out with his shoe. “I hate to waste one, but I don’t think
you taste quite as good on the end of a butt as tobacco
does.”
My breath was ragged, but I tried to focus. I gently
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tugged down on my wrist bonds, felt the reassuring pull
that the screw was fastened inside the knot. I began to work
it more, continuously pressing my wrists against the metal
to wedge it in even farther. I nearly gasped when I realized
the screw was in as far as it would go. I’d created a hole
in the knot. Now all I had to do was make it bigger.
“Do you smoke?” the man asked.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“That’s a brand I’m unfamiliar with. But since you
seem to be full of answers now, I’ll ask again. What did
Petrovsky tell you?”
“He told me your mother’s a whore and your father
liked to dress up like Raggedy Ann for Christmas.”
The man sighed deeply. I didn’t care. The longer we
played this game the more time I had. I felt the knot begin
to loosen, and soon I was able to slip my index finger
inside the knot hole. I pulled down on the screw, worked
the loop with my finger, felt it began to slip more. I
couldn’t let him notice, so I did it slowly. Methodically.
My chest hurt like hell, but I blocked it out. Amanda
was somewhere in this house, and even if I did talk, there
was no way I trusted this guy to let her live. Rule number
one, when a sociopath makes a promise, believe the
opposite.
“First time I got burned by one of these,” the man said,
“I was serving time up in Attica. The guards, hoo, man,
the guards. They sure liked to have their fun with us. One
of the prisoners got out of line, talked back, caused a
ruckus at the mess hall, they’d take a lit butt to the guy’s
armpit. Maybe the bottom of his feet. Something sweet
like that. Something that wouldn’t go away so fast. At
least it would smell sweet after they got done with you. I
guess you can see they did a little number on my arms
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here. Fifty-two, if I counted right, and I won’t even get into
the rest of my body. ’Course, one time they burnt my
arches so bad I couldn’t walk for a week. So first thing I
did when we got a hold of that place? When us boys took
over that prison back in ’71? I took a cig, lit the mother
up, and stuck it in that same man’s eye until it started
smoking.”
I heard the strike of another match, and he lit another
cigarette. Another Chesterfield.
“Did you know,” he said, taking a long drag, “that the
human hand alone has more than nine thousand nerve
endings and six hundred pain sensors? And most of that
is concentrated in the fingertips?”
“Yeah, I learned that back in health class.”
“What do you think it would feel like to experience
mind-numbing pain in the most sensitive area of your
body? Do you think you’d enjoy that? Better yet, do you
think Ms. Davies would enjoy that?”
I couldn’t help but think about the scars already on my
hand, from when a madman played butcher shop with it a
while back. I certainly wasn’t aching for more.
I tugged harder, felt my finger slip through one of the
rope’s cords. Soon I was able to fit two, then three fingers
inside, and I slowly unraveled the rope. I grabbed the end
gently before it could fall, but my hands were free. My
feet, though, were another matter, and there was no way I
could get to them without Chesterfield man noticing.
Unless…
“See, if you don’t answer my question, we’re going to
find out just how loud you and your friend can scream.
And trust me, nobody will be able to hear you.”
“It can’t be any louder than you scream when your
‘associate’ sticks his finger up your ass.”
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The man frowned, again sucked down the cig, leaving
a long ash dangling from the tip.
“Come on, dickhead,” I said. “Let’s see what you got.”
The man looked at me, pissed off and confused. “Let’s
see if you’re this much fun in a minute.”
He placed the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, then reached up with his free hand to steady mine
before he burned off my fingertips. As he raised the cigarette, I took a deep breath and blew the long piece of ash
directly into his face.
It erupted in a cloud of gray smoke, and the man hacked
and coughed and clawed at his eyes.
Before he could take a step back, I pulled off the bonds
around my wrists, wound up and backhanded him across
the face. He went sprawling across the floor. The cigarette
skittered away and went out.
Frantically I bent over and began undoing the bonds at
my feet. They were tight, but soon I was able to loosen
them. Just then the man stood up, blood leaking from a cut
across his cheek. He had fire in his eyes as he ran straight
toward me. At that moment I pulled the bonds away from
my feet, sidestepped the man and shoved his head against
the metal pipe. There was a sickening thud as he bounced
off it, then crumpled to the floor in a heap.
I was wobbly standing up. I heard a grunt, saw the man
begin to push himself up. There was hatred in his eyes. I
didn’t hesitate.
I ran forward and kicked him in the head as hard as I
could. The breath left him as he lay there, motionless.
As I tried to get the blood flowing back to my feet, I
noticed the glint of metal coming from a key ring in his
pocket. There were three keys on it. I picked it up, ran for
the door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. I took turns insert- The Stolen
183
ing each key inside, and on the third one it clicked home.
I twisted the knob, opened the door and prayed Amanda
was all right. I glanced back, saw the man unmoving but
still breathing steadily. Then I braced myself for whatever
horrors awaited in the rest of this house.
But when I ran up the stairs to the main floor, I was
shocked to see that I wasn’t being held in some dungeon.
Instead, I was standing in the middle of what looked like
the foyer of a typical suburban house.
“What the hell…?” I whispered.
The hardwood floors had been recently sanded and
polished, and the carpeting on the stairs was white and
clean. Several framed paintings hung from the walls. A
crystal chandelier hung above me, and a family room
with a large-screen television branched off to the left.
There was a doll with braided hair lying on the floor, next
to what looked like a scattered set of a child’s building
blocks. Everything was clean. I didn’t know what to
make of it.
“Amanda!” I yelled. There was no response.
I sprinted to the other end of the hall, then took the stairs
two at a time to the upper floor.
&n
bsp; I ran down a narrow hall. There were three doors, both
closed. I opened the first one. It was a bathroom. Hand
soaps. Clean towels. No window. No Amanda.
I approached the other door. Pushed it. It opened into
what looked like a master bedroom. A king-size bed sat
in the center, with a floral comforter cleanly tucked in.
Oddly there were no photos anywhere, as though the place
had been disinfected of humanity.
I looked around. Didn’t see anything.
Then I went to the other door. Stopped in front of it.
This one was different. It was painted white like the others,
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but the paint seemed duller. I touched the surface, immediately recoiled. The other doors were wooden. This one
was metal. And I knew right away that one of the keys on
my chain would open the dead bolt.
I thrust the key inside, got it on the first twist, but then
froze when I heard someone coming up the stairs.
The lock unlatched and I pushed the door open.
And then I was standing in what looked like the dream
room of any young girl. There were toys everywhere.
Coloring books. A large dollhouse filled with tiny furniture. Tapes and CDs and games were stacked high in a
corner. Pink wallpaper, and every book a child could ever
want to read. And there, sitting on a made bed, her face a
mess of fright and relief, was Amanda.
She jumped up and threw her arms around my chest. I
winced as she pressed on the cigarette burn, then took her
arm and said, “We need to go. Right now.”
Then I noticed something. On the floor. A small scrap
of paper. I picked it up, unfolded it. It was a receipt. It was
from a store called Toyz 4 Fun. I clenched my jaw. At that
moment I knew where we were. I knew what this house
was.
Panic welled inside me as I shoved the receipt into my
pocket, grabbed Amanda’s hand as we went for the door,
still slightly ajar. I heard someone running down the hall,
shouting, “Ray, where the hell are you, buddy?”
I waited until the footsteps were right outside, then I
slammed the heavy metal door closed as hard as I could.
There was an audible oomph as whoever was on the other
side was knocked flat off his feet.
I flung open the door and ran past, my heart hammering when I saw that the man I’d just knocked down had a
gun in his right hand.
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We sprinted downstairs and toward the front door.
Turned the knob. It was locked. One more key left.
I inserted the last key in the lock, let out a breath when
it caught, then turned the handle and opened the door to
the outside.
As soon as we stepped onto the front porch, Amanda
let out a bloodcurdling scream. There was a body in the
driveway. It was lying in a pool of blood. The beard gave
it away. It was Dmitri Petrovsky, and he was very dead.
“Run!” I shouted.
We ran down the driveway, and I recognized that we
were in the exact same place that we’d cornered Petrovsky. The high brick walls and trees obscured the view
beyond the house. There was nobody to hear us scream.
We sprinted around the bend, wind whistling past us,
and saw the metal gates up ahead.
They were closed. And I had no keys left.
When we reached the brick wall, I knelt down, cupped
my hands and said, “Climb on.”
Amanda stepped onto my hands.
“One, two, three. ”
I heaved up as she jumped. Her hands caught the rim
of the wall. I pushed from below as Amanda pulled herself
up, managing to straddle her legs across the wall.
“Come on!” she shouted.
Just as I got ready to jump, I heard a loud bang and a
chunk of brick exploded right beside me.
“Come on, Henry, they’re shooting at us!”
I jumped up, managed to get hold of the wall. Amanda
gripped my wrists and began to pull. I got a small foothold
in the chunk of wall that’d been blown out, then pushed
off and hoisted myself up. Another shot rang out, and
brick flew apart right where my foot had been.
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We toppled over the wall, landed on the other side in a
tangled mess. I leaped to my feet, helped Amanda up.
Then we ran as fast as we could, until the woods swallowed us.
We arrived panting at the road we’d turned off of when
we followed Petrovsky. Huntley Terrace. It was dark out.
I had no idea where we were or what day it was.
“Come on,” I said, taking Amanda’s hand again. I
thought back to the last time this happened, the last time
we were both running for our lives. Back then Amanda
was fleeing with a man she didn’t know. This time, for
better or worse, she knew what she’d gotten into.
We jogged down the dark road, continually looking
over our shoulders to see if we were being followed. I
heard nothing, saw nothing. My body felt numb. I was still
shirtless, and my side ached. Amanda suddenly stopped,
put her hand on my chest.
“Is that a burn mark?” she said.
“We don’t have time,” I panted.
Then out of the darkness a pair of headlights
appeared. My eyes widened, and I ran forward waving
my hands like a crazy person. I was in the middle of the
road, and I only prayed the driver could see well enough
not to run me over.
It was a gray Cadillac. It pulled to a stop a yard in front
of me. I ran to the driver’s-side window, gasping for air.
The driver was a woman of about forty, a DVD from
Blockbuster on her front dashboard.
“Don’t…don’t hurt me,” she said. Her eyes were frightened. I could only imagine the sight in front of her.
“Please,” I said, “my friend and I were attacked. If you
could just take us away from here and call the police…
Please, they’re trying to kill us.”
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She reached for the shift, prepared to drive away, then saw
Amanda huddled next to me, shivering in the lights of her
car.
A minute later we were in the backseat of the Cadillac,
heading away from one nightmare.
Then I felt the receipt in my pocket, and knew that
another nightmare had just begun.
23
The police station was cold. Nobody had gone out of their
way to offer Amanda or me a blanket or a drink or anything
else to settle our nerves. I was wearing a blue workshirt
with the name “Bill” stitched across the front. One of the
detectives had given it to me. I didn’t want to know where
it came from, but didn’t get the feeling Bill was looking
too hard for it.
Ironically the only hospital within driving distance was
Yardley. After the kind Vanessa Milne picked us up on the
side of the road in her Cadillac, she took us right to the
emergency room. The docs smeared the burn with something called Silvadene, then dressed it, told me to change
the dressing every
two hours and reapply the cream. It was
just a first-degree burn. Would go away in a week, and
hopefully wouldn’t leave a scar. Amanda didn’t have a
scratch on her. But she was pissed off beyond belief.
A pair of detectives met us at Yardley, but they made
us wait a good two hours before arriving. And even when
they did, they didn’t seem too keen to help. I found this
odd, that two people had escaped from men who wanted
to either torture or kill them, and they seemed about as
interested as they would be in macroeconomics.
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They asked several questions. First, why had we
decided to follow Dmitri Petrovsky in the first place, and
what we planned to ask him. I told them the truth. That
Dmitri Petrovsky was linked to two children born in Hobbs
County who’d disappeared, only to reappear several years
later. I told them that we had a feeling based on his
behavior at the pediatric clinic that he’d been withholding
something. They asked for proof of misconduct. I told
them we didn’t have proof. That was the point of following him.
After we were released, the cops took us back to the
Hobbs PD station. We were led through a cubicle farm of
desks and eventually seated in a nondescript gray room
with a metal table and chairs that were bolted to the floor.
A pitcher of water sat in front of us, along with two
glasses.
The same two cops joined us and sat down. They
poured themselves two cups of water, drank them loudly.
I had a strange feeling that we were being treated like the
criminals here.
“Can we get some of that?” Amanda asked. The cops
just stared at us. They had identical mustaches that rode
straight across their upper lips, then down the sides of
their mouths at a right angle. I got a gross mental image
of them standing over a sink with a razor, shaving those
’staches in neat lines.
“You have any idea what this town is like now?” the
fatter one asked. He had a crew cut and a neck full of angry
jowls, like he’d recently graduated from the Mike Ditka
finishing school. The one next to him was slightly trimmer,
yet had the same scornful look in his eye. Between these
two and the runaround I’d received from Lensicki earlier,
it was tiresome and frustrating to see the lack of support
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Jason Pinter
from this department. “What’s done is done, and now here
you two come, harassing an upstanding member of our
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