Sunken Graves, Alan Lee [all ebook reader .txt] 📗

to an overstuffed armchair, dragging Hathaway with him. No one noticed, the crowd in survival mode.

Jennings dropped the horse sculpture with a clang.

Lynch was dazed, blinking, and bleeding at the mouth. He hadn’t released Hathaway. In his confusion, he was still trying to skewer her with the hook. A man possessed.

Jennings lifted his left leg. The weight of the shotgun pulled his foot downward at the knee. He lowered the shoe to rest on Lynch’s chest, over his heart.

Fire crawling on the ceiling now.

Hathaway screaming. The hook fell, barely missing her face, gouging the wood. Lynch yanked it out again. He turned to face Jennings, dimly realizing his danger, the foot on his chest.

Jennings shoved his left hand into his left pocket. Fingers numb. Light headed. Fumbling and finding the key.

An absurd thought in Jennings’ mind. He was poised over Lynch like Virtue over the vanquished Tyrant on the seal of Virginia. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

He stepped up, his weight briefly pressing down on Lynch through the shotgun. Tugged on the string and felt it jerk against his upper thigh.

Lynch’s final vision was Jennings above, tendrils of fire over his head.

The trigger clicked backward. The 00 buckshot, a subsonic load, erupted.

Lynch’s ribcage shattered into sand and fragments. His heart liquified. The exploding gases entered Lynch’s chest and blew a starburst around the ragged muzzle stamp. Peter Lynch died with his eyes fixed hatefully on Jennings, his teeth forever locked together, gums and lips bloody, steel gripped tightly in his right fist.

Questioned later, party-goers would say they remembered the crash. It had been heard but not understood. A shotgun blast? It was loud but not enough to be a shotgun. Besides, how would someone get a shotgun into the party unnoticed? Not even Hathaway, squirming free, dizzy with pain and fear, had recognized the sound.

Hopping backward, Jennings struggled to believe it. His left tibia had absorbed the harsh recoil, a deep ache in his sore stub. The gun stock twisted inside the socket but the screws held. Heat off the suppressor melted some glue but not enough. The shotgun itself had never been visible.

Screaming members of the delirious crowd, still surging toward the front door, began to trip on the body and step over it, unaware.

Above the frantic noise, Hathaway said, “What happened?”

Jennings held a greasy mixture of relief and disgust in his chest. Shock kept the full effect palliated. He hauled her up by her good hand. “Let’s go.”

She kept the broken arm secured against her stomach and they joined the final rush escaping the fire. Jennings was hopping.

“Are you hurt?” said Hathaway.

“Are you hurt?”

“He broke my arm. I’ll be okay.”

Mr. Barry noticed Jennings struggling and he aided him through the door into the night air. Mr. Barry didn’t notice the blood dripping off Jennings’ shoe, nor the crimson footprints made by those who stumbled against the dead man.

58

Lynch’s house burned in the eyes of the partiers. The eastern corner of the house was engulfed, throwing light and shadow across the lawn. Officer Hudson shouting into his radio.

Jennings found Coach Murray and his wife and they all stood together. Hathaway held onto him with her undamaged arm, they watched.

The first sound of sirens reached them. Hudson had called the fire in quick.

A silhouette in the smoke. Chief Gibbs appeared, his head wreathed, carrying a little girl. A tall, bearded man followed, crying as a child would. Gibbs’ face contorted with hurt, maneuvering down the porch steps.

He set the girl onto the grass and straightened as best the gnarled pain would allow.

“Chief!” Officer Hudson met him there.

“Where’s Peter? Have you seen Peter?”

Hudson said no. He took the girl by the hand and pulled her away from the heat and Homer followed.

Gibbs searched the orange faces watching the fire.

“Peter? Peter! Where’s Peter?”

No one responded. Because no one knew.

Hathaway squeezed Jennings’ arm. Whispered, “Don’t say a word. Please?”

Gibbs looked until he found Jennings. They held one another there an instant until Jennings pressed his mouth into a grim line and gave a nod.

Gibbs’ shoulders sank.

He knew. In that flash, he knew everything. That he’d been too late, this his son’s life was over, that Jennings had been telling the truth about the lawyer in the basement, that everything, everything, was about to catch fire. He made a decision, that quick. High on pain and meds. He marched up the steps and into the smoke.

The firetruck navigated the drive, airhorn blaring, the front bumper narrowly missing luxury cars parked by valets. Red warning lights painting the scene. The truck stopped in a hiss of brakes and men in turnout coats poured from the extended cab. The sirens cut off. Hoses were retracted and latched onto the pumps. Half a dozen cell phone cameras recorded the scene.

The two squad cars parked as a firehose burst to life. A thick jet of water arced into the corner of the house.

In the chaos, a sound rang above the rest. A gunshot. A blast from inside the house and the attending host flinched as one.

“Oh no,” said Hudson.

No one moved. Or breathed. They waited and waited and the chief of police never came out. He’d been swallowed up.

More emergency lights coming up the drive, police and ambulances. As they arrived, there was an explosion from the bowels of the house. Fire had reached the jerry cans of gasoline in the basement, a final exclamation point on the life of Peter Lynch.

In his car, Jennings followed the ambulance carrying Daisy Hathaway to the hospital. Lynch had drugged her and broken her arm, and the paramedics insisted.

He made one brief stop, at a public dumpster in Roanoke City, seven miles from Lynch’s homestead. Into it Jennings deposited his makeshift left leg—his grandfather’s shotgun, his suppressor pieces, the ruined shoe, the modified foot and knee socket. The dumpster was due for collection on Monday.

He hopped back to his rental car, closed his eyes, and savored the heavy weight removed.

59

Sunday afternoon, Jennings was sitting in Our Daily Bread reading