Behind us, a door rattled. “It’s time,” said the guard.
Natalie Bondurant was on her feet, telling all of us she’d be in touch, and heading for the door. Ellen and I snuck in some quick hugs and headed for the door. Ellen had slipped out ahead of me when Derek said, “Dad?” I turned.
His eyes met mine. “You know your paintings?”
I thought, Huh? But I said, “Yeah?”
“I know you’ve been thinking about getting rid of them, but I don’t want you to.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I think they’re really good,” Derek said. “I don’t know whether I’ve ever mentioned that.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“If I have to stay here, like, if they keep me in jail a whole long time, like for a few years or forever, would they let me hang one of them in my cell?”
I managed to hold it together long enough to get back in my truck, out of Ellen’s sight.
TWENTY-FIVE
THAT NIGHT, they came for us.
The day itself wound down uneventfully after I got back from seeing Derek. Drew asked me how it went, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it.
At our last house, Drew was having some trouble getting one of the hand mowers to start. He yanked and yanked on the pull cord, pumped the primer button several times, yanked again, then wondered if he might have flooded the damn thing, then decided to give it one last pull.
He pulled so hard, he did something to the mechanism that retracts the cord, and suddenly he had four feet of it dangling over the mower.
“Well, shit,” he said when I walked over to see what had happened.
“No big deal,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said, holding the grip at the end of the cord, spinning the line around like it was a skipping rope. “It just came out.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“I could fix it. I could take it apart, see what I’ve done, rewind the cord—well, if I had the right tools.”
“I’ve got everything I need in my shed,” I said. “I can do it.”
“If you want, I could come over later tonight, after . . . after I make my mom’s dinner. You’ve got enough on your plate, Jim, without having to clean up after my mistakes.”
“All right then,” I said, and told Drew where I lived. But I felt he was entitled to a bit of a heads-up. “There’s a cop car out front, standing guard over the Langley house. They might have a couple of questions for you before they let you come up to our place.” Not that they’d been able to intercept Penny when she’d come by—twice.
“That’s okay,” said Drew.
“If you can make it, fine,” I said. “But if you can’t, don’t worry about it.”
Later, as I was dropping him off out front of his mother’s house, he reminded me of his intentions. “I’ll come round, if my mom doesn’t need me. Might be well after dinner.”
“Drew, either way, it’s cool,” I said.
He stood by the curb, watching me drive away, and in the rearview mirror I spotted him giving me a small salute as I rounded the corner.
When I pulled into our lane at 5:50, the police tape was gone from around the Langley house, and the police car that had been there for so many days was pulling out.
I put down the window so I could talk to the cop. It was the same young man who’d been covering most of the day shifts here since the murders.
“All done?” I said.
“I don’t have to babysit the place anymore,” he said. “They’re done with it as a crime scene. It’s kind of wrapped up. What with there being an arrest and all.” He cast his eyes down so he wouldn’t have to look into mine.
“Okay then,” I said, and took my foot off the brake and continued down to our house.
I had to unlock the door to get in. Ellen was still on guard, as was I. She’d arrived a few minutes earlier with a pepperoni and double-cheese pizza, still hot in the box. I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, all the energy drained from me.
“You disappeared pretty fast after we left Derek,” she said.
I couldn’t tell her that I was about to fall apart and didn’t want her to see me when it happened. “I had to get back to Drew,” I said.
Ellen got out some plates. It didn’t matter how much of a shambles our lives had become these last few days, we weren’t going to eat pizza out of a box.
She said, “I heard you dropped by city hall today.”
I glanced up at her. “What’d you hear, exactly?”
“That you put a huge dent in our watering can.”
“I can bang it out.”
“Jim, honestly, doing that, trying to get even with Lance, that’s not going to help things.”
“That’s probably true,” I said. “But I felt better, briefly.”
“What if he decides to press charges?”
I shook my head. “He won’t. Not after what he did to me.” I swallowed. “But he might try getting back at me again.”
“Terrific,” Ellen said, picking at a stray piece of green pepper that had somehow gotten onto our pizza by mistake.
“What about you?” I asked. “What did you do, before we saw Derek?” I wanted to ask where she’d had lunch, whether she’d met with anyone.
“Mostly here and at the bank,” she said. “Then just a couple of errands after we saw Derek, and then grabbed the pizza on the way home. I couldn’t think about dinner.”
Besides, I thought, she’d had a good lunch, with Conrad. Most likely Conrad, anyway. Sometimes Illeana drove his Audi.
I decided, at least for now, to let it go. Maybe part of me didn’t want to know. I couldn’t deal with any more complications. She did, after all, still work for the man, and if she was entitled to meet with him at Thackeray, I supposed she had the right to meet with him at the Clover.
Ellen was ignoring her pizza. “It’s all I can do to eat,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about Donna Langley. I can’t believe what she did.”
And even though Donna had once, many years ago, tried to get me into bed, I too found what she had done with my son hard to comprehend.
“I feel . . . I feel so angry with her,” Ellen said. “I wish I could go over there now, tell her what I think of her.”
“Whatever sins she may have committed,” I said, “she’s paid for all of them now.”
I sat down on the couch after dinner, turned on the news, and before I realized it, I was asleep. Out cold. Three nights with almost no sleep could do that to you.
I woke up around eight, Ellen sitting across from me. She smiled, first time I’d seen her do that in several days. “You’ve been snoring your head off,” she said.
Slowly, I worked myself off the couch. “Boy, I was out like a light.”
“I nodded off for a while, too. We should both go to bed, get a good night’s sleep.”
I agreed. “First, I’m going to go outside, check the shed, lock things up. We don’t have cops up the road anymore, you know.”
“We don’t?” Ellen sounded concerned.
“They’ve packed it in,” I said.
“The guy was there when I got home with the pizza,” Ellen said.
“He left just after. They’ve wrapped it all up, you see.”
“No,” Ellen said defiantly. “They haven’t.”
I gave her an upturned thumb and went outside by way of the kitchen, locking the door behind me so that Ellen would be safe. There wasn’t much spring in my step as I walked across the gravel to the shed. My feet were dragging. It was dusk, and would be dark in another half hour or so. There were things I could do, equipment to tend, bills to prepare, but all I had the strength for was to lock things up.
They got me as I came through the open garage door. Coming from my right, a shadow, then the blow.
Followed by darkness.
I COULDN’T HAVE BEEN OUT THAT LONG, because when I woke up, there was still some light outside. The world beyond the shed was
gray, verging on black. Maybe only a couple of minutes. But it had been long enough to secure me into an old wooden chair from the shed.
Even before I began to assess my situation, I was aware that the fingers of my right hand were very sore. Other parts of my body hurt, of course. My head was pounding. But the four fingers of my right hand felt pinched and uncomfortable.
I moved my head around, started to say something, and realized my mouth was secured with tape. I looked down at my body and saw duct tape wrapped around me just below my shoulders, more down around my waist. I couldn’t move my legs, and while I couldn’t see them below my knees, I assumed they’d been tied to the chair with more tape.
Tape held my left hand to one of the rungs of the seatback. I had to blink a couple of times, however, to comprehend what had been done to my right hand.
It wasn’t tied to the chair. It was taped to my hedge trimmer, which was sitting in my lap. I couldn’t see my fingers or hand at all, there was so much tape wrapped around them.
I understood now what had been done to me. And what I was facing.
My fingers had been jammed into the open slots of the trimmer, the ones the blades went through at lightning speed when the trigger on the handle was squeezed. Then my fingers had been wrapped with tape to keep them there. Squeezing the trigger, only for a fraction of a second, would cut all four fingers, probably down to about the first knuckles. The blades might not have been designed to go through bone, but I had little doubt they could do it. I’d cut plenty of bushes with this machine, hacking through small wooden branches under half an inch thick.
And these blades, they’d go through flesh like butter.
Once I’d figured out my situation, my eyes moved to the back of the trimmer, and the yellow extension cord attached to it. I followed the cord down to the floor, where it came up from a huge coil, like a snake before a charmer. From the bottom of the coil, a single line of cord emerged, leading toward the wall. I couldn’t see, from my position, whether it was plugged in or not.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty’s awake,” someone said.
“Oooh, goody,” said someone else.
The voices came from behind me, and I turned my head to one side, then the other, trying to get a look at them. But I needn’t have bothered. They both came around in front of me.
They were wearing stocking masks. My guess was they hadn’t been wearing them until they’d seen me stir, because they were both tugging them down around their necks. Their faces were mashed and distorted behind the hose, but I could tell that one man’s hair was dark, brown or black, while the other man had almost no hair at all.
“Fuck,” said the dark-haired one. “It’s too fucking hot for these.”
“Try to cope,” said the bald one. He looked at me. “So, how ya feeling, asshole? You weren’t asleep all that long.”
I raised my head to look into their shrouded eyes. I wondered if they could see the fear in mine.
Where, I thought suddenly, feeling the panic well up in me, is Ellen? I wasn’t sure, if my mouth hadn’t been taped, whether I’d even ask what they’d done with her, on the off chance they didn’t know she was in the house.
But then, as if he were able to translate my darting eyes into words, the bald one said, “Your wifey is just fine, Cutter. She’s in the house, tied up like you, except she doesn’t have her hand attached to a hedge trimmer.”
“Woulda been easier, though,” said the dark-haired one. “Her fingers’d be smaller, easier to jam in.”
The bald one shrugged. “Not to worry. We should be able to get what we need from this one.”
They must have taken my keys off me, or somehow tricked Ellen to come to the door. I tried to place the voices, wondered if I had ever heard them before, didn’t think I recognized them. They were both in pretty good shape. Lean, close to six feet, dressed casually but not cheaply. Expensive-looking jeans, the bald one had on a Lacoste T-shirt, the little green alligator emblem on his left chest. The other guy had on a simple black T, cut high enough on the arms to reveal well-toned biceps and part of a tattoo on his right arm, what looked like the end of a knife blade.
I tried to recall whether I’d ever seen Lance without a shirt on—it seemed unlikely—and if I had, whether he’d had a tattoo like that. Surely, if I’d ever seen it, I’d have remembered. This guy was about the same height and build as Lance, and if his face was damaged from a run-in with a watering can, I couldn’t tell through the dark stocking. The few words he’d uttered didn’t put me immediately in mind of the mayor’s driver, but for obvious reasons, I had him on my mind.
“You’ve noticed that we have you at our advantage,” the bald one said. He reached down and picked up the hedge trimmer, which dragged my hand up with it. I started to pull my arm back, but all that did was take the trimmer with it. “Tut-tut, you better behave,” he said.
He grabbed hold of the handle, floated his finger just beyond the trigger.
“So you see what’s happening here,” he said. “I touch this button, just even for like a fucking fraction of a second, and all the tips of your fingers are going to come off.”
I could feel droplets of sweat rolling down my forehead. One of them found its way into my right eye, and the saltiness of it stung like hell. I blinked several times.
“It’s going to be messy as hell,” he said. “And I have to be honest with you. I don’t really like the sight of blood. The good thing is, there’s so much tape wrapped around your hand here, I won’t have to see it squirting around all over the place.”
“Jesus,” said the dark-haired one, who’d been looking at my hand but then looked away. “That’s going to fucking hurt.” He reached under the nylon and scratched his neck. “Man, this is so goddamn hot. Couldn’t we just tape his eyes so we wouldn’t have to wear these things?”
“I think we’ll have an easier time persuading Mr. Cutter here to help us out if he can see what it is we plan to do with him.”
I made some noises behind the tape.
“Say what?” said the bald one. “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask you yet, and already you’re ready to talk?”
I slowly nodded my head. The bald one took his hand off the hedge trimmer handle and ripped the tape off my mouth. It hurt like all get-out but I held back a scream through gritted teeth.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If you’ve hurt my wife, I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you.”
The bald one’s misshapen mouth appeared to turn into a grin. “Uh, hello? Do you understand your situation at the moment? Do you think you’re in any position to be making threats? Maybe I need to make that clear to you right this fucking minute.”
And he gripped the handle again, held his finger over the trigger, and squeezed.
“Shit, Mortie!” said the dark-haired one with the knife tattoo.
“No!” I shouted. This time, I couldn’t hold back the scream.
I reflexively tried to jerk my hand away, but that only dragged the hedge trimmer closer to me. The bald one still had a firm hold of the machine, his finger still gripped about the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The trimmer made no noise. My fingers, beyond the pain they were already in by being jammed into the teeth of the machine, felt nothing.
The bald one dropped the trimmer into my lap and began to laugh. “Oh fuck!” he said, taking a step back, bending over, putting his hands atop his knees, laughing the entire time. “That was priceless! You should have seen the expression on your face!”
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me, too!” his partner said.
The bald one managed to pull himself together, let out a couple of enthusiastic hoots, then walked over to the wall, where the yellow extension cord disappeared behind some cardboard boxes. He kicked them aside, exposing the wall outlet, and I could see that the cord had not been plugged in.
He knelt down, grabbed the end of the cord, and shoved it firmly into the receptacle.
He
walked back over to me, rubbing his hands together, still smiling inside his mask. He grabbed the trimmer, lifted it, and my hand, up to the level of his waist, and said, “The next time, it’ll be the real deal.”
TWENTY-SIX
NOW, to get to the business at hand, so to speak,” said the bald one, the one I knew went by the name Mortie, if his associate was to be believed. “There’s some things I’d like to ask you.”
“What?” I said. My fingers, still held in the teeth of the hedge trimmer, were sweating inside the tape.
“You have a copy of a certain book,” he said. “On a disc? Am I right?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t know if you’ve got a printout of it, too, or it’s just on a disc, or two discs, or what the fuck, but we want it.”
“Okay,” I said, my mind racing. “You can have it. But I want to see that my wife is okay. I’m not telling you where it is until I see that my wife is unharmed.”
Mortie laughed. “I don’t think so, pal, because—”
I cut him off mid-sentence. “I want. To see. My wife.”
“What I was trying to tell you, asshole,” he said, moving around the hedge trimmer, “is that you’re not in a position to negotiate.”
I mustered as much courage as I could, given my circumstances. “I don’t care if you cut off all my fingers and all my toes. You can cut off my dick and suck on it if you want, but I’m not telling you anything until I see that my wife is okay.”
Mortie thought, weighed his options, then glanced over at the dark-haired one with the tattoo. “Go get his fucking wife.”
“I gotta take this thing off my head,” he said. “Just for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll go get her.”
As he left the shed and my field of vision, he was peeling the stocking off his head. “Jesus,” I heard him say. It didn’t sound like Lance to me. And besides, why would Lance want that disc?
“You must be getting a bit warm, too,” I said to Mortie.