With a shriek I dashed to the front door and locked it, and Thelma ran to the back door, locked it, and closed all the kitchen windows. The two of us ran into the bathroom, the only room that had a lock on the door. We crouched down, our weight against the door, holding hands while we listened to the front window take a blow from something heavy and shatter. Other windows shattered too. The crashing seemed to go on forever. We heard male voices call out threatening phrases filled with dirty names. “Dirty Reds! Go back to Russia!” Then the sound of tires peeling out. Then nothing at all.

We waited, crouched on the bathroom floor for fifteen minutes, fearing they might return. We got to our feet. We opened the bathroom door. The house was quiet. The neighborhood was quiet. We could hear birds. We came out of the bathroom and started slowly down the hall. The rooms that faced the backyard, the second bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, they were untouched. The windows in my office that faced the front were broken and red paint had splashed inside, with broken glass and red paint gleaming across the desk and floor.

We timidly made our way to the living room, where shards of broken glass and puddles of red paint lay everywhere, across the floor, across Thelma’s desk and her typewriter, splattered on the file cabinets and the furniture. The wet paint made awful little sucking sounds as it stuck to our shoes and we tracked it across the hardwood floors to the front door. I unlocked the door and opened it, and we gasped to find the long-decaying carcass of a dead dog lying there, and red paint all across the porch, the whole front of the house, glistening, still wet. Red paint spattered as well all over the MG, while lesser flecks dotted the Nash. The paint cans, still oozing, lay about. A big sledgehammer, itself covered in red paint, lay in front of the shattered front window. No point in calling the cops. We both knew that much.

I remembered Max Leslie sitting knee-deep in the vandalized swimming pool, red paint swirling in the depths. I could hardly catch my breath. “We have to get out of here. Fast.”

“We can’t leave without taking our files,” said Thelma. “Our files are incriminating, and they could come back, whoever they are.”

“We can’t carry those cabinets.”

“My nephews and my brother can. I’ll call. They’ll come right away.” Thelma went back inside, crying.

I stepped over the dead dog. The flies stirred and buzzed. I walked over to the Silver Bullet as though I were afraid of waking it. No longer silver but streaked with red paint, inside and out. I gently traced my finger through the paint and remembered Max Leslie telling me I was too young to have a past I’d regret. Well, I was certainly old enough now.