Relentless

Milo.
    Somehow, she had flipped the immense coffee table across Milo, positioning it between him and the windows, and she had stood it on end. They were behind it, hidden from the shooter, though from this end of the room I had a narrow view of them.
    The table was well made, solid. Nevertheless, a single round had cracked the top, torn out a chunk of wood, and penetrated to the other side, fortunately without striking either mother or son.
    As the window shades reached the halfway point and continued to descend, one thing became clear to me. In this attack, Waxx had one target—Milo.
    He could have killed me three times as I passed in front of the windows. But he never took a shot when I was most exposed, not even as I stood motionless at the switch to watch the shades come down.
    As Penny muscled the coffee table on end, she must have been such an easy target that Waxx could have blown out her brains. And only one shot had been fired at the table after she and Milo were behind it—no doubt because Waxx did not want to risk killing her instead of the boy.
    The shades now covered three-quarters of the glass.
    Penny rose warily from behind the table, but instructed Milo to remain on the floor.
    Just as with John Clitherow and Thomas Landulf, the psychopath intended, before killing me, to take from me those I loved the most. Waxx imagined a specific order to my losses. Milo first. So I could witness Penny’s anguish before she, too, was murdered.
    I suspected he wanted to reduce me to despair, to the utter abandonment of hope, that I might accept my own murder gratefully, almost as a form of suicide. After seeing his wife and daughter brutalized, Landulf may well have pleaded to be killed. Although John Clitherow appeared to have taken extreme steps to stay alive, he told me that most days he yearned to join his family in death.
    If one day I asked for death, I would be denying the value of life in general and the value of my life specifically, which would be as well a denial of the value of my writing. By begging death and receiving it, I would confirm Waxx’s original criticism of my work.
    The motorized shades reached the bottom of the glass wall.
    Holding Milo close, Penny came out from behind the overturned table, and I hurried to her.
    Because of his poor writing, I had judged Waxx an ineffective if influential critic, a curious eccentric. He was not eccentric but grotesque, demonic, not ineffective but a relentless murder machine, his mind a clockworks of meticulously calculated evil.
    “Police,” Penny said. “At least they can
stop
this.”
    I disagreed: “No. They won’t get here in time.”

   Denied Milo, Waxx would not shrug in resignation and leave. He would come into the house after the boy.
    On the densely populated shores and islands of the harbor, houses stood close together. In this wealthy, peaceful community, gunfire would draw startled residents to their windows and their phones.
    Already, we should have heard sirens. There were none.
    Penny said, “After all that shooting, he’s got to scram.”
    “No one heard it.”
    Wondering what to do, where to hide, I grabbed her free hand, drew her and Milo into the kitchen, intending to go from there into the downstairs hall.
    Lacking wind and thunder, the storm had only rain for a voice, a susurration that could not mask rifle fire. The waterways were largely without traffic, free of engine noise.
    The rifle must have been equipped with a sound suppressor. Andin the rain, while cascades of breaking glass might have been heard, the
pock
of bullets penetrating shatterproof windows went unnoticed.
    If Waxx had been cautious when positioning himself to shoot Milo, the dismal afternoon light and the skeins of rain would have made him all but invisible to anyone who stood at a window to enjoy the monochromatic beauty of the storm-bathed harbor.
    Penny said, “The alarm system. There’s a panic button.”
    Inset in a kitchen wall, a Crestron touch screen controlled the house systems: heating, cooling, music, security.
    Under my fingertip, the panel brightened with options. I pressed SECURITY . The display changed. I pressed PANIC , which should have set off a loud alarm and also automatically dialed the police with a recorded message declaring an emergency at this address. Nothing happened.
    Earlier, I had set the alarm. Now it was off.
    I attempted to set it again. The system was down.
    “The garage,” I said, “the Explorer, out of