Bending over, he cut me free of the chair, and very nearly sliced my legs in the process. Then, barely giving me time to flex my numb feet, he grabbed my elbow and hauled me up—I think he would have dislocated my shoulder if I hadn’t managed to get my feet deployed. The muffler on my mouth kept my scream of pain from sounding like much. He sawed and ripped to remove the duct tape from my wrists. I whimpered when the weight of my nearly lifeless arms swung forward to hang from my traumatized shoulders. Stoat shook his mangy head in mild rebuke. “See, my extra bedroom don’t seem so bad now, does it?” He meant being spread-eagled and handcuffed hands and feet, and fuck him with a salty dick, he was right.
Then, orderly creep that he was, he could not seem to help picking up the chair and positioning it neatly at the table where it belonged.
Once I had reacquainted myself with my hands, I ripped the tape off my own mouth. Ouch. But why, at this point, should anything not hurt?
“Where’s your damn car keys?” Stoat growled close to my ear.
The words were clear enough, yet I couldn’t seem to comprehend them; maybe I had been hit on the head too many times. “Huh?”
He had not put his knife away. He lifted it slightly and glared.
“Huh, sir?” I blurted.
He gave me a look that said Read my lips.
“You want my car keys?” In order to look for them, I reached toward the kitchen light switch.
Stoat struck my hand away. “No damn lights! You want the cops to see?”
“Um, cops?”
“What the hell you think I want the car keys for?”
Ah. My weary and perhaps damaged brain began to function. “Are they still there?” Meaning at his house.
He railed, “How the hell should I know? I don’t see no fucking cars, but there’s fucking yellow cop tape out front. If I didn’t feel so goddamn crappy, I’d kill you and steal your fucking car.”
Either he did not feel strong enough to drive, or he did not feel strong enough to break my steering column and start my car with a screwdriver. If the former, he would kill me eventually. If the latter, he would kill me when I found the keys. That part, the murderous part, was so shockingly clear it worked like a jump start on my mind. I must be as helpful to Stoat as I could, as long as I helped him get tired and get nowhere.
With clarity as if my mental lights had switched on, I remembered where my car keys were. In my purse. Which, according to Justin, Stoat had stolen and taken to his house—but he didn’t know I knew that. Meanwhile, the spare keys lay right there under his hatchet nose in the pink pottery bowl on my kitchen table, along with Scotch tape, rubber bands, a coupon cutter, a three-socket electrical outlet converter, emery boards, a lint roller, and various other household detritus, including a small stuffed aardvark that had belonged to Schweitzer.
Looming over me with his head weaving like a water moccasin ready to strike, Stoat hissed, “For the last time, where’s your keys?”
“In my purse!” I chirped just like my mother at her most virtuous and helpful moments.
“And where’s that?”
“Um, in the living room, I guess,” I said, pretending not to know it was right where he had put it, at his house. If he didn’t remember that, let him figure it out.
He grabbed me by the arm, yanked me forward, then stood behind me and nudged me in the middle of my back with the tip of his knife. “Walk.”
I walked. We progressed past the kitchen table, where the pink pottery bowl was barely to be seen in the dusk, and after that, each step took us farther away from it. But I didn’t congratulate myself much, because psychosis only knew what Stoat would do when we didn’t find my purse.
I led him to the place where I ordinarily parked it, between sofa and armchair, then made what I hoped was a convincing show of peering into the shadows. “It’s not there.”
Stoat snapped, “Then where the hell—” He stopped, and I wished I could see his ugly face as he remembered. His tone changed when he said, “Oh, fuck.”
Gee, wherever could it be? But I had the good sense to remain silent.
Stoat poked the knife tip harder into my back and growled, “You gotta have spare keys. Where’s your spare keys?”
With what I considered fairly convincing innocence I said, “It should be easier to find my purse.”
“Screw your fucking purse! I asked you, where’s the spare keys?”
He terrified me so much that I babbled convincingly, “I, um, sir, I don’t know!”
The sharp pressure against my back increased. “You dumb cow, think!”
As if I wasn’t thinking? I had thought enough to know that if he found my car keys, he would probably kill me.
I squeaked, “Um, maybe, um, they could be in one of the boxes I haven’t unpacked yet?”
Something slammed against my shoulders—his hard, constricting arm throwing me off-balance, jerking me back against him, as he switched his knife from my back to my throat. I felt the blade, razor-sharp, quivering there. Or maybe, as I vividly remembered his earlier lesson about the carotid and the windpipe and the jugular and so on, maybe I was the one quivering.
I felt his hot breath as he said, “Think harder, bitch.”
He didn’t say it, but I knew: I could tell him where the car keys were. Or I could die now instead of later.
TWENTY-FIVE
So depressed he didn’t feel as if he could move, Forrest stood beside his brother, both of them watching as Bernie Morales drove away. Somehow the friendly cop’s departure made him feel as if he’d been dumped to fend for himself, like an unwanted cat, a lost child—
I am not a child, he reminded himself, and he managed to speak, albeit vaguely. “Oh, well.”
“Yeah.” Quinn stirred, straightened, and turned to trudge toward the rental car. “I guess when we get back to the room, we’ll try to ferret some do-gooders out of the phone book, like he said.”
“You drive.” Forrest pulled the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to his brother, knowing Quinn would feel marginally better behind the wheel. He got into the Aveo’s passenger side. As Quinn started the little car, Forrest looked blankly out of his window. Flat landscape, bare lawn around the blue shack leading up to forest behind, weedy fields on each side, a few bushes with fluffy cluster blossoms, hard to tell what color in the sundown light, maybe rose or peach or white. Sunset clouds, all warm colors, reflecting in the windows of the chill blue house.
Quinn put the car in gear and pulled away.
Forrest felt himself jolt upright as if struck by a bolt of lightning. “Wait!”
“Huh?” Quinn hit the brakes.
Forrest said, “I saw something.”
“What?”
“Not sure. Maybe nothing. A shadow. A movement. In the house.”
“Are you sure?”
“I just said I’m not sure!” Surprised to find himself shouting, Forrest lowered the volume. “It’s hard to tell, but I was looking at the windows and something made me think there’s somebody in there.”
“You want to go back and look?”
This did not deserve an answer. Forrest got out of the car, closing the door as quietly as he could, and started to head around the side of the blue shack. He heard Quinn turn off the car and glanced over his shoulder to see his brother following him.
As soon as he rounded the shack’s corner and stepped into the backyard, Forrest saw a streamer of yellow police tape wafting in the evening breeze. An instant later he saw where it had come from. The X of tape that had sealed the back door was ripped aside. Someone had made entry.
He stopped to stare, blinking, frozen like a deer hit by headlights. Without needing to look, he knew his brother had halted by his side.
Close to his ear Quinn said softly, “Good call, Forrie.”
Forrest nodded. Then, as if the movement of his head had freed up his working parts, he edged forward for a better look. Quinn, ever and annoyingly the older brother, stepped past him to peer in,
then whispered, “There’s a light on!”
“I can see that,” Forrest muttered, fixated on the roller blind pulled down in the window of the back bedroom where he and Quinn had found the sex toys. The light within illuminated the window blind like a movie screen, and Forrest had not watched a moment before a quick, slim shadow crossed it. Forrest felt his heart pounding.
“There’s somebody in there!” Quinn sounded breathless.
“Stoat?” Forrest whispered.
“I hope so! Let’s get him!”
“He has guns. We need cops.”
“No damn time!”
“We need something.” Although he managed to hold his voice to a whisper, Forrest felt himself panting from the sheer danger of the moment. “Get the jack handle out of the car.”
“He’ll get away!”
“I got the back door; you got the front. Hurry up!”
Quinn gave a wordless, agonized gasp, turned, and ran back toward the car. Forrest stayed where he was.
The light in the bedroom suddenly died.
Forrest stiffened, trying to watch the back door he could now barely see in the twilight.
Something moved. Shadows? Wind. No. Forrest saw the back door opening.
There was no time to think, only to react. Forrest sprinted forward, ready to fight Stoat with his bare hands.
The slim person in the doorway startled so hard he let whatever he was carrying thump to the floor, then stood rigid in the doorway. Forrest saw his pale, youthful face seemingly floating in nightfall’s shadows.
Quinn’s voice said, “That’s not Stoat.”
Forrest said, “It’s sure not,” as his brother stood beside him, improvised weapon in hand.
“Who the hell are you?” the boy challenged.
“Who the hell are you?” Quinn returned sharply, all New Yorker.
But Forrest’s eyes had adjusted to the dim evening light; he could see the boy’s face in more detail, and he recognized him now, even though the kid’s face was murky with dirt and scratches and his blond cornrows were gone. “Quinn,” he said, “it’s him. The one on the tapes.”
“Quinn?” echoed the boy, his face transformed with excitement. “Quinn and Forrest?”
• • •
Justin had felt lower than a cockroach, sneaking out of the fishing shack while Miss Lee was asleep, but what else was new? Aside from the single day of freedom he had just spent, he could barely recall a time when he hadn’t felt worthless. He accepted the soreness of his body, especially his bare feet, as what a piece of shit like him deserved. Limping up the weedy lane in the dark, he wasn’t more than halfway back to the dirt road before he blundered into Spanish daggers and cut his shins. He could feel blood trickling down his legs as he stumbled on his way, and weirdly he felt better. Pain on the outside took away from pain on the inside.
I HAVE A PLAN, said the note he’d left, and he did. He planned to go hide out with his grandfather, his father’s father, whom he’d liked the one time he’d met him. So the old guy was a drunk? Good. That and the way he’d stayed away most of Justin’s life told Justin he didn’t care too much, which was fine, because Justin wanted to be let alone. Not forever. Just until his bruises faded and his hair grew back and some other parts of him healed. Then maybe he could face—no, Christ, he didn’t see how he could ever face his family, since he’d betrayed them by staying with Stoat when he should have, could have, told a teacher or somebody. . . . He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t spoken up, because he didn’t understand it himself. But that was only one of the embarrassing questions he didn’t want anybody asking him, only one of the reasons he didn’t want to be in the news or on TV or, worst of all, testifying in a courtroom. He had bad dreams sometimes about being questioned by a stone-faced district attorney:
“What happened after you regained consciousness, Justin?”
And forced by the paranormal power of the law, Justin was compelled to say far too much truth: “Mr. Stoat told me to come up and sit in the front seat of the van and stop crying or he’d give me something to cry about. I wanted him to take me home, but I already knew it was no use. I said I had to go to the bathroom, thinking maybe he’d let me out of the van and I could run, but he told me he wasn’t a fool. After we got to his place, then he let me go to the bathroom, but the window was all boarded up and there was no lock on the door.”
“Go on.”
“Um, he watched.”
“Go on.”
“He yanked all my clothes off and pushed me into the bathtub and told me to take a shower. I felt sick. I couldn’t get the water temperature right. I was still messing with it when he came into the shower with me. He had all his clothes off too, and—I was so scared I just froze.”
“What happened then?”
“He pushed me into the water and washed me all over with soap. He held on to me hard with one hand and—touched me—”
And then generally, before the worst of it, he woke up. But thinking this, already awake in the sodden chill of a swamp night, Justin made the nightmare stop by sheer force of will. No. NO. I’m not telling. Never.
When his sore bare feet found the sand road, he knew which way to turn. Seeing the sun set had helped him to figure out which way was home. Not sweet home Alabama, but his more recent home, Stoat’s home. Justin knew Lee would think he was crazy to head back there, but to him it felt right. Anyway, he needed shoes and socks and fresh clothes and some money—he knew where Stoat kept the jar full of spare change—and he would grab something to eat before he thumbed a ride in the back of somebody’s pickup truck, got to a town, took a bus to Birmingham, where his grandfather lived. It wouldn’t be too hard to do this and avoid Stoat. He would watch the house and let himself in when Stoat went to work or whatever.
On the sand road he forced himself into a painful jog trot. Through the constant background noise of insects he heard the unmistakable single-note wordless Johnny Cash song of a male gator, so low and powerful it made his back prickle. He heard the creaky complaint of a disturbed heron. Then he heard the distant thrum of an engine and the scrunch of tires on sand. Vehicle approaching. Nobody drove through the swamp at this time of night with any good intention; even if it was not Stoat, it had to be alligator poachers or drug dealers or some other kind of slime with a crime to hide. Instantly, without needing to think about it, Justin lengthened his stride to run off the road into the woods, crashing through brush like a deer. And seeing headlights between the trees now, afraid to be caught in their white beams, he dropped to the ground, or rather shallow water, behind palmettos. He did not care what he might disturb there, poisonous spiders, scorpions, snakes, whatever, because he was more afraid of Stoat than any of those things. He could not see the vehicle, but at least he felt pretty sure whoever was in it could not see him, because he kept his head down and he wore the old green baseball hat that Lee had found.
Good thing. The passing vehicle, with a coughing, wheezy engine, really sounded like Stoat’s van.
But that may have been because he had Stoat on his mind, Justin told himself. After it had driven past and he could no longer hear it, he got back onto the road and on his way, running as long as he could, then slowing to a walk, then running again.
During the night he hid from two more vehicles, getting himself wet and grimy in the process. When daylight began to intrude on night’s protective darkness, Justin thought it would be a good idea for him to get off the road, now that he had come close to the edge of swampland. Instead of sheets of scummy water, he saw a real creek meandering through forest that sometimes flooded, judging by the splayed trunks of the trees, but right now was dry. Almost as dry as his mouth. In a kind of mental dawning, an epiphany, Justin allowed himself to recognize that he was very thirsty.
The water in the creek ran clear. He could drink it.
Picking his way through the woods to get there, Justin discovered that he was also very weary, so fatigued that he wobbled on his feet. And when he crouched to d
rink, he very nearly toppled into the creek. Bracing himself with one hand, he managed to cup water in the other and slowly drink his fill. Then he would have liked to bathe, but he felt as if he might drown if he tried. So exhausted. Falling-down tired. Could barely keep his eyes open.
And no wonder, he realized foggily. When had he last slept? Not this past night, and not the one before either; then he had been hiding from Stoat in the river. And the two nights before that, he’d stayed awake to feed Lee.
Sheesh, thought Justin, yawning as if he would dislocate his jaw. Definitely it was time for a nap, if he could find a safe place.
Luck favored him. Farther up the creek bank he spotted an old, leaf-littered, and very likely forgotten wooden rowboat beached upside down. Justin waded along the edge of the creek so he could get to it without struggling through thorny vines. Once there, he used what felt like the last of his strength to tilt one side of it off the ground and peer at the bare earth underneath, checking for snakes or scorpions.
A few beetles scurried away and a few worms squirmed their way out of sight. Nothing he couldn’t deal with under the circumstances.
Whispering, “Sweet!” Justin crawled underneath the rowboat and let it drop back to the ground so that it formed a carapace over him, a big high-domed wooden tortoise shell. Lying on soft, sandy earth in sheltered darkness felt heavenly. Closing his eyes, Justin told himself he would sleep just a few hours, until the heat of the day awoke him. . . .
• • •
Sweating, Justin awoke from sleep so deep he could not at first recall where he was, especially when it was so dark he couldn’t see a thing. He explored with his hands, and his fingertips encountered wooden planks.
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