Peach drove. And drove. She knew where she was going and who she had to see. She knew where Chayla was taking her, carried along by the winds at her back.

53

The patio door was locked.

The man raised his gun and fired two shots into the floor-to-ceiling window beside the door. The glass around the bullet holes became white frost, and cracks wriggled outward like lightning bolts. Wind punched loudly through the two holes, increasing the pressure on the weakened frame, and when he fired again, the window exploded inward in a hail of diamonds.

Tarla squeezed her eyes shut. Glass rained down on her hair. Her ears rang with the explosions. The air in the sunroom smelled burnt, and sheetrock dust made a cloud where the three bullets tunneled into the rear wall.

He stepped through the shattered window past jagged teeth clinging to the frame. The storm came with him, loud and uncontrolled. Curtains on both ends of the wall of glass began to dance. Ten feet away, Tarla felt spray soaking her face. With the window broken, the zoo cage had swung open, and wild animals poured inside.

The man with the gun was dressed as he had been ten years earlier, all in black. The hood covered his face, but seeing him, Tarla knew it was the same man. This time, she knew she wouldn’t walk away alive, waking up in a hospital days later. None of them would. She had a vague curiosity about what it would feel like when he shot her, how much it would hurt, how long it would take her to die. She tried to swallow her regrets, which were numerous. Cab’s smile filled her mind, as it had the first time.

Caprice stood next to her, stiff as a corpse. Her hair sparkled with fragments of glass. Her eyes were dark little stones, and her jaw was set, fiercely determined. She looked like a cat on the hunt, ready to pounce. Tarla wanted to catch her eye and say: You won’t win.

Diane hadn’t moved. This man had come for her, but she looked serene, as if the Chopin funeral march were playing calmly in her head, a piano serenade for the soon-to-be dead. For the first time in a long while, Tarla thought that her friend looked free. She realized it had been a terrible mistake for Diane ever to enter the election campaign. Politics changed you. It made you worse than you were. Now, with that burden lifted, she could simply be Diane again, if only for a few more moments.

Time hung in the air, the way a bubble floats, but every bubble has to pop eventually. The man took a step toward the three of them. He couldn’t miss, not at this distance. Even so, he was hurt. His free hand clutched his side. Tarla could see a tear in the fabric, drenched red with blood.