Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

The first thing Reddick saw when he came to was Dana, stretched out on the couch above him, bound and gagged with duct tape. She was blinking at him furiously, eyes brimming with tears.

  He immediately recognized that he, too, was bound in a similar fashion, tape binding his ankles together and his wrists behind his back, a long strip wound completely around his head to cover his mouth. He was still on the floor, on his back, but he’d been moved away from the door to the center of the living room, which was dark now, suggesting he’d been out for some time.

  ‘I’m gonna make this quick,’ he heard someone behind him say.

  Reddick turned to one side, head throbbing, to see a big man standing several feet away, a dark ski mask covering his head, a knife approaching the size of a small machete clutched tightly in one gloved hand.

  ‘I got your kid tied up in the bedroom,’ the guy said. ‘If you wanna keep him alive . . .’

  Reddick didn’t hear the words that followed. His vision blurred and his head filled with a deafening static, all the air rushing out of his lungs at once.

  I got your kid tied up in the bedroom.

  Reddick began to scream, the tape around his mouth barely containing the full intensity of his terror and rage. His eyes rolled up toward the top of his head and his body convulsed, every muscle pulled as taut as a violin string.

  The man in the mask just stood there and watched, stunned, as Dana’s sobbing grew to a fever pitch.

  ‘What the fuck?’ the big man said.

  He walked over to Reddick and kicked him hard in the midsection, once, twice. ‘Hey. Hey! Shut the fuck up and listen to what I’m telling you, asshole!’

  But Reddick was beyond his reach. Something inside him gave way and the room flared white, before darkness engulfed him again like the wings of death itself.

  ‘I don’t know what your problem is, buddy, but you better get over it fast.’

  The man in the mask was looming over him, breathing straight into his face. Everything else was as it had been before: Reddick on the floor, Dana on the couch. He had no idea how long he’d been out.

  ‘Now, I’m gonna try to explain things to you one more time, and if you freak out on me again, your little boy’s dead. Understand? Nod your head if you understand.’

  The sound of the man’s voice was like something out of a dream, muffled and undulating. The room before Reddick’s eyes kept blinking in and out as if illuminated by a light bulb threatening to die. Questions without answers clattered around inside his head, company for a single thought that refused to fall silent: Not again. This can’t be happening to me again.

  But Reddick understood. He didn’t know who this man was or why he was here, but he knew one thing with absolute, unshakable certainty: He had to hold on long enough to hear what the man in the mask had to say. The comfort and release of total madness beckoned; he had nothing but a whisper-thin thread of sanity left. But he either held on to that thread now, with all the power he possessed, or Jake, and probably Dana as well, were dead. It was as simple as that.

  Reddick nodded his head.

  ‘Good,’ the man in the mask said, standing erect. ‘Here’s the deal. I need you to forget something. A car accident you had a few nights ago with a friend of mine. His name’s Baumhower. Remember?’

  Reddick did, but he couldn’t believe it. This was all about that whimpering fool in the mini-van Sunday night?

  ‘I’m waiting for you to nod your head,’ the man in the mask said, nudging Reddick in the chest with the toe of his right shoe.

  Reddick nodded again.

  ‘For reasons you don’t need to know, Mr Baumhower can’t have word of your accident go beyond you and him. So you’re gonna pretend it never happened, Reddick. You’re not gonna report it to your insurance company, the cops, no one. Ever. Do I have to tell you why?’

  Reddick shook his head. The threat that this maniac would come back to harm his wife and son was implicit.

  ‘Well, just to be sure, I’m gonna tell you both anyway.’ The masked man walked over to where Dana lay, put his face an inch from her own and turned the blade of his knife to and fro, right in front of her nose. ‘You paying attention, sweetheart?’

  Dana nodded, frantic.

  ‘Your boy over there breathes a word about the accident to anybody, you’re all dead. I’ll start with the kid and leave you for last. After you and I have some fun first, of course.’

  Reddick could feel himself slipping away, becoming something more animal than human. Desperate as he was to remain silent, a low, rumbling moan began to roll through him like thunder.

  ‘Would you like that? You an’ me havin’ a little fun first?’ the man with the knife asked Dana.

  And then Reddick was screaming again, helpless to do anything else. Images nine years old, of three corpses strewn about a bloodstained house in West Palm Beach, Florida, streamed through his mind in an endless loop, all he had left of a family he’d once loved the way he loved Dana and Jake today. The giant in the ski mask looked over to see him making a silly, futile effort to get to his feet, flopping around on the floor like a decapitated chicken. Without a word, he sauntered over and kicked Reddick under the chin, seemingly trying to take his head off.

  Reddick fell on to his back and finally let go, blinking up at the ceiling spinning above him until the lights went out for good.

  NINE

  They found Jake asleep in his bedroom. He’d been knocked out with chloroform, but was otherwise unharmed. Despite what their intruder had said to the contrary, he hadn’t even bothered to tie Jake up or gag him, one small favor for which they could be thankful. Had Jake awoken and found himself alone, trussed up and gagged like his parents, things could have been much worse. As it was they had to lie to him, tell him the big man in the mask who’d scared Mommy and covered his mouth with the funny smelling cloth was just a friend of Daddy’s playing a stupid game. He clearly found the story incredible, but he didn’t question it.

  Naturally, Dana wanted to call the police. Had she done so when she had the chance, having been first to slip out of her bonds before Reddick had even regained consciousness, he would have had no say in the matter. But she’d waited until she was sure Jake was safe and Reddick was OK to go to the phone, and by then it was too late.

  ‘No police,’ Reddick said.

  ‘Joe . . .’

  ‘You heard me! We’re not calling the police!’

  They sat in the dining room together, both of them shaking like heroin addicts in withdrawal, Jake back in their bedroom where they’d perched him in front of the TV. Dana was sure Reddick was either insane or suffering the effects of a concussion, possibly even both. Bruised and ashen-faced, he looked more like a dead man than a live one, and he wasn’t making sense. How could they not call the police?

  But Reddick was adamant. From the moment he’d heard the words that were pounding in his head, even now – I got your kid tied up in the bedroom – he’d been thinking it through, considering every possibility if he and Dana did what almost anyone else would do in their position and seek help from the authorities, and no matter how he looked at it, one thing was an irrefutable constant: risk. The chance that something could go wrong and, for all their efforts to protect his wife and son, the cops or the Feds would let the man in the mask make good on his threat to kill them. The odds said it couldn’t happen, that such a thing was as unlikely to occur as the same number coming up twice in a single lottery, but Reddick didn’t give a damn.

  Infinitesimal or not, he wasn’t going to play the odds in this, the most important game of his life.

  ‘But what else can we do?’ Dana asked. ‘Wait for that bastard or this Baumhower friend of his to come back?’ She’d already asked him who Baumhower was and he’d told her what little he knew, confessing he had no clue why the little shit would want so desperately to keep the car accident they’d had five nights ago a secret.

  ‘They won’t be back,’ Reddick said.

  ‘But how can you
know that?’

  Reddick just looked at her, making no effort to disguise the demon, freshly unleashed, roiling about within.

  ‘Oh, my God. You can’t seriously be thinking of taking care of these people yourself?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about it. You and Jake are getting out of here. Tonight.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no guarantee the police can protect you. I’ve seen what happens when they can’t. As long as you and Jake are somewhere safe, I can make sure those assholes never threaten either one of you again.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like I said: You don’t need to worry about it.’

  Dana shook her head, fighting back tears. ‘This is insane. You’re hurt, Joe. You need a doctor. And we need to call the police. Now, before anything else happens.’

  ‘No!’ Reddick slammed the heel of a fist into the dining room table, salt and pepper shakers leaping into a midair dance. Terrified, Dana fell silent and inched her chair away from the table, making ready to flee. She had never seen her husband this far gone before and the thought of him laying a hand on her or their son – something he had not done once in the six years they’d been together – was suddenly not so difficult to imagine.

  Reddick saw the fear on Dana’s face and froze, immediately aware of what he’d done. This wasn’t what he wanted. He wasn’t the monster here.

  He withdrew to his side of the table again and waited for the rage to subside. Dana was right to be afraid of him and he knew it; pushed or prodded the wrong way, he was capable of anything now, and once he let his thirst for blood out of the box, he would never get it back in. He either learned to keep himself in check, or all was surely lost.

  ‘Please,’ he said, his voice a dry, barbed whisper. ‘You have to trust me on this, Dana. I’ve got to handle this situation alone. There’s no other way to be sure.’

  ‘Sure of what?’

  He took a long time to answer. Tears and images of the wife and two children he’d once thought were his forever began to cloud his vision like a veil. ‘That I won’t have to bury you or my son. Been there, done that.’ He shook his head and swallowed hard. ‘I’m never going there again.’

  Dana remained far from convinced. Not going to the police for help ran counter to everything her instincts were telling her to do. But there was truth in her husband’s words to her, truth she couldn’t deny even to herself. Seeking police protection was no guarantee of her safety or that of their son, and nothing short of a guarantee would suffice. She hadn’t suffered what Reddick had suffered, could only imagine the depths of his pain and heartbreak, but she had seen enough over the years to know that he would never survive it if anything were to happen to her or Jake. Asking him to entrust their lives to others while people who had threatened them with death were still breathing was asking the impossible.

  Even so, Dana might have held her ground and insisted they call the police over Reddick’s objections were it not for the simple fact that Jake was her son, too. She loved Reddick, but Jake was her life, the center of her universe. If Reddick needed to know with absolute certainty that Baumhower and his friend would never again touch a hair on the boy’s head, no less so did Dana. And, it shamed her to realize now, she didn’t much care what such certainty would ultimately cost.

  ‘All right,’ she said, reaching out to take Reddick’s hand.

  He held on to her tight, drawing all the strength from her that he could. He knew he would need it. He’d been an emotional cripple for a long time, a borderline psychopath walking a razor wire between normalcy and madness, and now he’d been pushed over the edge. His head throbbed and his body ached, and he felt like the only thing holding him together was his skin, that if he turned too quickly in one direction or another, he’d crumble into a pile of ashes that would then scatter to the far winds. But he couldn’t let that happen. Not yet. He had work to do first, dirty work, and to do it he would have to retain some level of functionality. One day or two, that was all he needed.

  After that, he’d gladly surrender in full to the darkness that had been calling him for the past nine years.

  TEN

  It didn’t take Clarke long to begin having second thoughts. He should have just killed Reddick and been done with it.

  Cross, of course, were he aware of what Clarke had done, would say just the opposite: Clarke should have never approached Reddick in the first place. So what if he heard about Gillis Rainey’s body turning up in the river? Was that any reason to assume he’d put the dead man and Andy Baumhower together, ever? Why make a pre-emptive move to guard against something they had no reason to believe would ever happen, and one so fraught with risk, at that? Instead of improving the odds that Reddick would never go to the police with word of the car accident he’d had with Andy last Sunday morning, Clarke had all but ensured it.

  Unless the scare he’d put into Reddick proved to be big enough.

  That was the one thing Clarke was becoming less and less sure of as time wore on. By early Saturday morning, one long restless night after he’d fled Reddick’s home, Clarke was as convinced as ever that trying to silence Reddick before he could become a problem had been the right thing to do. Sitting back and doing nothing, playing the percentages that Reddick would never connect Gillis Rainey to Andy Baumhower, would have been a punk move, the equivalent of hoping and praying for the best. Clarke never hoped or prayed for anything; what he wanted to happen, he took action to make happen. But maybe in Reddick’s case, he hadn’t taken action enough. That was his growing suspicion.

  Reddick’s behavior at the house – all the screaming and thrashing about – had been troubling. It had been above and beyond what Clarke would have expected to see from a man who was simply afraid for his wife and child. There had been an electric quality to it that brought to Clarke’s mind the clinically insane, and if that was the case – if Reddick was in one way or another deranged – how he would react to Clarke’s invasion of his home once his hands were untied and the gag removed from his mouth was anybody’s guess. A sane man could be counted on to do what was reasonable, but a crazed one was unpredictable.

  Adding further to Clarke’s sense of unease was the fact that, from the beginning, Reddick hadn’t looked like the kind of man who would scare easy. Appearances could often be deceiving, but the man Clarke had followed around for most of the day Friday, before he’d been reduced to a trussed-up crybaby curled up in the fetal position on his wife’s living room floor, had resembled nothing as much as a cop or a Marine, somebody who was far more comfortable going through things than around them. He wasn’t a cop, because Clarke never once saw him flash a badge, and if he was US military, he was no longer active. But he had spent over an hour on Friday inside the City Hall East building downtown, where Clarke knew a number of law enforcement agencies had offices, so his being associated with the law in one capacity or another could not be entirely ruled out.

  Were do-overs possible, Clarke would have gone back in time to the moment Reddick walked into his wife’s home and the trap Clarke had set for him there and whacked them both. He hadn’t thought such an extreme measure was necessary then, but he could see now how killing them would have left much less to chance. What he’d done instead was done, however, and Clarke couldn’t change it. All he could do was prepare for the worst in case Reddick chose not to play ball and went to the authorities. First, he had to tell Baumhower what he’d done so the fool didn’t get caught by surprise if the cops came calling. Andy would surely spill his guts otherwise.

  After that, Clarke would spend a few hours throughout the weekend checking in on Reddick and his family, looking for any sign that Reddick had tragically mistaken his threat to kill them all for a bluff.

  Clarke’s suspicions about Reddick were well-founded, but he would prove to be too late getting around to having them. While Clarke was deciding to keep an eye on him and his wife over the next two days, Reddick was already taking steps to make such surveillance im
possible.

  He had started by driving Dana and Jake all the way down to Irvine late Friday night, hopping off and on the freeway throughout just to make sure they weren’t being followed, and finding a motel room there for the three of them. Once they were checked in, he remained awake while his wife and son slept, then dozed for a couple hours himself as soon as Dana awoke Saturday morning. She didn’t want to touch the SIG Sauer P220 handgun he’d stopped at his apartment the night before to pick up, along with several other things, but he’d forced the weapon into her hand and shown her how to operate it anyway, determined to leave nothing to chance.

  The minute Jake awoke, they all showered and dressed and found a quiet place near the motel to have breakfast.

  ‘What now?’ Dana asked immediately after they’d placed their orders. Sitting between them, Jake was in his own little world, listening to his mother’s iPod while working the games on a children’s menu, so speaking freely wasn’t a problem.

  ‘Nothing. You two sit tight here until I come back for you.’

  ‘Here? Why here? My brother—’

  ‘No.’ Dana’s brother Ken lived out in Moorpark and the home he shared with his wife and three kids there was big enough to accommodate another half-dozen people. ‘I want you where these guys will never be able to find you, and depending on their resources, hiding out with a family member might not be good enough.’

  Dana’s silence, and the look she gave him, said she thought he was taking his paranoia to new heights.

  ‘They found you once, Dana. They had my address, not yours. Until I know who these assholes are, I’m going to err on the side of caution.’

  She nodded, satisfied with his reasoning. ‘How long?’

  ‘I don’t know. A couple days at least, maybe more.’

  ‘Do you know what . . .’ She reconsidered, glancing at Jake, and tried again. ‘Do you have a plan?’

  ‘Not yet. But something will come to me.’