Jeffy ricocheted from the Suavidad Beach where Amity was long dead, back to the town in which she was still alive, where she had better be alive, because the alternative wasn’t something that he could handle. He didn’t care that there were many parallel worlds in which his daughter remained breathing and vital even if she proved to be dead here, because this was the girl he’d loved for more than eleven years. He could love other versions of her—How could he not?—but in the thousands of days of their shared lives, he and this Amity laughed at the same things, sorrowed at the same things, weathered precisely the same vicissitudes of life, and no other Amity could be exactly like the one who’d filled his heart for more than a decade. She was the best thing that ever happened to him. Another Amity, no matter how nearly identical she might be to the one he raised, would not be his Amity. The loss of her would be real and devastating. Having failed her, he would dwell in despair all the remaining days of his life, this one life of many, this only life that mattered to him.

When he and Ed arrived in the master bedroom of the Pellafino house, the air was clean, as if the place hadn’t been attacked with gas. He half wondered if the key screwed up and delivered them to the wrong timeline. The silence was a relief from the ear-skewering squeal of the alarm in the other world, but such quiet was also a worry because from it he inevitably inferred that Falkirk’s work here was already concluded, with no one left to rescue.

Ed whispered, “Shotgun.”

As Jeffy handed over the weapon, men laughed somewhere on the second floor, and another man, much closer, called out, “Canker, Yessman—here, now!”

92

With Vince Canker and Roy Yessman, Lucas Blackridge searched the house, bottom to top, though there was no point to it. The gas had been introduced at such high velocity, with so many pounds of pressure behind it, that no one could have had time to flee the kitchen other than with a key that gave him access to the Everett Highways. Besides, there would have been no refuge upstairs, where the gas would have penetrated every corner at most four seconds after the ground-floor rooms were flooded.

He suspected Falkirk just wanted a few minutes alone with the unconscious woman because she was something of a looker. Blackridge knew his boss to be an arrogant ass, knew he hated women in general and pretty women in particular, and suspected him of being a pervert who liked to inflict pain on them. An unconscious woman wouldn’t give Falkirk the pleasure of a response to what torment he visited on her body. But maybe he intended to do the damage while she slept and have the gratification of her agony when she woke.

Blackridge had often considered arranging a fatal accident for Falkirk, with an eye toward perhaps moving into his position after the memorial service. However, the sonofabitch was well connected, and getting away with a disguised assassination would not be easy. In his present position with this cockamamie project, he was paid four times what he would have received anywhere else, and he didn’t want to wind up back in a civilian police department working more for the pension than for the salary.

They gave the creep ten minutes with the Coltrane woman and speculated among themselves what atrocity he might commit with her.

At the back of the house, as they were ready to turn around and go downstairs, Vince Canker decided he needed to take a piss, and he went into the upstairs hall bath to relieve himself. The urge was apparently communicable, because Yessman decided to wait for his turn in the facilities.

Blackridge continued toward the front of the house. As he drew near the stairs, he heard a sudden insufflation of air. There were no open windows on the second floor, and the sound, though muffled, seemed akin to the whoosh that always accompanied transit between timelines. He thought it might have come from beyond the open door to his left.

At the back of the house, Canker and Yessman laughed, being the type who found nothing funnier than bathroom humor.

Blackridge called out, “Canker, Yessman—here, now!”

He hurried into the master bedroom, drawing his pistol as he crossed the threshold, and there was Jeffrey Coltrane, incoming from elsewhere. On arrival, he must have lurched into this timeline and stumbled, which sometimes happened. Having dropped his weapon, he was bending down to retrieve it.

Blackridge said, “Don’t touch it.”

93

The guy rushed through the open door as Jeffrey pretended to have dropped the pistol. The thug was professional and quick and ready and not stupid, so he realized at once that he made a mistake by assuming his quarry was a milquetoast dealer in antiques and an eccentric physicist with no more street smarts than any tenured Harvard professor. He began to turn his head to the right, but had no time to dodge the blow. Ed stood behind the door, shotgun raised high, and he brought the butt plate of the stock down hard on the gunman’s head. Skin split, bone cracked, blood flowed, and the man folded to the floor as if he were wet origami.

The laughing men were still in high humor as they approached along the second-floor hall, evidently unaware that the first man had summoned them to action. Before they appeared in the doorway, screams rose from downstairs. The voice was female, shrill with as much anger as terror. Amity.

94

He was going to kill her.

His eyes were the crazy animal eyes of a vicious predator, cruel and strange. Amity knew there was a real chance Falkirk was going to kill her, and she intuited that the harder she resisted, the greater the likelihood he couldn’t stop himself from murdering her in the most painful way he could imagine. But she wasn’t able to stop resisting, either. She wasn’t being the courageous girl in a story, wasn’t fighting back just because that’s what she learned from novels. There was something inside her that she had never known was there until now, a ferocious sense of her right to be respected, to be left alone, to live. This creep hadn’t given to her the right to life, so he had no authority to take it from her. No one had given it to her, she’d been born with it, and this life was hers as long as she could defend it. Fighting for your life wasn’t just instinct, but also a duty, because life was a gift that came with a mission to fulfill. You were here for a purpose, and you needed to figure out what it was, and to let yourself be killed without a hell of a fight meant you had failed everyone you loved and everyone you might one day have loved. So as this creep dragged her out of the pantry by her hair, she on her back, even though he still held the gun in one hand, she cried out, “Asshole,” and reared up and punched him in the balls.

Although her father had taught her the nutcracker technique, resorting to it was of course embarrassing even in these extreme circumstances. She would rather have done something less intimate, like shooting him, but she didn’t have a gun. Anyway, although it was an embarrassing move, it was also satisfying and effective. The twist of her hair slipped from his grasp. His face was as contorted as that of a psycho clown, and from him came a combination wheeze and groan that would have been funny if Amity hadn’t been fighting for her life.

Her father wasn’t here, and neither was spooky old Ed, so she figured somehow they had ported out. They would be back. She had no doubt they would be back. Just maybe not in time.

She scrambled away from Falkirk on her hands and knees, at first with no destination, no purpose other than to put distance between her and him, but then she remembered the gun. Daddy’s gun. As they were preparing breakfast, he’d put the pistol on the counter by the bread box. She had never fired a gun before, but it couldn’t be that hard. Everyone used them in the movies. In the quick, when either you did the deed or died, the good guy or girl always put a hole in the bad guy or girl.

Abruptly she changed direction, frantically crawling toward the farther end of the kitchen. She almost made it to the bread box. She was maybe four feet from the counter on which her father’s gun lay, when Falkirk kicked her hard in the butt and sent her sprawling facedown on the floor.

95