You Can't Stop Me - By Max Allan Collins & Matthew Clemens Page 0,3

ear and out the other, when you’d been married as long as they had. David could be most anywhere, with his buddies or his girl….

Well, at least the national news boys hadn’t been waiting. Harrow slowed at the turn up the long driveway to the house. Turning just past the mailbox, he felt something inside him catch.

The door of the mailbox was closed.

Ellen always left it open, after removing the mail, her signal to him that he didn’t have to stop for it. Had he forgotten a dinner out she’d planned, or one of David’s many ball games? She was active with a couple of women’s groups and the PTA—maybe she’d gone to Des Moines to shop or run errands, and went straight to whatever it was.

With a shrug, he put the truck in park and climbed out to get the mail.

If the mail was still here, though, that meant she had been gone since mid-afternoon at least. He opened the box, pulled out its contents, and headed back to the truck.

He climbed up and in, tossed the pile of bills and magazines and so on onto the passenger seat, and eased the truck into gear, then crept up the long blacktop driveway. The two-story house was dark, which made him uneasy.

If Ellen was home, the lights would be on; but even if she was going to be gone, she would have left one light on for him. It was just something they did for each other.

Something was wrong.

Chapter Two

Harrow gunned the truck up the short hill, pressing the garage-door opener and painfully counting the seconds as the door slid up. He still couldn’t see anything. He cursed himself for not replacing the opener’s burned-out bulb.

The hill was steep, and the garage sat at a slight angle to the house. He would not be able to tell if her car was inside until the truck’s lights hit the garage. He crested the hill, and, as he feared, her car sat parked in its space.

What the hell was going on?

Where was David? If something was wrong with Ellen, if she’d gotten sick or been injured, why hadn’t David called his dad’s cell? Nearing the garage, Harrow kicked the brake and threw the truck into park, the sudden stop almost hurling him into the wheel.

He hopped out, pulled his pistol, and circled around the back of the truck. Anxiety gripped him and his cop senses were tingling; but he hadn’t defaulted to cop objectivity—this was his home.

Resisting the impulse to run, but still using the vehicle as cover, he crept around the truck, checked the windows in the house, saw no movement in the dark, then crossed the short distance to the back door.

You’re being a dumb, over-reacting shit, he told himself.

Still, he had the pistol ready as he opened the screen door….

Then, his hip holding it open, he reached for the knob of the inside door with his left hand.

The knob didn’t turn.

The door was locked, yet another bad sign. They never locked the doors when they were home. Acid poured into Harrow’s stomach, his chest tightened, and his eyes burned. This afternoon had been about instantaneous action—leaping to stop an assassin a nearly instinctive move.

This was different.

Entering his own house had become about caution and danger, his mind flooded with possible outcomes, none good.

In his gut, he already knew that tragedy was waiting. That didn’t stop him from praying that he was wrong as he unlocked the door. Entering the landing, he looked straight ahead at a family photo on the wall, Ellen, David, and himself smiling at the lens. His mother had snapped the photo at a family picnic a year before she died.

He glanced left, down into the darkened basement, then turned right and went up two steps into the kitchen.

Normally a bright room, with its yellow walls and white trim, now an inky threat, with no lights on, every shadow a trap. In the half-light that filtered in through the open curtains of the corner window over a small breakfast nook, knives in their wooden block on the counter to his right took on malevolence. Harrow glimpsed the moon through the window, a full fat moon, a butcher’s moon.

Fitting then that he also noticed that the butcher knife was gone from its slot in the block.

He moved past the stove on his left, the sink on the right, the big side-by-side refrigerator/freezer straight ahead. His rubber-soled shoes padded silently across the floor. Every nerve in his body