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  "All right then," he said to Paul. "I'll do what you say. What do we do?"

  There was no one inside the pistol range, so they were free to discuss the details. "The best time would be on a Sunday morning," Paul said. "Ryan brings Charlie to Sunday school, but then goes home. He's there alone for a good hour. There are woods behind his house, and a road on the other side of them. We could pull the car into the woods, go through them to the house. Nobody sees the car or us...except Ryan."

  "Do we wear disguises or what?"

  "We'll have to. Maybe just something nondescript like jeans and a windbreaker, and we can use stockings over our faces."

  "Will you even bring a gun then?"

  "I'll bring it, but I won't use it. Let's pray that I won't have to use it."

  They decided to go the following Sunday. Both would blame illness for keeping them at home. Sunday School started at 9:00, so Peter and Paul met at Paul's house at 8:15 and climbed into Paul's car. They drove outside of Buchanan, where Paul wound his way along several country roads until he came to a dirt lane that led into a copse of woods. He drove in until the lane ended in undergrowth, where his car was not visible from the road. Then the two got out. Paul took a holstered revolver from beneath the seat and strapped it onto his belt.

  "Your .38?" Peter asked, and Paul nodded. Both were wearing dark blue jeans and loose fitting jackets. Paul tugged a navy stocking cap over his head, and Peter put on a red baseball cap with no insignia. From his pocket Paul took a nylon stocking that he handed to Peter. "We'll put them on when we get there," he said. Then he turned and started to walk into the woods.

  It was scarcely two hundred yards from the end of the lane to where the woods stopped, marking the line of Douglas Ryan's large back yard. The two men stopped at the edge of the trees, and looked carefully at the windows of the house, but saw no movement within.

  "Come on," Paul said, quickly leading Peter into and across the open space, so that they stopped against the back wall of the large stone house. Then they edged their way toward the attached garage to their left. Through the back window Peter could see only one car, a black Jaguar sedan. The second bay was empty.

  "He's not here," Paul said. "Taking Charlie to Sunday School. This is fine. We'll just wait here."

  In less than ten minutes, they heard the sounds of an engine, and looked through the garage's back window and the small panes of glass that ran along the front of the garage. Peter saw a dark red Mercedes come up the long drive from the road below. As it drew closer to where they hid, Peter could feel his heart pounding. "Put the stocking on," Paul said, doing as he had suggested.

  Peter took off his cap and pulled the sheer fabric snugly over the top of his head, thinking that it still bore the traces of perfume, and wondered if it had belonged to Paul's wife. Then the thought vanished as he heard the squeal of brakes around the front of the garage, and knew that the time had come.

  Next to him, Paul pulled the pistol out of its holster and looked at the boy. With the stocking over his head, Paul's face looked like that of some jungle idol made of ancient and rotting wood, and Peter wondered if he looked half as terrifying. "You ready?" Paul said, and Peter nodded. "Remember," Paul whispered through the nylon, "we're doing this for the girl, and for God, no other reason."

  "No other reason," Peter said, and his own voice sounded small and weak to him. But he must be strong, and he would be. "Let's do it," he said, and now the words were more energetic, rippling with excitement and the holy fire that he felt building in his belly.

  Peter heard the car door slam shut, and followed Paul as he ran around the side of the garage, gun in hand. Ryan was standing near the car, staring at them. He was wearing a down filled jacket and held a thick copy of the Sunday New York Times in his left hand. His right held a keycase. He wasn't a large man, but was slightly overweight, and his nearly bald head shone red in the cold air.

  "Inside," Paul said, gesturing with the pistol.

  "What the hell is this?" Ryan said. His voice was deeper than Peter had expected. He did not move.

  "We'll explain once we're inside," Paul said. "Now move."

  Ryan led them to the front door and unlocked it. The two men followed him in. "Okay, now what?" Ryan asked as Paul shut the door and double locked it. "You want money, what? I don't have a lot of cash in the house, but you're welcome to it, just go, huh?"

  Paul shook his head. "We didn't come for money."

  "So what do you want then, breakfast?"

  "Shut up," Peter said. He hated this man, hated his money, hated his attitude, and hated most of all what he was, what he had done to his daughter. "Just shut up, we'll do the talking."

  Ryan looked at Peter and nodded, unable to keep a smirk from his face. "Okay then, talk."

  "Sit down," Paul said, and gestured with his pistol to a sectional sofa on which Douglas Ryan sat, his weight more on his knees than his buttocks. Despite his bravado, Peter saw that he had broken a sweat. His globe-like head was speckled with dots of moisture. "You have a daughter."

  Only slight interest shone in Ryan's eyes. "Yeah?"

  "You've been doing things with her."

  It shook him for a moment, but he recovered quickly enough to shrug. "Sure. Fathers do things with their daughters -- go on picnics, sledding...take her to Sunday school."

  "That's not what I mean. I mean things you shouldn't do."

  Ryan's small, feral eyes narrowed, and Peter was pleased to see that he swallowed heavily before he responded. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Mr. Ryan," Paul said in a voice whose coldness Peter admired, "have you molested your daughter?"

  The coldness was nearly matched by Ryan's voice, but fury made it shake. "Who the hell are you?"

  "Someone who's concerned, that's all. Both of us."

  "Well, both of you can go fuck yourselves. What business is it of yours what I do in my own house?"

  Peter would have lost it then, had Paul not taken the gun and pointed it directly at Ryan's snarling face. "It's our business because we've got a gun. We can kill you and walk away from here. Now you answer my question, sir, or I'll shoot you this minute. Answer me."

  Both of Ryan's chins quivered, but in rage, not in fear. This was not a man, Peter thought, who was ever afraid, because he was always right. No matter what the situation, what Douglas Ryan did was always the right thing to do, simply because it was what Douglas Ryan wanted to do.

  "What do you want me to say? She told somebody, didn't she, that little bitch. And now here you are. You wouldn't be here if you didn't already know, so what the hell am I supposed to do, deny it? What do you want me to do?"

  "Then you admit it?" Paul said.

  "Yeah, yeah, I admit it, so the fuck what? Now what do you want? You wanta shoot me?"

  "I want you to give custody of the girl to her mother."

  "You do, huh? Well, wantin' and gettin' aren't the same thing. Why should I?"

  "I told you -- because we've got the guns."

  "You got shit. You're not gonna kill me. Somebody who's concerned about a kid getting a little too much love doesn't have the balls to kill anybody. You're nothing but burglars, or kidnappers maybe. You can't go to the police, you can't go to anybody, so why don't you two faggots just go home!"

  The word rocked Peter, and he drew his arms inward.

  "Yeah, that means you, kid," Ryan said. "Charlie's my daughter, and I'll do whatever the hell I want with her, and there's not a damn thing you two yahoos can do about it, so why don't you go fuck each other and let -- "

  Peter didn't even think about yanking the gun from his waistband or pulling the trigger. He just did it, and watched the goose feathers, tinted with red, puff out from the hole in Douglas Ryan's jacket. Peter pulled the trigger over and over, even when the only movement that came from Ryan was the twitching of his body as each .45 caliber bullet hit him. He didn't know which was louder -- the booming of the gun in his ears, or the pounding of the blood in his head.
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  Finally he realized that the pistol was no longer responding, and when he looked down, he saw that the slide was back, and the gun was empty. Then he looked over at Paul, and saw him holding his own pistol. Paul was staring at him as though he could not believe what had just happened. Peter knew that he had to speak, had to say something, and finally he did.

  "He wouldn't have stopped." Peter's voice was like a whisper in the sudden silence of the large room. "He would have kept at her over and over, you know that."

  Paul Blair seemed to shake himself then, as if shoving his shock to the back of his mind so that he could do what had to be done. Then he pulled the stocking from over his head and began to give commands like an officer. "All right, pick up those cases, every one," he said, pointing to the empty cartridge cases littering the pale gray carpet. "How many did you fire?"

  "Six. I loaded six."

  They searched until they found them all. The last had rolled beneath a miniature rocking chair which held an assortment of stuffed animals. There was no need to wipe anything for fingerprints. They had kept thin gloves on ever since they had left the car.

  "Let's go," Paul said. "Out the back." They went through the living room, but as they passed the stairs to the second floor Paul stopped, and seemed to struggle with himself. "I have to see," he said, and ran up the stairs. Peter followed, wondering what he meant.

  He realized Paul's meaning as they stood in the doorway to the little girl's room. It was a dream bedroom. Nearly everything, including the large canopy bed, was in pink. The carpet was thick and luxurious. Lifesized stuffed animals stood, sat, or crouched in every corner. Lace abounded everywhere.

  "Now I know," Paul said. "We were right." Peter looked at him quizzically. "This isn't for her -- it isn't her fantasy." Paul gestured broadly at the cloying sweetness of the room. "It's his." He turned and headed back down the stairs. Peter followed.

  They walked across the yard and through the woods without speaking. Although he had killed a man, the fact had not yet registered on him. The main thought in his mind was the childlike hope that Paul was not angry with him.

  ~ * ~

  My God, thought Paul Blair, pushing aside branches, crushing underbrush in his hurry to be free of these clinging woods in which he had become entrapped. My God, what have I done?

  He hadn’t even known the boy had a pistol until he had heard the first shot. And then he had been powerless to do anything but watch and listen to the sound that deafened his ears as it crushed his soul. The boy had killed.

  After all his attempts to convince Peter that violence could no longer be the answer, the boy had brought along a gun, and, given the first opportunity, had used it. True, the man had been maddening, a monster with no thought for anything except himself, a true sociopath, as Paul understood the meaning of the term. But there might have been some other way. Peter hadn't had to kill him.

  But now he had, and there was no doubt that Douglas Ryan deserved his fate. Still, it was not supposed to happen the way it had. Paul should have been the only one to have blood on his hands, and now the boy shared the guilt as well. Paul felt dreadful, as though he had corrupted the boy, and expected the hand of God to come down and smite him at any moment. The most he could do now was to make sure that, whatever happened, Peter was not involved further. The violence, all the violence, would have to stop. No more threats, no more intimidation. This was the last of it.

  Paul started the car right away, and nervously drove out the lane. But there was no one to see them as they pulled onto the road. They hadn't gone far before Peter broke the silence.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "It was just that...when he talked about her that way...I was back there for a second. Back when you saved me that day. And it was him again. But this time I could do something about it. Something to save...myself maybe. Save the girl." His words faltered in the air between them, the rationalizations falling apart like mist. "I didn't mean to do it," he finished weakly.

  "Where did you get the gun?" Paul asked.

  "It's my father's."

  "He'll miss it then."

  "I doubt it. He hasn't looked at it in years."

  "Is it registered to him?"

  "I don't think so. He said something about the black market."

  "All right then. Give it to me. And the empty cases."

  "You're going to get rid of it?"

  "Yes," Paul said. But he had no intention of doing that. He would keep it, so that if he were ever arrested for what the law thought of as his crimes, he would take the blame for Douglas Ryan's death as well, and have the gun to prove it. He would save Peter Hurst a second time if he could.

  When they arrived at where Peter had left his car, Paul put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "We need to think about this, about what's happened, both of us. There's no time to talk now, but later this week, all right?"

  Peter nodded. "Okay."

  "And until we see each other again, pray for that man's soul. And pray for both of us too."

  Chapter 37

  Frank Byers found Douglas Ryan when he and his wife Mindy drove Charlie Ryan home from Sunday school after her father didn't pick her up or answer his phone. Charlie walked into the house with Frank, and they saw Ryan's bloody body at the same time. Charlie didn't cry, and Frank thought that was odd, when he had sufficiently recovered from the sight to think again.

  At first he thought Charlie Ryan must have gone into shock, but she seemed perfectly rational, and went upstairs with Mindy to wait in her bedroom until the ambulance and police arrived. Mindy found her indifference to her father's murder equally disquieting, but the emergency medics who examined her found no sign of shock whatever.

  And when Olivia Feldman talked to her, saw the girl's bedroom, and understood the domestic situation, she thought she knew why Charlie didn't care that her father was dead. It was only when she gently asked the girl if her father had ever done anything to her that she thought he shouldn't have that she began to cry. It seemed then as if she would never stop.

  Olivia left the girl with Mindy Byers and went downstairs where Rich Zielinski was supervising the scene. "I want the girl to go to Victim's Services," she told him. "There was something very strange going on in this house, and I want to know what it was. I suspect abuse. Talk to the girl's teachers, friends, minister, anybody close to her." She didn't remind Zielinski to treat the girl with kid gloves. Everyone in her department knew to do so, and Victims' Services had made it their mission to lessen pain. "What's the story here?"

  "Ernie says probably .45 caliber. Shot at least five times in the chest and gut."

  "Damn. I'd hoped for a .38."

  "Your crusader again?"

  "It fits, doesn't it? If I'm right about the abuse. There's no worse slimeball than the one who hits on a kid, especially if she's his own. This guy'd be a tailor-made victim. And there was no theft involved. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. What's the victim's line?"

  "Farm equipment."

  "Okay, maybe it was just a John Deere hit team."

  Zielinski chuckled. "Maybe, but I don't think it was our other boy. Different gun, different M.O. The other victims were one shot, very clean, very efficient. But whoever nailed this guy was plenty pissed."

  "Let's try to get some solid evidence anyway. Where'd he come from? He had to drive out here, park somewhere nearby. Check the drive, what's on the other side of those woods out back, the whole drill, okay?"

  "You know it."

  By Sunday night Olivia knew that the killer had come two hundred yards through the woods in back, and had parked his car in a short dirt road that turned off a rural route. The cold had hardened the soil so that the investigators could not distinguish any specific tire tracks. The killer had left no other trace behind except the broken brush that marked his passage through the woods.

  Olivia got to bed late that night, and lay awake for a long time, thinking to herself, Is it you? Is it, you shit? But she heard no answers in the night.


  Chapter 38

  Though he opened himself up to guilt, Peter Hurst could feel none at all. What he had felt at the time, and what he felt now in retrospect was a tremendous cleansing feeling, as though Jesus himself had baptized him in the waters of the Jordan, washing all his sins away. It was, he thought, what sex with the woman you loved and married must be like.

  All the power he had felt when he spoke before the CCYC, molding people with his words, was as nothing compared to this far greater strength, this strength that could end an unrepentant sinner's life just as easily as God could do. And that Ryan man was unrepentant. Though Paul's request that they pray for his soul was well meant, it was useless. Ryan had died in sin and would remain in hell throughout eternity, paying for his crimes. All the prayers in the world would not change that.

  And it had been Peter Hurst who had put him there.

  Peter thought feverishly about what steps to take next. He could see that Paul was weakening, due in large part to his fears for Peter, that the boy not become involved in the types of acts Paul had committed in Christ's name. But Peter was already involved. He had become a Revenger of Blood, and was delighted by it. He knew beyond question that this was what the Lord had intended for him, why God had given him into the hands of that monster when he was small, and delivered him through Paul's actions. It was why God had thrown the two of them together at that abortion factory all those years later. And it was why he would keep on doing what he knew he had to do, no matter what Paul Blair said or did.

  But still, he needed Paul. Paul seemed to somehow know what transgressions were being committed, and who was committing them. So Peter would keep on working at the clothing store, keep shooting with Paul, if Paul would let him, and continue to share Paul's concerns. And his secrets.