal of this long pistol left strong sensations upon her callused hands.
    The pistol disappeared into her pocket. She walked slowly to the window. The immense blackness outside it—lacking any reference point—hypnotized her and drew her forward. Like a sleepwalker she approached the glass, three feet, two, compelled to find something visible on the other side of the blue-green panes—a branch, an owl, a cloud, the verdigris Pegasus weather vane atop the garage, anything that would make the darkness less infinite and permanent. Lightning lit the flooded driveway. She recalled waving goodbye to her husband. She realized with a shock that that gesture might have been the last communication between them ever, and, worse, perhaps one that he had not even seen.
    She gazed into the night. Where are you, Owen? Where? Lis knew he was near. For she’d by now realized that, injured or not, he was making his way back to the house, trying to get Hrubek onto their property and complete his mission—to kill him and make it look like self-defense. They could be a mile from the house, or fifty yards away. It was only a matter of time.
    Another bolt of lightning streaked from the sky and hit nearby. Lis gasped, stepping back, as the thunder rattled the badly glazed eighteenth-century panes. The storm now came forward like a wave, a wall of indifferent water a thousand feet high. It sped frantically across the lake, whose surface was oddly illuminated as if the globules of rain emitted radiation when they collided with the dark water.
    A huge growl of thunder enveloped the house, finishing with a sharp whipcrack. Lis hurried downstairs. She pulled her rain slicker from a hook and said, “I’m going outside. I’m going to find my husband.”

27
    On April 15, 1865, Doctor Samuel A. Mudd splinted John Wilkes Booth’s leg and put him to bed in one of the cots that served as a small infirmary in his home office.
    Dr. Mudd had an idea who his patient was and what he’d done the night before but the doctor chose not to ride to town and report Booth to the authorities because his wife was afraid to be left alone with the eerie, feverish man and begged him not to go. Mudd got arrested as part of the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and came one vote from being hanged. He was finally released from prison but he died a ruined man.
    Michael Hrubek, now reflecting on Mudd’s ordeal, thought: He had a woman to thank for that. Just goes to show.
    He also thought a doctor might not be a bad idea right at the moment. His wrist burned wildly; it had slammed into the steering wheel when he drove his car into the conspirator’s truck. It didn’t hurt much but the forearm was glossy, swollen nearly double. From fingers to elbow it was a log of flesh.
    As he walked through the rain, however, he grew too excited to worry about his injuries.
    For Michael Hrubek was in Oz.
    The town of Ridgeton was magical to him. It was the end of his quest. It was the Promised Land and he looked at every strip of pale November grass and every rain-spattered parking meter and mailbox with respect. The storm had darkened most of downtown and the only lights were battery-driven exit and emergency signs. The red rectangles of light added to the mythic quality of the place.
    Standing in a booth, he flipped through a soggy phone book and found