Chapter Twenty-Eight

DRIVER CURLED INTO a ball on the floor of his kitchen, listening to the sounds around him. Gas hissing out of the refrigerator at his back, which had been struck by the bullet that came through the window. Stray pieces of glass tinkling down from the upper edge of the window onto the countertop. Crickets and night forest sounds, suddenly louder now than they had been through the glass.

Most of what Driver felt in those first few moments was pure confusion, rather than rage. It didn’t compute in Driver’s brain that the gunshot had been deliberate. No one in their right mind would attack him in his own home. Not anybody from around here, anyway. Not after his murderous display upon arrival, and the whispers of his reputation that had almost certainly followed it. He decided quickly that the shot must have been an accident, a stray from a hunter.

Then another shot blasted out a window in the next room.

The cell phone on the countertop began to ring, breaking him out of his stupor and yanking the fury inside him up out of its slumber.

He crouched, slipped a hand over the counter, and grabbed his phone. The name on the screen sent another shot of adrenaline through his bloodstream.

Marris.

Driver pushed the button to answer the call and lifted the device to his ear, saying nothing.

“You want to know something crazy?” It was a woman’s voice. Driver’s brain started putting pieces together. Scenarios that were incredible but nevertheless apparently true.

“What?” he managed.

“I was aiming for your truck both times,” the voice said. “Seems like I’m a terrible shot. At long distance, anyway.”

Driver hugged the ground. Through the phone he heard a familiar sound: the slice and shunt of a rifle’s bolt-action. He heard a shot and the crunch sound of his truck, parked just to the left of the kitchen window, collapsing as a tire was blown out.

“I’m getting better, though.”

“You stupid bitch,” Driver said. He heard surprise mingled with the anger on his breath. “You must be out of your goddamn mind. Do you have any idea who you’re messin’ with right now?”

“Norman Lucas Driver,” the woman said. “Asbestos removal specialist. Drug kingpin. Murderer.”

“You must be the Bulger wife.”

“No,” the woman said. “Not anymore. I’m on a bit of a journey of self-discovery right now, actually. I know how cliché that sounds, but it’s true.”

Driver crawled across the kitchen floor into the living room, hating who he was in this moment—unarmed, sweat-drenched, trembling uncontrollably as his body was flooded with fight-or-flight chemicals. He took a moment, a single second, to indulge in the pitifulness of it as he tucked his body behind the couch in the living room, where he could safely sneak a glance toward the end of the driveway. It was no use. She was parked in the moon shadow of a big oak tree, the license plate unreadable. Driver promised himself he would remember the feel of the humiliation burning through him, use it to fuel his revenge.

“People have been thrusting identities on me my whole life,” the woman said. “You know? When I was a teenager it was: get married, have kids, be that person. Daughter to wife to mother, whether you like it or not. Then all of a sudden, here you come with your own version of me: murder victim.”

“Lady, you got the wrong number,” Driver said. “You should have called a shrink. What you’re doing right now is ordering home delivery of the worst death imaginable.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Driver said. “I’m gonna get creative with you, bitch. Nobody gets to attack me in my own home. You just don’t do that.”

“I’m surprised.”

“By what?”

“By the sanctity you attach to the home,” the old woman said. “Georgette Winter-Lee was in her own home when you raped and suffocated her.”

Driver smiled in the darkness of his living room. The puzzle was complete.

“Old lady,” he said. “You’re picking a fight with the wrong person.”

“Young man,” she replied. “I could tell you the exact same thing.”