to the list of people for whom arrest warrants were outstanding. He sought the name Nathan Palmer—and began to make a list of curious facts.
57
For an instant, Megan didn’t recognize the intruder, but then she identified him by his voice, which she had heard earlier in the day, on the phone. Lee Shacket.
His hair was no longer blond, but brown. His neatly trimmed beard had been shaved off. Other changes in his appearance were too subtle to pinpoint, but he had about him a disturbing otherness.
Woody lay motionless, and when she spoke his name louder than before, he didn’t respond with any movement. Her thundering heart pounded faster, and she thought, What have you done to him, you sonofabitch?
Shacket’s right hand was on Woody’s head. On Woody’s face.
Megan had the Heckler in a two-hand grip, just like she’d been taught, the front sight fixed on Shacket’s face, the only thing she could see of him as he knelt at the other side of the bed, the boy between them, but her knocking heart shook her arms, something that never happened on a shooting range. At twenty-some feet, even when you were ready steady, a head shot was a tricky deal, a chest shot always better.
“Mommy wants to shoot the hundred-million-dollar man,” Shacket said. “Your mommy doesn’t know what’s good for her, but she’ll learn soon enough.”
She gave voice to her fear. “What have you done to him?”
His smile was wolfish. “Just touched him. Being touched seems to traumatize the little dummy. He’s stiff as a board, petrified. He doesn’t like being touched, at least not by me.”
As Shacket stroked Woody’s face with one hand, Megan said, “Get away, get away from him.”
“He doesn’t like being touched by me,” Shacket repeated, continuing to touch the boy. “The little freak is a big snob, just like his mommy. Mommy Megan thinks she’s so much better than other people. Even a hundred-million-dollar man isn’t good enough to touch her.”
She dared to take a step closer to him, another step, but she couldn’t yet keep the front sight where it needed to be, her heart beating so loud in her ears that she could no longer hear the windstorm if it still raged. Even in her paranoid days, when she’d first moved here and imagined a hundred scenarios in which nothing but a gun would save her and Woody, she hadn’t foreseen a situation like this, with the boy intervening between her and a threat, the only possible shot too dangerous to take.
“I called the police,” she lied.
“That would be too bad if you did. That would be a big mistake. We all make mistakes though, don’t we, Megan? I made one when I left my pistol in your kitchen earlier, after I ate that hot bitch’s tits.” He snickered and shook his head. “No, that’s not right, it was a steak. In your kitchen, it was a steak, and it wasn’t as good as Justine’s breasts.”
Maybe drugs fueled Shacket, but he was also inarguably insane. He began to lose control of his face, features failing to cooperate in a coherent expression. Twitches and ticks and squints and crooked grins and ill-formed frowns contested ceaselessly.
His increasing instability and his claim of cannibalism were force magnifiers for Megan’s fear. Her chest became tight, and she drew breath in ragged inhalations.
He said, “There would be no future for any of us if you really did call the police. But you’re a terrible liar, Megan. I smell the deception as surely as I smell your twat. Now let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to have my fantasy, after all. You and me, just like it always should have been. You know where my right hand is?”
“Get away from him.”
“Do you know where my right hand is?” he shouted, the lamplight lending an eerie glow to his eyes.
“Your hand’s on his face,” she said.
“But you can’t see precisely how it’s placed. The dummy’s eyes are closed, Megan. My thumb is on his right lid, my forefinger on his left. Can you picture that, Megan? I could press hard, dig deep, take out his eyes in two seconds. Then he’d be mute, blind, stupid, three times useless.” He put his left hand to the back of Woody’s head, to prevent him from pulling away. “You want me to gouge out his eyes, or you want to stop where you are and discuss options?”