Strange Highways

spaced about sixty feet on center and encircled by high chain-link safety barriers, lined one side of the street. From those flues, out of realms below, arose gray plumes of smoke like processions of fugitive ghosts, which were torn into rags by the wind and exorcised by the rain, leaving behind only a stink like that of hot tar.
     The two-story Bimmer residence was curiously narrow for its lot, built to the compressed horizontal dimensions of a row house in a downtown neighborhood in some industrial city like Altoona or Johnstown. It appeared taller than it actually was - and forbidding.
     Lights were on downstairs.
     As he and Celeste climbed the porch steps, Joey heard music inside, and a tinny laugh track. Television.
     He pulled open the aluminum-and-glass storm door and knocked on the wood door behind it.
     In the house, the phantom studio audience laughed uproariously and a lighthearted tinkle of piano music further cued the folks at home that they were supposed to be amused.
     After the briefest hesitation, Joey knocked again, harder and longer.
     "Hold your horses," someone called from inside.
     Relieved, Celeste exhaled explosively. "They're okay."
     The man who opened the door - evidently John Bimmer - was about fifty-five, shiny bald on top with a Friar Tuck fringe of hair. His beer belly overhung his pants. The bags under his eyes, his drooping jowls, and his rubbery features made him appear as friendly and comfortable as an old hound dog.
     Joey was holding the shotgun down at his side, safely aimed at the porch floor, and Bimmer didn't immediately see it. "You're an impatient young fella, ain't you?" he said affably. Then he spotted Celeste and broke into a wide smile. "Hey, missy, that lemon meringue pie you brought by yesterday was every bit of a first-rate job."
     Celeste said, "Mr. Bimmer, we-"
     "First rate," he repeated, interrupting her. He was wearing an unbuttoned flannel shirt, a white T-shirt, and tan pants held up by suspenders, and he patted the bulge of his belly to emphasize how good the pie had been. "Why, I even let Beth and Ma take a smell of that beauty before I ate it all myself?"
     The night echoed with a hard crack , as if the wind had snapped off a big tree branch somewhere nearby, but it was not a branch and had nothing to do with the wind, because simultaneously with the sound, arterial blood brightened the front of John Bimmer's T-shirt. His engaging smile turned strange as he was half lifted off his feet and thrown backward by the power of the shot.
     Joey shoved Celeste through the open doorway and to the living-room floor. He scrambled after her, dropped beside her, rolled onto his back, and kicked the front door shut hard enough to rattle a pair of pictures - John Kennedy, Pope John XXIII - and a bronze crucifix on the wall above the sofa.
     Bimmer had been thrown backward with such force that he wasn't even lying in their way, which meant that the caliber of the weapon was big, damn big, a deer rifle, maybe even bigger than that, a lot of punch. Probably hollow-point cartridges too.
     In a blue bathrobe and a crown of pink hair curlers, Bimmer's wife rose from an armchair in front of the television, even as the door was slamming shut, stunned into silence but only for an instant. When she saw her husband's vest of blood and the two shotguns, she reached the logical but incorrect conclusion. Screaming, she turned away from them.
     "Get down!" Joey shouted, and Celeste cried out, "Beth, stay down!"
     Unheeding, in a blind panic, heading toward the back of the house, Beth Bimmer crossed in front of a window. It imploded with an incongruously merry, bell-like ringing of shattering glass. She took a shot in the temple, which snapped her head to the side so hard that it might also have broken her neck, and as the phantom audience on the television laughed uproariously, she crashed to the living-room floor in front of a birdlike elderly woman in a yellow sweatsuit, who was sitting on the sofa.
     The older woman had to be Hannah, Bimmer's mother, but she had no time to grieve for her son and daughter-in-law, because two of the next three shots were generous destiny's gifts for her, pumped through the same window but delivered without the merry-bell music of breaking glass, killing her where she sat, as she reached for her hickory