Meeting Evil by Thomas Berger Page A

against the wall of the house. Face against the door, he cried, “I’m leaving the gun out here. That should show you how you misjudged me. When I get to town, I’ll call the phone company. Sorry I had to put yours out of commission. But you should have believed me!”
    There was no answer, and John had no means of telling whether the boy had heard him. He could have tried to peer in through one of the windows that gave onto the porch, but refrained from doing so lest he frighten the lad even more. He was considerate even under conditions of extremity.
    He had come out of the woods on the left side of the house. He began to leave now on the dirt driveway to its right, and had almost reached the road when an automobile turned in and stopped abruptly before him. For the briefest of instants he took it for some sort of official vehicle, and believed he had the choice of surrender or flight.
    But it was Sharon’s car, and Richie was behind its wheel. Sharon sat next to him. She looked more alert than when last seen.
    Richie pointed at the house and asked, out of the window, “Who’s in there?”
    John had hoped never to see him again, but the events that had occurred since so changed his feelings that he could put up with the man if it meant getting home.
    “Nobody.”
    Richie emerged from the car. He stretched in a self-indulgentway and smiled at John. “What are you doing here?”
    “I might ask you the same, but the hell with it. Let’s get out of here.”
    “We can’t go anyplace right now by car. The cops have set up roadblocks down there.”
    John could not believe it. “Roadblocks? It’s some kind of manhunt?” He sighed. “Then we’ve got no choice. Maybe they’re looking for someone else, someone dangerous, and it’s not for us at all. But even if it is us they’re looking for, we have to turn ourselves in. That burglary, so called, was hardly major, and it must be on record that I phoned for an ambulance, which should help with the truckdriver thing. I’ll support your claim that you were saving my life; the tire iron was right there beside him, after all. We can expect trouble, but I don’t see why we can’t beat the worst of it.” To be speaking in this fashion was outlandish for him, and if someone from his old life, preeminently Joanie, had appeared at this moment and said, “You
got
to be kidding,” he might have smirked and so conquered the nightmare, gone back inside his house, and, after cleaning up the breakfast dishes, put in the rest of a normal day off.
    But he really was here, not there, and Richie had broken away from him before he finished, bounded up on the porch, and snatching up the gun, slid forward the wooden handpiece under the barrel. He deftly caught the red shell that flew out. “Hey,” he cried with delight. He proceeded quickly to eject all the shells and then reload them into the weapon.
    John reacted too late. Stepping onto the porch, he said, “That belongs to a guy down the hill. He was pointing it at me, and I had to take it away from him. We’ll leave it here.” He reached for the gun, but Richie swung it away. “Come on, hand it over.”
    “I’m sorry, John, but I got to keep it. I need the protection. Cops don’t fight fair. They’ll be all over the place, with machine guns and tear gas. But maybe they won’t be able to find us. Let’s get that car out of sight.”
    John could no longer regard Richie as being merely an oddball with whom he felt uncomfortable. Even after the running-down of the truckdriver he had tried to maintain that illusion, for what was the alternative? He now said aloud, but mostly to himself, “All this can’t be just because of that hit-and-run.”
    Richie bounced down one step from the porch, shotgun across his left forearm. John looked around for the optimum route of escape. It would probably be that by which he had come, through the woods. But he had momentarily forgotten the boy inside the house, who would be defenseless