Relentless

no miracle here, my covenant with Death revoked: Now anything could happen.
    Thou shalt not murder, but killing is a whole different thing from murder. Self-defense isn’t a transgression, defense of the innocent is required, they give medals for defense of the innocent. A brass taste filled my mouth, a hot-copper odor burned in my nose, and a gorge rose but I choked it down.
    Booth remained sprawled and still on the floor, but Penny kept a two-hand grip on her pistol as she approached him. She kicked his weapon out of his reach, circled him, trying not to step in blood or on various scraps of tissue, and confirmed he was dead.
    I holstered my pistol. My hand ached.
    “Stay there, Milo,” she shouted toward the kitchen. “We’re all right. Just stay there.”
    My ears were still ringing, but I was no longer deaf when she came to me. We held each other.
    “You okay?” I asked.
    “No. I didn’t want to do it, not that, not ever.”
    “Kill or be murdered,” I said. “You did well, exactly what you should’ve done.”
    “You too. My God. I’m shaking head to foot, head to foot.”
    “I wasn’t fast enough,” I said.
    “Fast enough,” she disagreed. “Walbert was dead one way or the other, you couldn’t change that. They came here to kill him. And then to lie in wait for us.”
    She must have been right, but I said, “How did they know we’d come here?”
    “How do they know anything? Think about it later. We have to get out of here. Lock the front door, close any living-room draperies that might give someone a line of view through the archway into the hall. I’ll wipe off the coffee mugs, anything we might have touched in the kitchen.”
    As she hurried along the hallway, I negotiated the remains of the three men, striving not to think about the nature of the wet debris, and went to the front door.
    My sweat-damp fingers slipped on the deadbolt thumb-turn as I tried to twist it the wrong way. Then I engaged the lock and rubbed my sleeve over it to blur the thumbprint I might have left.
    I half remembered that after Walbert admitted us, he closed the door. None of us touched the knob, but I rubbed it with my sleeve, anyway.
    As the ringing in my ears subsided, I heard a sound rising outside. An approaching engine.
    Sidelights flanked the front door. I lifted the edge of a lace curtain, and looked out.
    A dark green sedan in the driveway, near the front porch, must have belonged to Booth and Oswald.
    Looming out of the mist, a black Hummer appeared to be more of a war machine than one of the full-scale Humvees that were used by the military. It parked behind the sedan, towering over it, and the driver left the engine running, headlights and fog lights blazing.
    Doors opened like spaceship portals, and three men stepped down and out of the huge vehicle. Even in the mist, I could see that one of them was Shearman Waxx.
    We were up against an organization, all right, and it was not the National Society of Book and Art Critics.
    Waxx was holding a cell phone to his left ear, and behind me in the hallway, a phone in one of Booth’s pockets played a few bars of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
    I turned away from the front door, executed some broken-field running to quick-step through the horror on the hallway floor, and raced toward the back of the house as Booth’s phone rang again.

   In the kitchen, Penny was polishing a coffee mug with a dishtowel, and Milo used a paper towel to buff prints off his juice glass.
    Maybe this was only my perception, subjective and not true, but Milo appeared to have changed in minutes, as if the events in the hallway, which he could imagine without seeing, had been an immersion in a baptistery that bleached out a measure of his innocence and left in him a sediment of experience that could never be washed away.
    When he looked at me, his beautiful blue eyes seemed to contain shadows that had never before veiled them. His face was pale, his lips paler, his hands dove-white, as if all the blood had rushed to his heart, to fortify it after the blow that it had taken as he stood listening to his parents kill and nearly be killed.
    I wanted to sweep him off the floor, hug him tight, kiss him, and talk him through this terrible moment, but to do so would be toensure his death and mine, so completely had our lives spiraled out of our control.
    “Waxx is here,” I said, “and he’s not alone.”
    Penny dropped the dishtowel, put down the mug, drew her