Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

He does.

‘I need help,’ Pete Saubers says rapidly. ‘Please, Mr Hodges, I really need help.’

‘Just a sec. I’m going to put you on speaker so my associates can hear.’

‘Associates?’ Pete sounds more alarmed than ever. ‘What associates?’

‘Holly Gibney. Your sister knows her. And Jerome Robinson. He’s Barbara Robinson’s older brother.’

‘Oh. I guess … I guess that’s okay.’ And, as if to himself: ‘How much worse can it get?’

‘Peter, we’re in Andrew Halliday’s shop. There’s a dead man in his office. I assume it’s Halliday, and I assume you know about it. Would those assumptions be correct?’

There’s a moment of silence. If not for the faint sound of traffic wherever Pete is, Hodges might have thought he’d broken the connection. Then the boy starts talking again, the words spilling out in a waterfall.

‘He was there when I got there. The man with the red lips. He told me Mr Halliday was in the back, so I went into his office, and he followed me and he had a gun and he tried to kill me when I wouldn’t tell him where the notebooks were. I wouldn’t because … because he doesn’t deserve to have them and besides he was going to kill me anyway, I could tell just by looking in his eyes. He … I …’

‘You threw the decanters at him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes! The bottles! And he shot at me! He missed, but it was so close I heard it go by. I ran and got away, but then he called me and said they’d blame me, the police would, because I threw a hatchet at him, too … did you see the hatchet?’

‘Yes,’ Hodges says. ‘I’m looking at it right now.’

‘And … and my fingerprints, see … they’re on it because I threw it at him … and he has some video discs of me and Mr Halliday arguing … because he was trying to blackmail me! Halliday, I mean, not the man with the red lips, only now he’s trying to blackmail me, too!’

‘This red-lips man has the store security video?’ Holly asks, bending toward the phone. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes! He said the police will arrest me and they will because I didn’t go to any of the Sunday meetings at River Bend, and he also has a voicemail and I don’t know what to do!’

‘Where are you, Peter?’ Hodges asks. ‘Where are you right now?’

There’s another pause, and Hodges knows exactly what Pete’s doing: checking for landmarks. He may have lived in the city his whole life, but right now he’s so freaked he doesn’t know east from west.

‘Government Square,’ he says at last. ‘Across from this restaurant, the Happy Cup?’

‘Do you see the man who shot at you?’

‘N-No. I ran, and I don’t think he could chase me very far on foot. He’s kind of old, and you can’t drive a car on Lacemaker Lane.’

‘Stay there,’ Hodges says. ‘We’ll come and get you.’

‘Please don’t call the police,’ Peter says. ‘It’ll kill my folks, after everything else that’s happened to them. I’ll give you the notebooks. I never should have kept them, and I never should have tried to sell any of them. I should have stopped with the money.’ His voice is blurring now as he breaks down. ‘My parents … they were in such trouble. About everything. I only wanted to help!’

‘I’m sure that’s true, but I have to call the police. If you didn’t kill Halliday, the evidence will show that. You’ll be fine. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to your house. Will your parents be there?’

‘Dad’s on a business thing, but my mom and sister will be.’ Pete has to hitch in a breath before going on. ‘I’ll go to jail, won’t I? They’ll never believe me about the man with the red lips. They’ll think I made him up.’

‘All you have to do is tell the truth,’ Holly says. ‘Bill won’t let anything bad happen to you.’ She grabs his hand and squeezes it fiercely. ‘Will you?’

Hodges repeats, ‘If you didn’t kill him, you’ll be fine.’

‘I didn’t! Swear to God!’

‘This other man did. The one with the red lips.’

‘Yes. He killed John Rothstein, too. He said Rothstein sold out.’

Hodges has a million questions, but this isn’t the time.

‘Listen to me, Pete. Very carefully. Stay where you are. We’ll be at Government Square in fifteen minutes.’

‘If you let me drive,’ Jerome says, ‘we can be there in ten.’

Hodges ignores this. ‘The four of us will go to your house. You’ll tell the whole story to me, my associates, and your mother. She may want to call your father and discuss getting you legal representation. Then we’re going to call the police. It’s the best I can do.’

And better than I should do, he thinks, eyeing the mangled corpse and thinking about how close he came to going to jail himself four years ago. For the same kind of thing, too: Lone Ranger shit. But surely another half hour or forty-five minutes can’t hurt. And what the boy said about his parents hit home. Hodges was at City Center that day. He saw the aftermath.

‘A-All right. Come as fast as you can.’

‘Yes.’ He breaks the connection.

‘What do we do about our fingerprints?’ Holly asks.

‘Leave them,’ Hodges says. ‘Let’s go get that kid. I can’t wait to hear his story.’ He tosses Jerome the Mercedes key.

‘Thanks, Massa Hodges!’ Tyrone Feelgood screeches. ‘Dis here black boy is one safe drivuh! I is goan get chall safe to yo destin—’

‘Shut up, Jerome.’

Hodges and Holly say it together.

37

Pete takes a deep, trembling breath and closes his cell phone. Everything is going around in his head like some nightmare amusement park ride, and he’s sure he sounded like an idiot. Or a murderer scared of getting caught and making up any wild tale. He forgot to tell Mr Hodges that Red Lips once lived in Pete’s own house, and he should have done that. He thinks about calling Hodges back, but why bother when he and those other two are coming to pick him up?

The guy won’t go to the house, anyway, Pete tells himself. He can’t. He has to stay invisible.

But he might, just the same. If he thinks I was lying about moving the notebooks somewhere else, he really might. Because he’s crazy. A total whack-job.

He tries Tina’s phone again and gets nothing but her message: ‘Hey, it’s Teens, sorry I missed you, do your thing.’ Beeep.

All right, then.

Mom.

But before he can call her, he sees a bus coming, and in the destination window, like a gift from heaven, are the words NORTH SIDE. Pete suddenly decides he’s not going to sit here and wait for Mr Hodges. The bus will get him there sooner, and he wants to go home now. He’ll call Mr Hodges once he’s on board and tell him to meet him at the house, but first he’ll call his mother and tell her to lock all the doors.

The bus is almost empty, but he makes his way to the back, just the same. And he doesn’t have to call his mother, after all; his phone rings in his hand as he sits down. MOM, the screen says. He takes a deep breath and pushes ACCEPT. She’s talking before he can even say hello.

‘Where are you, Peter?’ Peter instead of Pete. Not a good start. ‘I expected you home an hour ago.’

‘I’m coming,’ he says. ‘I’m on the bus.’

‘Let’s stick to the truth, shall we? The bus has come and gone. I saw it.’

‘Not the schoolbus, the North Side bus. I had to …’ What? Run an errand? That’s so ludicrous he could laugh. Except this is no laughing matter. Far from it. ‘There was something I had to do. Is Tina there? She didn’t go down to Ellen’s, or something?’

‘She’s in the backyard, reading her book.’

The bus is picking its way past some road construction, moving with agonizing slowness.

‘Mom, listen to me. You—’

‘No, you listen to me. Did you send that money?’

He closes his eyes.

‘Did you? A simple yes or no will suffice. We can go into the details later.’

Eyes still closed, he says: ‘Yes. It was me. But—’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘That’s a long story, and right now it doesn’t matter. The money doesn’t matter. There’s a guy—’

‘What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? That was over twenty thousand dollars!’

He stifles an urge to say Did you just figure that out?

The bus continues lumbering its laborious way through the construction. Sweat is rolling down Pete’s face. He can see the smear of blood on his knee, dark brown instead of red, but still as loud as a shout. Guilty! it yells. Guilty, guilty!

‘Mom, please shut up and listen to me.’

Shocked silence on the other end of the line. Not since the days of his toddler tantrums has he told his mother to shut up.

‘There’s a guy, and he’s dangerous.’ He could tell her just how dangerous, but he wants her on alert, not in hysterics. ‘I don’t think he’ll come to the house, but he might. You should get Tina inside and lock the doors. Just for a few minutes, then I’ll be there. Some other people, too. People who can help.’

At least I hope so, he thinks.

God, I hope so.

38

Morris Bellamy turns onto Sycamore Street. He’s aware that his life is rapidly narrowing to a point. All he has is a few hundred stolen dollars, a stolen car, and the need to get his hands on Rothstein’s notebooks. Oh, he has one other thing, too: a short-term hideout where he can go, and read, and find out what happened to Jimmy Gold after the Duzzy-Doo campaign put him at the top of the advertising dungheap with a double fistful of those Golden Bucks. Morris understands this is a crazy goal, so he must be a crazy person, but it’s all he has, and it’s enough.

There’s his old house, which is now the notebook thief’s house. With a little red car in the driveway.

‘Crazy don’t mean shit,’ Morris Bellamy says. ‘Crazy don’t mean shit. Nothing means shit.’

Words to live by.

39

‘Bill,’ Jerome says. ‘I hate to say it, but I think our bird has flown.’

Hodges looks up from his thoughts as Jerome guides the Mercedes through Government Square. There are quite a few people sitting on the benches – reading newspapers, chatting and drinking coffee, feeding the pigeons – but there are no teenagers of either sex.

‘I don’t see him at any of the tables on the café side, either,’ Holly reports. ‘Maybe he went inside for a cup of coffee?’

‘Right now, coffee would be the last thing on his mind,’ Hodges says. He pounds a fist on his thigh.

‘North Side and South Side buses run through here every fifteen minutes,’ Jerome says. ‘If I were in his shoes, sitting and waiting around for someone to come and pick me up would be torture. I’d want to be doing something.’

That’s when Hodges’s phone rings.

‘A bus came along and I decided not to wait,’ Pete says. He sounds calmer now. ‘I’ll be home when you get there. I just got off the phone with my mother. She and Tina are okay.’

Hodges doesn’t like the sound of this. ‘Why wouldn’t they be, Peter?’

‘Because the guy with the red lips knows where we live. He said he used to live there. I forgot to tell you.’

Hodges checks where they are. ‘How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?’

‘Be there in twenty. Maybe less. If I’d known the kid was going to grab a bus, I would’ve taken the Crosstown.’

‘Mr Hodges?’ Pete.

‘I’m here.’

‘He’d be stupid to go to my house, anyway. If he does that, I won’t be framed anymore.’

He’s got a point. ‘Did you tell them to lock up and stay inside?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did you give your mom his description?’

‘Yes.’

Hodges knows that if he calls the cops, Mr Red Lips will be gone with the wind, leaving Pete to depend on the forensic evidence to get him off the hook. And they can probably beat the cops, anyway.

‘Tell him to call the guy,’ Holly says. She leans toward Hodges and bellows, ‘Call and say you changed your mind and will give him the notebooks!’

‘Pete, did you hear that?’

‘Yeah, but I can’t. I don’t even know if he has a phone. He called me from the one in the bookshop. We didn’t, you know, exactly have time to exchange info.’

‘How poopy is that?’ Holly asks no one in particular.

‘All right. Call me the minute you get home and verify that everything’s okay. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll have to call for the police.’

‘I’m sure they’re f—’

But this is where they came in. Hodges closes his phone and leans forward. ‘Punch it, Jerome.’

‘As soon as I can.’ He gestures at the traffic, three lanes going each way, chrome twinkling in the sunshine. ‘Once we get past the rotary up there, we’ll be gone like Enron.’

Twenty minutes, Hodges thinks. Twenty minutes at most. What can happen in twenty minutes?

The answer, he knows from bitter experience, is quite a lot. Life and death. Right now all he can do is hope those twenty minutes don’t come back to haunt him.

40

Linda Saubers came into her husband’s little home office to wait for Pete, because her husband’s laptop is on the desk and she can play computer solitaire. She is far too upset to read.

After talking to Pete, she’s more upset than ever. Afraid, too, but not of some sinister villain lurking on Sycamore Street. She’s afraid for her son, because it’s clear he believes in the sinister villain. Things are finally starting to come together. His pallor and weight loss … the crazy moustache he tried to grow … the return of his acne and his long silences … they all make sense now. If he’s not having a nervous breakdown, he’s on the verge of one.

She gets up and looks out the window at her daughter. Tina’s got her best blouse on, the billowy yellow one, and no way should she be wearing it on a dirty old glider that should have been taken down years ago. She has a book, and it’s open, but she doesn’t seem to be reading. She looks drawn and sad.

What a nightmare, Linda thinks. First Tom hurt so badly he’ll walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and now our son seeing monsters in the shadows. That money wasn’t manna from heaven, it was acid rain. Maybe he just has to come clean. Tell us the whole story about where the money came from. Once he does that, the healing process can begin.

In the meantime, she’ll do as he asked: call Tina inside and lock the house. It can’t hurt.

A board creaks behind her. She turns, expecting to see her son, but it’s not Pete. It’s a man with pale skin, thinning white hair, and red lips. It’s the man her son described, the sinister villain, and her first feeling isn’t terror but an absurdly powerful sense of relief. Her son isn’t having a nervous breakdown, after all.

Then she sees the gun in the man’s hand, and the terror comes, bright and hot.

‘You must be Mom,’ the intruder says. ‘Strong family resemblance.’

‘Who are you?’ Linda Saubers asks. ‘What are you doing here?’

The intruder – in the doorway of her husband’s study instead of in her son’s mind – glances out the window, and Linda has to suppress an urge to say Don’t look at her.

‘Is that your daughter?’ Morris asks. ‘Hey, she’s pretty. I always liked a girl in yellow.’

‘What do you want?’ Linda asks.

‘What’s mine,’ Morris says, and shoots her in the head. Blood flies up and spatters red droplets against the glass. It sounds like rain.

41

Tina hears an alarming bang from the house and runs for the kitchen door. It’s the pressure cooker, she thinks. Mom forgot the damn pressure cooker again. This has happened once before, while her mother was making preserves. It’s an old cooker, the kind that sits on the stove, and Pete spent most of one Saturday afternoon on a stepladder, scraping dried strawberry goo off the ceiling. Mom was vacuuming the living room when it happened, which was lucky. Tina hopes to God she wasn’t in the kitchen this time, either.

‘Mom?’ She runs inside. There’s nothing on the stove. ‘Mo—’

An arm grabs her around the middle, hard. Tina loses her breath in an explosive whoosh. Her feet rise from the floor, kicking. She can feel whiskers against her cheek. She can smell sweat, sour and hot.

‘Don’t scream and I won’t have to hurt you,’ the man says into her ear, making her skin prickle. ‘Do you understand?’

Tina manages to nod, but her heart is hammering and the world is going dark. ‘Let me – breathe,’ she gasps, and the hold loosens. Her feet go back to the floor. She turns and sees a man with a pale face and red lips. There’s a cut on his chin, it looks like a bad one. The skin around it is swollen and blue-black.

‘Don’t scream,’ he repeats, and raises an admonitory finger. ‘Do not do that.’ He smiles, and if it’s supposed to make her feel better, it doesn’t work. His teeth are yellow. They look more like fangs than teeth.

‘What did you do to my mother?’

‘She’s fine,’ the man with the red lips says. ‘Where’s your cell phone? A pretty little girl like you must have a cell phone. Lots of friends to chatter and text with. Is it in your pocket?’

‘N-N-No. Upstairs. In my room.’

‘Let’s go get it,’ Morris says. ‘You’re going to make a call.’

42

Pete’s stop is Elm Street, two blocks over from the house, and the bus is almost there. He’s making his way to the front when his cell buzzes. His relief at seeing his sister’s smiling face in the little window is so great that his knees loosen and he has to grab one of the straphandles.

‘Tina! I’ll be there in a—’

‘There’s a man here!’ Tina is crying so hard he can barely understand her. ‘He was in the house! He—’

Then she’s gone, and he knows the voice that replaces hers. He wishes to God he didn’t.

‘Hello, Peter,’ Red Lips says. ‘Are you on your way?’

He can’t say anything. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. The bus pulls over at the corner of Elm and Breckenridge Terrace, his stop, but Pete only stands there.

‘Don’t bother answering that, and don’t bother coming home, because no one will be here if you do.’

‘He’s lying!’ Tina yells. ‘Mom is—’

Then she howls.

‘Don’t you hurt her,’ Pete says. The few other riders don’t look around from their papers or handhelds, because he can’t speak above a whisper. ‘Don’t you hurt my sister.’

‘I won’t if she shuts up. She needs to be quiet. You need to be quiet, too, and listen to me. But first you need to answer two questions. Have you called the police?’

‘No.’

‘Have you called anyone?’

‘No.’ Pete lies without hesitation.

‘Good. Excellent. Now comes the listening part. Are you listening?’

A large lady with a shopping bag is clambering onto the bus, wheezing. Pete gets off as soon as she’s out of the way, walking like a boy in a dream, the phone plastered to his ear.

‘I’m taking your sister with me to a safe place. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks.’

Pete starts to tell him they don’t have to do it that way, he’ll just tell Red Lips where the notebooks are, then realizes doing that would be a huge mistake. Once Red Lips knows they’re in the basement at the Rec, he’ll have no reason to keep Tina alive.

‘Are you there, Peter?’

‘Y-Yes.’

‘You better be. You just better be. Get the notebooks. When you have them – and not before – call your sister’s cell again. If you call for any other reason, I’ll hurt her.’

‘Is my mother all right?’

‘She’s fine, just tied up. Don’t worry about her, and don’t bother going home. Just get the notebooks and call me.’

With that, Red Lips is gone. Pete doesn’t have time to tell him he has to go home, because he’ll need Tina’s wagon again to haul the cartons. He also needs to get his father’s key to the Rec. He returned it to the board in his father’s office, and he needs it to get in.

43

Morris slips Tina’s pink phone into his pocket and yanks a cord from her desktop computer. ‘Turn around. Hands behind you.’

‘Did you shoot her?’ Tears are running down Tina’s cheeks. ‘Was that the sound I heard? Did you shoot my moth—’

Morris slaps her, and hard. Blood flies from Tina’s nose and the corner of her mouth. Her eyes widen in shock.

‘You need to shut your quack and turn around. Hands behind you.’

Tina does it, sobbing. Morris ties her wrists together at the small of her back, cinching the knots viciously.

‘Ow! Ow, mister! That’s too tight!’

‘Deal with it.’ He wonders vaguely how many shots might be left in his old pal’s gun. Two will be enough; one for the thief and one for the thief’s sister. ‘Walk. Downstairs. Out the kitchen door. Let’s go. Hup-two-three-four.’

She looks back at him, her eyes huge and bloodshot and swimming with tears. ‘Are you going to rape me?’

‘No,’ Morris says, then adds something that is all the more terrifying because she doesn’t understand it: ‘I won’t make that mistake again.’

44

Linda comes to staring at the ceiling. She knows where she is, Tom’s office, but not what has happened to her. The right side of her head is on fire, and when she raises a hand to her face, it comes away wet with blood. The last thing she can remember is Peggy Moran telling her that Tina had gotten sick at school.

Go get her and take her home, Peggy had said. I’ll cover this.

No, she remembers something else. Something about the mystery money.

I was going to talk to Pete about it, she thinks. Get some answers. I was playing solitaire on Tom’s computer, just killing time while I waited for him to come home, and then—

Then, black.

Now, this terrible pain in her head, like a constantly slamming door. It’s even worse than the migraines she sometimes gets. Worse even than childbirth. She tries to raise her head and manages to do it, but the world starts going in and out with her heartbeat, first sucking, then blooming, each oscillation accompanied by such godawful agony …

She looks down and sees the front of her gray dress has changed to a muddy purple. She thinks, Oh God, that’s a lot of blood. Have I had a stroke? Some kind of brain hemorrhage?

Surely not, surely those only bleed on the inside, but whatever it is, she needs help. She needs an ambulance, but she can’t make her hand go to the phone. It lifts, trembles, and drops back to the floor.

She hears a yelp of pain from somewhere close, then crying she’d recognize anywhere, even while dying (which, she suspects, she may be). It’s Tina.

She manages to prop herself up on one bloody hand, enough to look out the window. She sees a man hustling Tina down the back steps into the yard. Tina’s hands are tied behind her.

Linda forgets about her pain, forgets about needing an ambulance. A man has broken in, and he’s now abducting her daughter. She needs to stop him. She needs the police. She tries to get into the swivel chair behind the desk, but at first she can only paw at the seat. She does a lunging sit-up and for a moment the pain is so intense the world turns white, but she holds onto consciousness and grabs the arms of the chair. When her vision clears, she sees the man opening the back gate and shoving Tina through. Herding her, like an animal on its way to the slaughterhouse.

Bring her back! Linda screams. Don’t you hurt my baby!

But only in her head. When she tries to get up, the chair turns and she loses her grip on the arms. The world darkens. She hears a terrible gagging sound before she blacks out, and has time to think, Can that be me?

45

Things are not golden after the rotary. Instead of open street, they see backed-up traffic and two orange signs. One says FLAGGER AHEAD. The other says ROAD CONSTRUCTION. There’s a line of cars waiting while the flagger lets downtown traffic go through. After three minutes of sitting, each one feeling an hour long, Hodges tells Jerome to use the side streets.

‘I wish I could, but we’re blocked in.’ He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, where the line of cars behind them is now backed up almost to the rotary.

Holly has been bent over her iPad, whacking away. Now she looks up. ‘Use the sidewalk,’ she says, then goes back to her magic tablet.

‘There are mailboxes, Hollyberry,’ Jerome says. ‘Also a chainlink fence up ahead. I don’t think there’s room.’

She takes another brief look. ‘Yeah, there is. You may scrape a little, but it won’t be the first time for this car. Go on.’

‘Who pays the fine if I get arrested on a charge of driving while black? You?’

Holly rolls her eyes. Jerome turns to Hodges, who sighs and nods. ‘She’s right. There’s room. I’ll pay your fucking fine.’

Jerome swings right. The Mercedes clips the fender of the car stopped ahead of them, then bumps up onto the sidewalk. Here comes the first mailbox. Jerome swings even farther to the right, now entirely off the street. There’s a thud as the driver’s side knocks the mailbox off its post, then a drawn-out squall as the passenger side caresses the chainlink fence. A woman in shorts and a halter top is mowing her lawn. She shouts at them as the passenger side of Holly’s German U-boat peels away a sign reading NO TRESPASSING NO SOLICITING NO DOOR TO DOOR SALESMEN. She rushes for her driveway, still shouting. Then she just peers, shading her eyes and squinting. Hodges can see her lips moving.

‘Oh, goody,’ Jerome says. ‘She’s getting your plate number.’

‘Just drive,’ Holly says. ‘Drive drive drive.’ And with no pause: ‘Red Lips is Morris Bellamy. That’s his name.’

It’s the flagger yelling at them now. The construction workers, who have been uncovering a sewer pipe running beneath the street, are staring. Some are laughing. One of them winks at Jerome and makes a bottle-tipping gesture. Then they are past. The Mercedes thumps back down to the street. With traffic bound for the North Side bottlenecked behind them, the street ahead is blessedly empty.

‘I checked the city tax records,’ Holly says. ‘At the time John Rothstein was murdered in 1978, the taxes on 23 Sycamore Street were being paid by Anita Elaine Bellamy. I did a Google search for her name and came up with over fifty hits, she’s sort of a famous academic, but only one hit that matters. Her son was tried and convicted of aggravated rape late that same year. Right here in the city. He got a life sentence. There’s a picture of him in one of the news stories. Look.’ She hands the iPad to Hodges.

Morris Bellamy has been snapped coming down the steps of a courthouse Hodges remembers well, although it was replaced by the concrete monstrosity in Government Square fifteen years ago. Bellamy is flanked by a pair of detectives. Hodges recalls one of them, Paul Emerson. Good police, long retired. He’s wearing a suit. So is the other detective, but that one has draped his coat over Bellamy’s hands to hide the handcuffs he’s wearing. Bellamy is also in a suit, which means the picture was taken either while the trial was ongoing, or just after the verdict was rendered. It’s a black-and-white photo, which only makes the contrast between Bellamy’s pale complexion and dark mouth more striking. He almost looks like he’s wearing lipstick.

‘That’s got to be him,’ Holly says. ‘If you call the state prison, I’ll bet you six thousand bucks that he’s out.’

‘No bet,’ Hodges says. ‘How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?’

‘Ten minutes.’

‘Firm or optimistic?’

Reluctantly, Jerome replies, ‘Well … maybe a tad optimistic.’

‘Just do the best you can and try not to run anybody ov—’

Hodge’s cell rings. It’s Pete. He sounds out of breath.

‘Have you called the police, Mr Hodges?’

‘No.’ Although they’ll probably have the license plate of Holly’s car by now, but he sees no reason to tell Pete that. The boy sounds more upset than ever. Almost crazed.

‘You can’t. No matter what. He’s got my sister. He says if he doesn’t get the notebooks, he’ll kill her. I’m going to give them to him.’

‘Pete, don’t—’

But he’s talking to no one. Pete has broken the connection.

46

Morris hustles Tina along the path. At one point a jutting branch rips her filmy blouse and scratches her arm, bringing blood.

‘Don’t make me go so fast, mister! I’ll fall down!’

Morris whacks the back of her head above her ponytail. ‘Save your breath, bitch. Just be grateful I’m not making you run.’

He holds onto her shoulders as they cross the stream, balancing her so she won’t fall in, and when they reach the point where the scrub brush and stunted trees give way to the Rec property, he tells her to stop.

The baseball field is deserted, but a few boys are on the cracked asphalt of the basketball court. They’re stripped to the waist, their shoulders gleaming. The day is really too hot for outside games, which is why Morris supposes there are only a few of them.

He unties Tina’s hands. She gives a little whimper of relief and starts rubbing her wrists, which are crisscrossed with deep red grooves.

‘We’re going to walk along the edge of the trees,’ he tells her. ‘The only time those boys will be able to get a good look at us is when we get near the building and come out of the shade. If they say hello, or if there’s someone you know, just wave and smile and keep walking. Do you understand?’

‘Y-Yes.’

‘If you scream or yell for help, I’ll put a bullet in your head. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes. Did you shoot my mother? You did, didn’t you?’

‘Of course not, just fired one into the ceiling to settle her down. She’s fine and you will be, too, if you do as you’re told. Get moving.’

They walk in the shade, the uncut grass of right field whickering against Morris’s trousers and Tina’s jeans. The boys are totally absorbed in their game and don’t even look around, although if they had, Tina’s bright yellow blouse would have stood out against the green trees like a warning flag.

When they reach the back of the Rec, Morris guides her past his old pal’s Subaru, keeping a close eye on the boys as he does so. Once the brick flank of the building hides the two of them from the basketball court, he ties Tina’s hands behind her again. No sense taking chances with Birch Street so close. Lots of houses on Birch Street.

He sees Tina draw in a deep breath and grabs her shoulder. ‘Don’t yell, girlfriend. Open your mouth and I’ll beat it off you.’

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ Tina whispers. ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’

Morris nods, satisfied. It’s a wise-con response if he ever heard one.

‘See that basement window? The one that’s open? Lie down, turn over on your belly, and drop through.’

Tina squats and peers into the shadows. Then she turns her bloody swollen face up to him. ‘It’s too far! I’ll fall!’

Exasperated, Morris kicks her in the shoulder. She cries out. He bends over and places the muzzle of the automatic against her temple.

‘You said you’d do whatever I wanted, and that’s what I want. Get through that window right now, or I’ll put a bullet in your tiny brat brain.’

Morris wonders if he means it. He decides he does. Little girls also don’t mean shit.

Weeping, Tina squirms through the window. She hesitates, half in and half out, looking at Morris with pleading eyes. He draws his foot back to kick her in the face and help her along. She drops, then yells in spite of Morris’s explicit instructions not to.