Cat & Mouse

Sampson waved good-bye, saluted, and then he went around the corner of the house, which he bumped on the way out.

I was alone on the back porch steps, staring out over Nana’s moonlit garden, smiling like the fool I can be sometimes, but maybe not often enough.

I heard Sampson call out. Then his deep laugh came from the front of the house.

“Good night, watermelon-ass.”

Chapter 67

I CAME FULLY awake, and I wondered what I was afraid of, what the hell was happening here. My first conscious fear was that I was having a heart attack in my own bed.

I was spacey and woozy, still flying high from the party. My heart was beating loudly, thundering in my chest.

I thought that I had heard a deep, low, pounding noise from somewhere inside the house. The noise was close. It sounded as if a heavy weight, maybe a club, had been striking something down the hallway.

My eyes weren’t adjusted to the darkness yet. I listened for another noise.

I was frightened. I couldn’t remember where I left my Glock last night. What could possibly make that heavy pounding sound inside the house?

I listened with all the concentration I could command.

The refrigerator purred down in the kitchen.

A distant truck changed gears on the mean streets.

Still, something about that sound, the pounding noise, bothered me a lot. Had there even been a sound? I wondered. Was it just the first warnings of a powerful headache coming on?

Before I realized what was happening, a shadowy figure rose from the other side of the bed.

Soneji! He’s kept his promise. He’s here in the house!

“Aaagghhgghh!” the attacker screamed and swung at me with a large club of some sort.

I tried to roll, but my body and mind weren’t cooperating. I’d had too much to drink, too much party, too much fun.

I felt a powerful blow to my shoulder! My whole body went numb. I tried to scream, but suddenly I had no voice. I couldn’t scream. I could barely move.

The club descended swiftly again-this time it struck my lower back.

Someone was trying to beat me to death. Jesus, God. I thought of the loud pounding sounds. Had he gone to Nana’s room first? Damon and Jannie’s? What was happening in our house?

I reached for him and managed to grab his arm. I yanked hard and he shrieked again, a high-pitched sound, but definitely a man’s voice.

Soneji? How could it be? I’d seen him die in the tunnels of Grand Central Station.

What was happening to me? Who was in my bedroom? Who was upstairs in our house?

“Jannie? Damon?-” I finally mumbled, tried to call to them. “Nana? Nana?”

I began scratching at his chest, his arms, felt something sticky, probably drawing blood. I was fighting with only one arm, and barely able to do that.

“Who are you? What are you doing? Damon! Damon!” I called out again. Much louder this time.

He broke loose and I fell out of the bed, face first. The floor came at me hard, struck, and my face went numb.

My whole body was on fire. I began to throw up on the carpet.

The bat, the sledgehammer, the crowbar, whatever in hell it was-came down again and seemed to split me in two. I was burning up with pain. Ax! Has to be ax!

I could feel and smell blood everywhere around me on the floor. My blood?

“I told you there was no way to stop me!” he screamed. “I told you.”

I looked up and thought I recognized the face looming above me. Gary Soneji? Could it possibly be Soneji? How could that possibly be? It couldn’t!

I understood that I was dying, and I didn’t want to die. I wanted to run, to see my kids one more time. Just one more look at them.

I knew I couldn’t stop the attack. Knew there was nothing I could do to stop this horror from happening.

I thought of Nana and Jannie, Damon, Christine. My heart ached for them.

Then I let God do His will.

Part Four. Thomas Pierce

Chapter 68

MATTHEW LEWIS happily drove the graveyard shift on the city bus line that traveled along East Capitol Street in D.C. He was absently whistling a Marvin Gaye song, “What’s Going On,” as he piloted his bus through the night.

He had driven this same route for nineteen years and was mostly glad to have the work. He also enjoyed the solitude. Lewis had always been a fairly deep thinker, according to his friends and Alva, his wife of twenty years. He was a history buff, and interested in government, sometimes a little sociology, too. He had developed the interests in his native Jamaica and had kept up with them.

For the past few months, he had been listening to self-improvement tapes from an outfit called the Teaching Company, in Virginia. As he rode along East Capitol at five in the morning, he was really getting into an excellent lecture called “The Good King-the American Presidency Since the Depression.” Sometimes he’d knock off two or three lectures in a single night, or maybe he’d listen to a particularly good tape a couple of times in a night.