The Door to December

there.'
     'You won't melt,' Manuello said.
     The phone began to ring again.
     As before, the detectives ignored it.
    * * *
    The siren failed.
     Dan tapped the control switch with his foot, clicked it on and off and on again, but the siren refused to come back to life. He was left with only the flashing red emergency beacon and his horn to get him through the rain-slowed traffic.
     He was going to be too late. Again. As with Cindy Lakey. Too late. Whipping and weaving from lane to lane, cutting dangerously in and out of traffic, blasting the horn, he was increasingly sure that they were dead, all dead, that he had lost a friend, and the innocent child he had hoped to protect, and the woman whose impact on him — admit it — had been somewhere in the hundred-megaton range. All dead.
    * * *
    Laura picked up Melanie's coat and dressed her first. It was a slower procedure than it might have been because the girl didn't help at all.
     Manuello said, 'What is she — a retard or something?'
     Astonished and angry, Laura said, 'I can't believe you actually said that.'
     'Well, she don't act normal,' Manuello said.
     'Oh, don't she?' Laura said scathingly. 'Jesus. She's a very sick little girl. What's your excuse?'
     While Laura got Melanie into the coat, Earl was directed to sit on the sofa. He perched on the edge. His arms were cuffed behind him.
     When Laura finished buttoning her daughter's raincoat, she picked up her own coat.
     Wexlersh said, 'Never mind that. You sit there on the sofa beside Benton.'
     'But—'
     ' Sit!' Wexlersh said, pointing at the sofa with his gun.
     His ice-gray eyes were unreadable.
     Or maybe Laura simply didn't want to read what was evident in them.
     She looked at Detective Manuello. He was smirking.
     Turning to Earl for guidance, Laura saw that he looked more uneasy than ever.
     'Sit,' Wexlersh repeated, not stressing the word this time, almost speaking in a whisper, yet somehow conveying more authority — and a greater potential for violence — with that soft tone than he had when he'd spoken more harshly.
     Laura's stomach clenched and twisted. A sickening wave of dread swept through her.
     When Laura sat down, Wexlersh went to Melanie, took the girl by the hand, and led her away from the sofa, brought her to where he had been standing, and kept her between himself and Manuello.
     'No,' Laura said miserably, but the two detectives ignored her.
     Looking at Wexlersh, Manuello said, 'Now?'
     'Now,' Wexlersh said.
     Manuello reached under his coat and brought out a pistol. It wasn't the weapon that he had taken off Earl, and Laura didn't think that it was the detective's own service weapon either, because she was pretty sure policemen usually used revolvers. That was what Wexlersh was holding: a revolver. The moment she saw the new pistol in Manuello's hand, she had a sharper sense that something was amiss.
     Then Manuello took a burnished metal tube from his coat pocket and began to screw it onto the barrel of the pistol. It was a silencer.
     Earl said, 'What the hell are you doing?'
     Neither Wexlersh nor Manuello answered him.
     'Jesus Christ!' Earl said in shock and horror as a sudden and unacceptable realization dawned upon him.
     'No shouting,' Wexlersh said. 'No screaming.'
     Earl thrust off the sofa, to his feet, uselessly struggling to free himself of the handcuffs.
     Wexlersh rushed at him, clubbed him with the revolver, once on the shoulder, once alongside the face.
     Earl fell backward onto the sofa.
     Manuello had gotten the threads of the silencer misaligned with those that had been machined into the barrel of the pistol, and he had to unscrew it and try again.
     Still looming over Earl, Wexlersh looked at his partner and said, 'Will you hurry up?'
     'I'm trying, I'm trying,' Manuello said, wrestling with the stubborn attachment to the pistol.
     'You crazy bastards are going to kill us,' Earl said through split and bleeding lips.
     When Laura heard their fate put into blunt words, she wasn't surprised. She realized that she had known, if only subconsciously, what was coming, had sensed it when the detectives had first entered the room, had felt it even more strongly when they