The Darkest Evening of the Year

minute.”
    “Hard to whup a guy’s ass after he embeds a tire iron in your skull.”
    Slamming shut the tailgate, she said, “Your skull would be fine. It’s the tire iron that would’ve been bent.”
    “Let’s get out of here before he decides he should have held out for three thousand.”
    Flipping open her cell phone, she said, “We’re not leaving.”
    “What? Why?”
    Keying in three numbers, she said, “The fun’s just getting started.”
    “I don’t like that look on your face.”
    “What look is that?”
    “Reckless abandon.”
    “Reckless is a cute look for me. Don’t I look cute?” The 911 operator answered, and Amy said, “I’m on a cell phone. A man here is beating his wife and little boy. He’s drunk.” She gave the address.
    Nose to the glass, peering from the dark cargo hold of the SUV, the golden retriever had the blinkless curiosity of a resident of an aquarium bumping against the walls of its world.
    Amy gave her name to the operator. “He’s beaten them before. I’m afraid this time he’s going to cripple or kill them.”
    The breeze stirred faster, and the eucalyptus trees tossed their tresses as if winged swarms spiraled through them.
    Staring at the house, Brian felt chaos coming. He had much hard experience of chaos. He had been born in a tornado.
    “I’m a family friend,” Amy lied in answer to the 911 operator’s question. “Hurry.”
    As Amy terminated the call, Brian said, “I thought you took the steam out of him.”
    “No. By now he’s decided that he sold his honor with the dog. He’ll blame Janet for that. Come on.”
    She started toward the house, and Brian hurried at her side. “Shouldn’t we leave it to the police?”
    “They might not get here in time.”
    Vague leaf shadows shuddered on the moon-silvered sidewalk, as if they were a thousand beetles quivering toward sheltering crevices.
    “But a situation like this,” he said, “we don’t know what we’re doing.”
    “What we’re doing is the right thing. You didn’t see the boy’s face. His left eye is swollen. His father gave him a bloody nose.”
    An old anger rose in Brian. “What do you want to do to the sonofabitch?”
    Climbing the porch steps, she said, “That’s up to him.”
    Janet had left the front door ajar. From the back of the house rose Carl’s angry voice and hammering and crystalline shatters of sound and the sweet desperate singing of a child.
    At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.
    Amy pushed open the door. They went inside.

 
    Chapter
2
    C eramic salt and pepper shakers, paired dogs—sitting Airedales, quizzical beagles, grinning goldens, prancing poodles, shepherds, spaniels, terriers, noble Irish wolfhounds—waited in orderly rows on shelves beyond open cabinet doors, and others stood in disorder on a kitchen counter.
    Shaking, face pale and wet with tears, Janet Brockman moved two sheep dogs from the counter to the table.
    The tire iron swung high as the woman moved, descended as she put the shakers on the table, and barely missed her snatched-back hands. Salt and ceramic shrapnel sprayed from the point of impact, then pepper and sharp shards.
    The double crack of iron on wood was followed by Carl’s demand: “Two more.”
    Watching from the dark hallway, Amy Redwing sensed that the collection must be precious to Janet, the one example of order in her disordered life. In those small ceramic dogs, the woman found some kind of hope.
    Carl apparently understood this, too. He intended to shatter both the figurines and his wife’s remaining spirit.
    Clutching a ragged pink rabbit that might have been a dog toy, the little girl sheltered beside the refrigerator. Her jewel-bright eyes were focused on a landscape of the mind.
    In a small but clear voice, she sang in a language that Amy did not recognize. The haunting melody sounded Celtic.
    The boy, Jimmy, evidently had taken refuge elsewhere.
    Alert to the fact that her husband would as soon shatter her fingers as break the salt and pepper shakers, Janet flinched at the whoosh of arcing iron. She dropped a pair of ceramic Dalmatians on the table.
    Crying out as the weapon grazed her right wrist, she cowered back against the ovens, arms crossed over her breasts.
    When the lug wrench rang off oak, sparing both the salt and pepper, Carl snatched up a Dalmatian and threw it at his wife’s face.