won’t be in the city tomorrow. No matter what happens to me, I need to know they will not be at risk.
Ondowsky is worried about what I may do with the information I’ve gotten, but he’s also confident. He’ll kill me if he can. I know this. What he doesn’t know is that I have been in these situations before, and won’t underestimate him.
Bill Hodges, my friend and sometime partner, remembered me in his will. There was the death benefit from his insurance policy, but there were other keepsakes that mean even more to me. One was his service weapon, a .38 Smith & Wesson Military and Police revolver. Bill told me that most city police now carry the Glock 22, which holds fifteen rounds instead of six, but that he himself was old-school, and proud of it.
I don’t like guns—hate them, in fact—but I will use Bill’s tomorrow, and I won’t hesitate. There will be no discussion. I had one conversation with Ondowsky, and that was enough. I will shoot him in the chest, and not just because the best shot is always the center mass shot, a thing I learned in the shooting class I took two years ago.
The real reason is
[Pause]
You remember what happened in the cave, when I hit the thing we found there in the head? Of course you do. We dream about it, and we’ll never forget it. I believe the force—the physical force—that animates these things is a kind of alien brain that has replaced the human brain which might have existed before being taken over. I don’t know where it originated, and I don’t care. Shooting this thing in the chest may not kill it. In fact, Ralph, I’m sort of counting on that. I believe there is another way to get rid of it for good. You see there’s been a glitch.
My mother just drove in. I’ll try to finish this later today or tomorrow.
3
Charlotte won’t let Holly help with the cooking; every time her daughter comes into the kitchen, Charlotte shoos her out. It makes for a long day, but the dinner hour finally arrives. Charlotte has put on the green dress she wears every Christmas (proud of the fact that she can still get into it). Her Christmas pin—holly and holly berries—is in its accustomed place over her left breast.
“An authentic Christmas dinner, just like in the old days!” she exclaims as she leads Holly into the dining room by the elbow. Like a prisoner being led into an interrogation room, Holly thinks. “I’ve made all your favorites!”
They sit across from each other. Charlotte has lit her aromatherapy candles, which give off a lemongrass scent that makes Holly want to sneeze. They toast each other with thimble glasses of Mogen David wine (an authentic oough if ever there was one) and wish each other a merry Christmas. Then comes a salad already dressed with the snotlike ranch dressing Holly hates (Charlotte thinks she loves it), and the dry-as-papyrus turkey, which can only be swallowed with lots of gravy to grease its passage. The mashed potatoes are lumpy. The overcooked asparagus is as limp and hateful as ever. Only the carrot cake (store-bought) is tasty.
Holly eats everything on her plate and compliments her mother. Who beams.
After the dishes are done (Holly dries, as always; her mother claims she never gets all the “smutch” off the pots), they repair to the living room, where Charlotte hunts out the DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life. How many Christmas seasons have they watched it? A dozen at least, and probably more. Uncle Henry used to be able to quote every line. Maybe, Holly thinks, he still can. She’s googled Alzheimer’s and found out there’s no way of telling what areas of the mind remain bright as the circuits shut down, one by one.
Before the film begins, Charlotte hands Holly a Santa hat . . . and with great ceremony. “You always wear it when we watch this,” she says. “Ever since you were a little girl. It’s a tradition.”
Holly has been a movie buff all her life and has found things to enjoy even in films the critics have roasted (she believes, for example, that Stallone’s Cobra is woefully underestimated), but It’s a Wonderful Life has always made her uneasy. She can relate to George Bailey at the beginning of the film, but by the end he strikes her as someone with a serious bipolar condition who’s arrived at the manic part of