Strangled - Brian McGrory [130]
I was about to open the door when Huck let out a low, guttural woof — more a directive to me than a warning to anyone else. I pulled my hand off the knob and looked back at him as he stared intensely at the door. His actions, or maybe they were reactions, were now making me tense.
Then another sound.
This one was more like footsteps — definitely movement, someone or something walking on the carpeted floor of my bedroom. I thought immediately of Edgar Sullivan, shot dead in a CVS a little more than twenty-four hours ago, and how unspeakably sad that really was. I thought of Joshua Carpenter, gunned down in the Boston Public Garden while he mourned his late wife. And now whoever did that might well be in my apartment, lying in wait for me.
I looked back at the dog and put a finger over my mouth, in the universal sign that requested he not bark. I’m not sure he understood, though maybe he did. Something creaked from behind the door, and then everything fell quiet.
I thought of stepping outside and calling the police. The police, at least one of them, might have been the bad guys in all this, given what I suspected Mac Foley was up to. So I put that plan on hold. I thought of calling Hank, but didn’t want to leave Elizabeth Riggs unprotected. I thought of calling Vinny Mongillo, but he was stuck in jail. I thought of calling Peter Martin, but unless I planned to nag the intruder to death, that wouldn’t do any good.
So I put my hand on the doorknob again. I was tired. I was frustrated. I was furious over having been unwittingly lured into the center of a lurid tale, alliteration intended. I was even angrier over the fact that people, innocent people, good people, had died. And in a more honest moment, I would probably confess that I felt more than a little guilty that I was still alive.
So without further ado, I flung the door open, simultaneously yelling, “Don’t fucking move!”
I’m not quite sure what I expected to find, though it probably involved a man in a black ski hat holding a semiautomatic weapon pointed at my face. Didn’t matter; I wanted to confront whoever it was that was trying to do whatever it was that they were doing. I wanted to see the face. I wanted to take a swing. Maybe, just maybe, I’d surprise him. Maybe I’d wrestle him to the ground, knock him out cold, summon authorities, and gain my biggest clue yet as to what the hell was going on.
Well, I didn’t find that. Any of that.
No, what I found was a five-foot-seven-inch woman with a short mop of blond hair, and big blue eyes that were at once sleepy and surprised, wearing one of my blue oxford cloth shirts and nothing else, balancing a glass of water in her hand while she climbed into my rumpled bed. Her name was Maggie Kane, and she said to me, very simply, “I won’t.”
Huck, standing directly behind me, brave boy that he was, inched out in front, slowly at first, hesitantly — until Maggie called out, “Who’s this?” And then he went scampering over, relief all across his face, his tail slapping against the side of the bed.
Me, I stayed in the doorway. Men might be dogs, but I didn’t want to act like one here. Plus I was too tired. And shocked.
I hadn’t seen her since before we were supposed to become husband and wife, meaning before she fled the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to get away from me and us, and before I had sat in Caffe Vittoria in Boston’s North End and decided that she wasn’t the woman I was meant to be with for the rest of my life. That seemed, by the way, like five centuries ago.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. I didn’t know if I should feel vindicated. I didn’t know if I should feel relieved. I didn’t know if I should feel anger, arousal, disdain, contempt, humiliation, or overwhelming joy.
But the reality was, I didn’t feel any of that. I didn’t feel any of that because I didn’t feel anything at all. I stood there in that doorway, looking at a barely attired woman who ninety-nine out of a hundred guys would have been jumping and screaming for joy to have found lying in their bed, and what I felt was nothing.