Sam raised the gun toward Marjorie, sighting down the center of the sunflower on the mug sitting in front of her chest. “Well, call someone before I start killing people for nothing.”
“Blake,” I said. “He’ll pick up.”
I saw in Marjorie’s eyes her measuring the distance between where she sat and her handgun. But I knew. Up the stairs, into her side table. Gun in the walnut box with the velvet lining, bullets pushed to the back of the drawer with the gun oil and the shammy cloth. No way would Sam let her out of our sight for that long. Besides, if I knew where Marjorie’s gun slept, so did Sam.
I turned to Barry. “Phone?”
Still in shock, he pointed to a charging station at the end of the kitchen counter with a notepad next to it and three takeout menus pinned to a cork board on the wall.
I dialed Blake. “Speaker,” she said. I pushed the button and we all listened to the ring.
“Hello?”
“Blake, it’s me. Is Lucas with you?”
Silence. The static of the phone line. “He stepped out. I was listening to Springsteen and you know how much he hates him.”
“Cut the shit, Blake,” Sam said. “Tell him we’re with Marjorie. Tell him he either comes out here right now or she dies.”
Marjorie gasped slightly.
“Who’s Marjorie?” Blake asked.
“Would you fucking tell him Blake. Don’t be a fucking cop for once in your life.”
The line went muffled, a hand over the receiver. Sam drank her coffee. Marjorie pulled tighter at her bathrobe and Barry stood flatfooted in the kitchen. I assumed he’d been trying to figure a way to get to the alarm system control panel and hit the panic button. Sam wasn’t about to let that happen again.
Blake came back on the line. “He’ll be there.”
“Put him on.”
A pause, then shuffling. Lucas came on. “Marge? You okay?”
Marjorie started to say something, but stopped the sound on the way out of her throat, looked to Sam for approval. Sam nodded. “I’m okay. A little scared. Confused. But okay.”
“For now,” Sam added.
“Samantha?”
“Yeah. You got both of us here.”
A pause filled with doubt. Two of the same person would be the easiest thing to fake over the phone. Lucas still wasn’t convinced. He knew something was up. All those cops at the station didn’t suddenly start shooting themselves. Even if he thought I went whacko and poisoned his entire office, I couldn’t be upstairs shooting while downstairs locked in a cell.
Well, I could be both places at once, but not the way he thought. The half and half thing stymied him.
“Marge, who is there with you?”
Marjorie stammered. I didn’t blame her. “It’s Samantha. And I guess her twin sister. She’s got a gun.” Well done, Marjorie. You paint quite the word picture.
“And which one am I speaking with?”
“Which one do you think, dumbass? I’m the one you always wished came out a little more in the bedroom. I bet right now you’re thinking of having us both, aren’t you? What is it with guys and twins? It’s incest, you know.” She turned to Barry. “Even this sick fuck I bet was thinking it, weren’t you Barry? Miss Marjorie not giving you enough in the sack? Think you could handle two of us? News flash: you couldn’t.”
“I’ll be there. Don’t do anything rash.”
“Then you’d better fucking hurry.” She nodded to me and I hung up.
“So now we wait,” she said and took a long sip on her sunflower mug. “Your coffee is shit, by the way.”
(INSERT TOM PETTY LYRIC ABOUT WAITING HERE)
“Now what?” I asked.
“We wait. What did you think, we were gonna order in pizza?”
“When he gets here, what then?”
“I think you know.”
I concentrated on my heart beat. I kept my mind empty, my nerves calm. My insides were as stable as a house of cards in a tornado (straight from Daddy’s lips, that one). I wanted like hell to think of a plan, to scan the room for a weapon, to find her weakness and exploit it like I’d been trained to do, but I needed to keep my thoughts blank or she would see.
Kind of hard to come up with a plan when you can’t think of a plan. I stood by the end of the kitchen counter, halfway between Marjorie and Barry and facing my mirror image. Of course, on her side of the mirror, she held a gun.
Marjorie sat still, but you could practically hear the gears in her mind grinding. A year and a half on the shooting range and it all came down to this. I wanted to tell her if she shot Sam, I would die too but something told me she didn’t give a shit about either one of us right then. One Samantha, two Samanthas, as long as we were out of her house, who cares?
“So, okay, your coffee is shit, what’s for breakfast?” Sam said.
Barry looked to Marjorie for an answer but she remained silent.
“Doesn’t have to be fancy,” Sam said. “Some oatmeal, a bagel, some toast with jelly. I’m not asking for eggs fucking benedict here.”
“We have toast,” Barry said and took a step toward an upper cabinet. He’d violated rule #1 of a hostage situation—no sudden moves.
“Hold up there, Barry,” Sam said as she waved the gun his direction. Barry put the brakes on, hard. His feet skidded on the spilled coffee from his own cup and his loafers slid out from under him like he wore ice skates instead.
Barry carried an extra twenty pounds of married man hanging over his belt. Not fat per se, but not at his college fighting weight anymore. When he hit the tile floor of the kitchen he hit hard. His palms slapped down in the puddle of cold coffee and made an awful noise, but he didn’t seem too damaged by it all. Then he started moaning and grabbing at his lower back.
The lower back—scourge of the middle-aged suburbanite everywhere.
“What the fuck, Barry?” Sam said. “I was gonna ask you what flavor jelly you had.”
Barry wailed worse than if he’d been shot. His eyes squeezed tight and his face turned red as he strained against the pain. Marjorie sat up straight in her seat, a wifely concern on her face, but she stayed put.
“His back,” she said. “It goes out from time to time.”
“Looks like that time is now,” Sam said. “When does he shut up?”
I bent down to Barry. “You okay?” He moaned back at me, continued his writhing like a bug under a magnifying glass in the hot sun.
“Leave him alone, he’s fine,” Sam said.
“He’s obviously not.”
“He fell down. Big fucking deal. Believe me, I could make things a lot worse for him.” Sam stepped into the kitchen, closer to Barry for him to hear. “And I will if you don’t shut the fuck up.”