Relentless

Penny remained asleep, facing the harbor. The longer that you look at anything, the more you see, but not in this instance.
    At the coffee table that went with the other furniture grouping, Milo’s work still engrossed him.
    He must have gotten up at some point because overhead lights were on.
    Although a couple of hours remained until nightfall, the storm clouds and the rain had wrung down a faux twilight.
    Pale on the window glass, room-light reflections made portions of the view ambiguous, feathered crisp edges, melded objects that in reality were distinct from one another.
    From here, the harbor was not as visible to me as I was visible to anyone in the harbor.
    Marty, architect and builder, once told me, in more technical detail than I could process, that each layer of glass in the triple-pane windows was specially processed in some way—laminated perhaps, involving nanotechnology of some kind. Also applied to both faces ofeach pane was a remarkable protective film. Consequently, this glass would not shatter and cause injury in an earthquake. Furthermore, were a madman or an incompetent burglar to seek entry to the house by smashing a window with a sledgehammer, he would need as much as five minutes to do so and, in the process, would have worn the edge off his lust for murder or larceny.
    When the first high-powered rifle bullet pierced one of the windows, the sole sound was a hollow
pock!
The glass did not shatter; neither did it craze into the spirals and radials of a spiderweb. Except for a corona of short cracks, the hole looked as neat as that a power drill would make in a board.
    I saw a small sparkling spray of tiny bits of glass even as I heard the
pock
, all but simultaneously saw the bullet hole, heard the spent round slap into something elsewhere in the room, but did not turn to see what had been hit.
    Instead, I grabbed the sofa behind which I was standing and pulled it toward me, toppling it onto its back, dropping flat as I did so, and spilling a rudely awakened Penny onto the floor with me, where we were hidden from the shooter by the upended furniture.
    “Gunfire,” I told her, and she was clear-eyed and clearheaded by the time the second syllable passed my lips.
    I looked toward Milo, who had been sitting on the floor at the coffee table, about twelve feet away, and saw him falling onto his side. For an instant, I thought he had been hit, but the lack of blood spatter confirmed a miss.
    No sooner had the boy dropped for cover than, by a fraction of a second, another
pock
preceded the sound of a more violent impact, and the laptop on the coffee table blew apart.

   I cannot remember whether I was breathing like a marathon runner or was barely able to draw my breath, whether the sight of Milo in mortal danger sharpened my wits or dulled them. I know that although I was afraid, fear remained subordinate to a more intense emotion—call it horror—an abhorrence of the possibility that Milo might be killed, but coupled with horror was the energized despair that is desperation, which can make a cautious man reckless. In a crisis, the urge to act can rule the mind and heart, a mad dominion that favors the wrong action over no action at all, and I recall that forcing myself to hesitate and
think
took all the self-control I possessed.
    We were on the ground floor, so the shooter didn’t have to find a perch to angle down on us. He could be on the patio, on the private pier, on the seawall, on the upper deck of one of the boats at the public moorings.
    Prostrate on the carpet, Milo presented a low profile, but he remained a target, highly vulnerable.
    His eyes were squeezed shut, his face squinched, as though he were concentrating hard on wishing away the gunman. Right now he was not different ages physically, emotionally, and intellectually. At the moment, our brilliant little Milo was all six-year-old, and terrified.
    No sign of Lassie. Maybe she retreated to the entertainment-center cabinet.
    The patio had not been staged with outdoor furniture. The only obstructions between the shooter and the windows were the slender boles of four queen palms.
    Getting behind furniture in the family room would make Milo more difficult to target with precision. But it would not make him safe.
    Although Penny and I had the upturned seat of the sofa between us and the windows, I took no comfort in that barrier.
    The shooter knew where we were hiding. The upholstered seat would not stop—would hardly slow—a