The Taking

quite equals a father-and-child reunion."
        Molly found her voice and was relieved to hear no tremor in it, no reflection of the fact that her thundering heart boomed hard enough to rattle bone on bone in her knees. "What are you doing here?"
        "Where else should I be but with my only remaining family?"
        "I'm not afraid of you."
        "I'm not afraid of you, either, sweetheart."
        The 9-mm pistol nestled in her raincoat. She slipped her right hand into that pocket, closed it around the checked grip, and hooked her index finger on the trigger guard.
        "Going to shoot me again?" he asked, once more with a note of amusement.
        Render was handsome now, as he had always been; and once he had been uncannily charming, too, sufficiently winning in his ways that her mother, who even as a young woman had a keen insight into people, had been seduced by him and swept into marriage.
        Thalia had soon learned the consequences of her naiveté. She'd mistaken Render's possessiveness for love. She discovered that what had seemed to be an admirable male desire to cherish and protect had in fact been an almost demonic need to control.
        Rain-slicked, rain-beaded, Michael Render stood here in his true persona, reveled in it. But there was something different about him, too, a disturbing change that Molly could sense but not define. His seductive gray eyes had a luster to rival the luminosity of the early rain, as if the storm had filled him to the brim and pooled now within his skull.
        "I've given up guns," he assured her. "They're effective but so impersonal. Between the idea and the reality, the thrill is lost, and murder by gun fades in memory too fast. In a year or two, reliving it doesn't even stir an erection."
        By the time Molly was two years old, her mother had endured enough of Render's intimidation, his irrational jealousy, his self-pitying tantrums, his threats, and finally his violence. Choosing freedom at the cost of poverty, she had taken nothing from their marriage except her most personal possessions and her daughter.
        "And let me tell you, Molly, dear, when a virile man is confined to solitary accommodations in a sanitarium for the criminally insane, even in one of the progressive institutions with all its comforts, he is denied the satisfaction of women, and to achieve relief, he really needs all of the erotic memories he can get."
        During and following the divorce, Render had initially pursued sole custody of his child, then joint custody. When the legal system proved slow enough to try his short-fuse patience and when judges admonished him for his behavior in their courtrooms, he argued his case in personal confrontations with Thalia, often in public places, red-faced and shouting threats, which resulted in the issuance of restraining orders that diminished his chances of obtaining joint custody. Contempt for the restraining orders had landed him in jail for thirty days and had put an end to even his supervised visitation rights.
        "After a year of isolation," he said now, "I'd all but forgotten the feel of your mother-the taste of her mouth, the weight of her breasts. I had cheap whores who stayed in memory better." A smile, a shrug. "Your mother was a boring porcelain bitch."
        "Shut up." Molly couldn't summon any volume, only a whisper. As always, Render insisted on dominance, and to her chagrin, Molly was unable to assert herself, as though twenty years had dropped out from under her, plunging her into childhood again. "Shut up."
        "After two years, the memory of your head-shot, gut-shot little playmates didn't do it for me anymore, either. A bullet is just too impersonal. A bullet isn't a blade, and a blade isn't bare hands. I've found that strangulation stays vivid in the memory. It's much more intimate than merely pulling a trigger. I stiffen even now at the thought of it."
        Molly drew the pistol from her raincoat pocket.
        "Ah," he said with evident satisfaction, as though the intention behind his visit to the tavern had been to taunt her into precisely this confrontation. "I've come a long way through bad weather to ask you a few questions-but first to tell you a little story, so you'll better understand your dear old dad."
        The moment was increasingly surreal. Claustrophobic. Paralytic. Emblematic.
        She stood at the vise point between the jaws of the past and the