Page 98 of Not a Word

“What’s that doing there?” Holden asked.

“Not much good to you up in your closet,” she said. “I want you to feel safe. Don’t you want to feel safe? It’s a crazy world out there.”

“I . . . guess.”

“And even if you keep it someplace where you can get your hands on it right away, it’s pretty useless if it’s not loaded.”

He sat up in bed. “What did you do?”

She brought out the box of ammunition, which had also been in the drawer. “You are good to go.”

“It’s loaded?”

Alicia smiled and nodded. She set it back in the drawer and closed it slowly. “There when you need it.”

“Nobody’s gonna break in here.”

“You never know.”

He looked unconvinced. “Makes me nervous.”

“Come on. You’ve kept that gun in your place for years. And you were a kid. You kept it with your baseball cards. That was irresponsible. This is different.”

Alicia won him over. The loaded gun stayed in the drawer. She was getting there. Now to get him to use it.

One evening, a breakthrough.

She’d got him wound up about how differently his life might have gone if his mother hadn’t screwed him up. He had all this natural talent. He could have become a comedian, maybe, he was such a good mimic. Or an environmentalist, a champion of causes. But that fear of losing his mother’s love, it gnawed away at him, made him feel worthless. He paced the living room, shaking his head, agreeing with her, saying he’d always had this dream of being a mountain climber.

Alicia thought, Seriously?

But he lacked the ambition, he said. Not just to climb mountains, but to accomplish anything of note. Alicia had come to the conclusion that Holden was, at his very core, an underachiever, and that his mother didn’t have all that much to do with it, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t happy to feed his need to blame her.

As he ranted, she went into the bedroom, returned with the gun, and put it in his hand.

“If she were here right now, what would you do?”

He looked at the gun, as if appreciating its real power—its potential to change his life—for the first time. He raised the gun, pointed at the door, as if someone were standing on the other side of it.

“I’d shoot her in the fucking head,” he said.

The following morning, he’d expressed regret for his behavior. Took the gun from the drawer, put it back in the shoebox, and placed it back on the closet shelf, as though afraid of what he might do with it if it were too close at hand.

She was starting to doubt whether he had it in him to get the job done. Sometimes, if you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself.

And then yesterday happened.

Talk about your clusterfuck.

Okay, so maybe things didn’t go off the way she’d hoped. That didn’t mean you let up the pressure. You didn’t give the enemy time to recover. You kept the heat on.

With Corky out of the room now, Alicia entered a number on her phone.

One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four.

Was she not going to accept her call? Maybe the cops were there. Or she was in the—

“Hello?”