Nineteen
The phone dropped from Lori's
hand, her mouth agape
and her face ashen with shock.
"It's Ralph."
Karen shot to her feet and knocked her chair back
against the wall. She thundered out the back door. Carol and Amy began
screaming for Lori to call the sheriff.
The world about her slowed to a crawl, and her heart
pounded like a drum. She had no time to call for help. Amy had said that
Ralph carried a shotgun in his truck. Pitting a baseball bat against a
man with a gun would only get Karen killed. If Ralph was drunk, even the
children could be in danger. The lives of her family and her friends
needed defending against deadly force, and she had only one way to defend
them.
She ran to the bedroom, leaped onto the bed and
lifted the rifle from its mounting. She fetched a clip of ammunition
locked in the dresser. It took forever to rummage for the key tapped to
the underside of a top drawer, but only a few more precious seconds to
slap the cartridge in place, chamber a round and thumb the safety switch
to the off position.
Amy and Carol had gone out the front way. Lori
collided with the two as they came running back in, screaming, pursued by
Ralph's pickup barreling down the street, leaving a wake of blue exhaust
and filling the quiet neighborhood with the roar of its engine. Ralph
leaned over the steering wheel with his shaggy hair blowing in the wind.
A shotgun protruded from the side window.
Lori shoved the door closed. She turned and dived
for Amy standing just behind her. She caught the woman about her willowy
hips and took her down an instant before the front picture window imploded
and showered the living room in clouds of sparkling shards of glass.
The pickup thundered on down the street, the sound of
its engine diminishing. Tires screamed around the corner a block away.
Lori rose to her feet, leaving Amy weeping in a
glittery coat of sparkling dust. Larger shards of glass crunched beneath
Lori's feet when she shifted weight to reach for the fallen rifle.
Carol rose unharmed from behind the couch, wide-eyed
with horror.
"Lori, no!"
Lori went out the back way. She leaped off the porch
with the rifle clutched in both hands and hit the ground at a dead run.
Tires squalled as Ralph made his second and final turn onto Karen's
street. It didn't seem possible for her to intercept the man in time.
Fate intervened. Backfiring and spewing black smoke, the pickup bogged
down and all but rolled to a stop a half block away. Ralph racing the
engine wildly, giving Lori time to reach the curb in front of Karen's
house.
Tires squalled again, and the truck came roaring
closer.
She brought the rifle to her shoulder as she had done
once before on the rifle range and took aim along its sights. Ralph's
haggard face registered shock when he saw her. He shoved the shotgun
further out the window and swung it around to bear on her.
The shotgun boomed once, and then the rifle cracked
in Lori's hands. The barrel flew an inch or two into the air, but dropped
back down on target in an instant. She fired again and the windshield of
the truck turned white and disintegrated. She fired a third time and the
truck jerked violently sideways. It toppled slowly onto its side and slid
to a stop in a grating shriek of dragging sheet metal.
Lori lowered the rifle, but only slightly, and she
waited, refusing in that moment of absolute clarity to lower her guard.
The door of the truck was pushed open. A bloody arm
appeared, and then the shotgun. Ralph McBride pulled himself up and out
of the cab and slid to the ground. He collapsed in a heap, the shotgun
clattering to the pavement beside him. He wiped blood from his face with
his forearm.
He saw her and grew rigid with gathering fury.
Muttering incoherently, he reached for the shotgun with his one good arm
and climbed painfully to his feet. At the same moment, Karen burst from
her house with a roar of animal rage and the baseball bat held high over
her head.
Lori had no time to call attention to herself. Ralph
swung the shotgun around to fire at the woman from the hip. Lori’s rifle
barked one final time, and Ralph spun and slammed against the hood of his
overturned pickup. He dropped to his knees, threw his head back, and
bellowed pain and anguish.
Unaware of what had transpired in the final few
seconds of her mindless attack, Karen Radcliff rushed up to the wounded
man and began systematically beating him over the head with Leslie's shiny
aluminum baseball bat.
