Chapter 22: In Front of Everyone

Somebody screamed.

The crowd broke backward from him.

Russell stood alone in the middle of my father's showroom with a black pistol pointed at his brother.

His hand was perfectly steady.

That was the worst part.

"You were in the lake," he said.

"I was in Hank's truck," Abe said. "Eating a sandwich."

He kept walking.

He walked slowly, with his cap in his left hand and his right hand open at his side.

"Stop," Russell said.

Abe stopped, ten feet away.

"Everything," Russell said, in a voice gone high and strange.

"You got everything. Your father's name. The company. Mom's whole face when you walk in a room."

"I found her for you, and you didn't even look hard enough to know I lied."

"You're right," Abe said. "I didn't."

"And now you get the boy too."

"The boy isn't something you get, Russell."

Russell's finger moved on the trigger.

I was six feet from him, at the foot of the stairs.

I took the ring off my finger.

"Russell," I said.

He looked at me.

It was half a second.

It was all Abe needed.

He crossed ten feet in two steps.

His left hand closed over the top of the gun and turned it up and away, and his right came down on Russell's wrist.

There was a crack.

The gun was in Abe's hand.

Russell was on his knees on my father's rug, holding his wrist against his chest.

Abe didn't look at him.

He dropped the magazine into his palm, racked the slide and caught the round in the air.

He set all three pieces on the cake table, beside the bran flakes box.

It took about as long as it takes to put down a cup.

Nobody in the room had breathed.

Then the front doors opened again, and two detectives came in out of the rain with four uniformed officers behind them.

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