Free Testament by David Morrell Page A

hall was a mess after the firemen got through with it. He and Claire opened windows, but there was little breeze, and the thick smell of the smoke was everywhere.
    Then Claire disappeared, and when he went looking for her, he found her behind the unlocked closed door in the bathroom. She was sitting with the toilet cover down, her face slack and tired, staring emptily at the bathtub. Her jeans were wet and black from cleaning up.
    “Maybe that would help,” he said. “Go on and take a bath, why don’t you? Nothing’s going to happen this soon after the fire.”
    “There isn’t anything that will help,” she told him.
    “The police car is out front again, and the man is downstairs with the phone again. We’re safe enough now. Go on.”
    “I don’t even hate you anymore. That’s how tired I am.”
    He had been smiling, and the smile froze on his face, and the little spirit he had left simply died just then. It was all he could do to go back across the hall and check on Sarah in their room. She was asleep. In a moment he heard the water start rumbling into the bathtub, and at least that was something. The best he could hope for at any rate.
    By nine Claire was asleep next to Sarah, and he kept the house in darkness, wandering through it. He drank coffee with the detective on duty by the phone. He went back upstairs, couldn’t bear the smell of the smoke, and stood by the open window to clear his head and breathe.
    It was raining, had been raining for an hour, a slow steady drizzle that came straight down whispering onto the grass and the pavement. He raised the screen and leaned his head out, letting the rain soak his hair and trickle coldly across his neck, breathing the fresh cool air. The streetlight was out again. Except for a few rain-misted lights in some houses at the end of the street, everything was dark and dripping wet.
    The streetlight. He tried to convince himself that the busy anxious feeling in his stomach was just nerves, no reason for panic, but something was tugging at him from behind and something was pushing at him from in front and he panicked anyway, jerking his head back in through the window, cracking it as the explosions lit up the night like fireworks, like thunder and lightning that might have come with the rain. Five, eight, ten roaring flashes, he was never sure how many. A constant string of them from between the houses on the other side of the street, shotguns, downstairs windows shattering as he dove to the floor, and the window above him burst inward, glass crashing down on him, pellets whapping against the far wall.
    Claire sat up, startled. Sarah screamed. He groped to his knees, heart racing, water from his wet hair running ice cold down his back. A blast hit another window, slashing glass over Claire and Sarah. Claire wailed, dragging Sarah out of the bed with her, huddling with her on the floor as another volley hit the house and more glass ripped across the room and Sarah was hysterical.
    “Daddy! Daddy!”
    The shotguns stopped. He heard car doors opening, men shouting in the night. He was on his feet, trembling, peering out one corner of the window. The police. They were out of the cruiser, separating, running splashing through the pools of water and the rain toward the cover of the two big fir trees in front of the house. Webster, he was thinking. He had to get Webster. The police would have radioed for help. That didn’t matter. He had to get Webster.
    He swung around the bed to the phone, picking it up, trying to remember Webster’s number, and there was no dial tone. The line had been cut.
    “Stay here,” he told Claire and Sarah. He headed out the door toward the hall. “No,” he told them. “Get in the bathroom. Get in the bathtub. Anything for cover.” He didn’t wait. He was already hurrying down the hall, Sarah crying in the room behind him as he stumbled down the stairs, nearly bumping into the detective who had left the phone and was standing in the dark