Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

‘My ankle! I think I broke my ankle!’

Morris doesn’t give a fuck about her ankle. He takes a quick look around to make sure he’s still unobserved, then slides through the window and into the basement of the Birch Street Rec, landing on the closed carton he used for a step last time. The thief’s sister must have landed on it wrong and tumbled to the floor. Her foot is twisted sideways and already beginning to swell. To Morris Bellamy, that doesn’t mean shit, either.

47

Mr Hodges has a thousand questions, but Pete has no time to answer any of them. He ends the call and sprints down Sycamore Street to his house. He has decided getting Tina’s old wagon will take too long; he’ll figure out some other way to transport the notebooks when he gets to the Rec. All he really needs is the key to the building.

He runs into his father’s office to grab it and stops cold. His mother is on the floor beside the desk, her blue eyes shining from a mask of blood. There’s more blood on his dad’s open laptop, on the front of her dress, spattered on the desk chair and the window behind her. Music is tinkling from the computer, and even in his distress, he recognizes the tune. She was playing solitaire. Just playing solitaire and waiting for her kid to come home and bothering no one.

‘Mom!’ He runs to her, crying.

‘My head,’ she says. ‘Look at my head.’

He bends over her, parts bloody clumps of hair, trying to be gentle, and sees a trench running from her temple to the back of her head. At one point, halfway along the trench, he can see bleary gray-white. It’s her skull, he thinks. That’s bad, but at least it’s not her brains, please God no, brains are soft, brains would be leaking. It’s just her skull.

‘A man came,’ she says, speaking with great effort. ‘He … took … Tina. I heard her cry out. You have to … oh Jesus Christ, how my head rings.’

Pete hesitates for one endless second, wavering between his need to help his mother and his need to protect his sister, to get her back. If only this was a nightmare, he thinks. If only I could wake up.

Mom first. Mom right now.

He grabs the phone off his father’s desk. ‘Be quiet, Mom. Don’t say anything else, and don’t move.’

She closes her eyes wearily. ‘Did he come for the money? Did that man come for the money you found?’

‘No, for what was with it,’ Pete says, and punches in three numbers he learned in grade school.

‘Nine-one-one,’ a woman says. ‘What is your emergency?’

‘My mom’s been shot,’ Pete says. ‘Twenty-three Sycamore Street. Send an ambulance, right now. She’s bleeding like crazy.’

‘What is your name, si—’

Pete hangs up. ‘Mom, I have to go. I have to get Tina back.’

‘Don’t … be hurt.’ She’s slurring now. Her eyes are still shut and he sees with horror that there’s even blood in her eyelashes. This is his fault, all his fault. ‘Don’t let … Tina be … hur …’

She falls silent, but she’s breathing. Oh God, please let her keep breathing.

Pete takes the key to the Birch Street Rec’s front door from his father’s real estate properties board.

‘You’ll be okay, Mom. The ambulance will come. Some friends will come, too.’

He starts for the door, then an idea strikes him and he turns back. ‘Mom?’

‘Whaa …’

‘Does Dad still smoke?’

Without opening her eyes, she says, ‘He thinks … I don’t … know.’

Quickly – he has to be gone before Hodges gets here and tries to stop him from doing what he has to do – Pete begins to search the drawers of his father’s desk.

Just in case, he thinks.

Just in case.

48

The back gate is ajar. Pete doesn’t notice. He pelts down the path. As he nears the stream, he passes a scrap of filmy yellow cloth hanging from a branch jutting out into the path. He reaches the stream and turns to look, almost without realizing it, at the spot where the trunk is buried. The trunk that caused all this horror.

When he reaches the stepping-stones at the bottom of the bank, Pete suddenly stops. His eyes widen. His legs go rubbery and loose. He sits down hard, staring at the foaming, shallow water that he has crossed so many times, often with his little sister babbling away about whatever interested her at the time. Mrs Beasley. SpongeBob. Her friend Ellen. Her favorite lunchbox.

Her favorite clothes.

The filmy yellow blouse with the billowing sleeves, for instance. Mom tells her she shouldn’t wear it so often, because it has to be dry-cleaned. Was Teens wearing it this morning when she left for school? That seems like a century ago, but he thinks …

He thinks she was.

I’m taking her to a safe place, Red Lips had said. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks.

Can it be?

Of course it can. If Red Lips grew up in Pete’s house, he would have spent time at the Rec. All the kids in the neighborhood spent time there, until it closed. And he must have known about the path, because the trunk was buried less than twenty paces from where it crossed the stream.

But he doesn’t know about the notebooks, Pete thinks. Not yet.

Unless he found out since the last call, that is. If so, he will have taken them already. He’ll be gone. That would be okay if he’s left Tina alive. And why wouldn’t he? What reason would he have to kill her once he has what he wants?

For revenge, Pete thinks coldly. To get back at me. I’m the thief who took the notebooks, I hit him with a bottle and got away at the bookstore, and I deserve to be punished.

He gets up and staggers as a wave of lightheadedness rushes through him. When it passes, he crosses the creek. On the other side, he begins to run again.

49

The front door of 23 Sycamore is standing open. Hodges is out of the Mercedes before Jerome has brought it fully to a stop. He runs inside, one hand in his pocket, gripping the Happy Slapper. He hears tinkly music he knows well from hours spent playing computer solitaire.

He follows the sound and finds a woman sitting – sprawling – beside a desk in an alcove that has been set up as an office. One side of her face is swollen and drenched in blood. She looks at him, trying to focus.

‘Pete,’ she says, and then, ‘He took Tina.’

Hodges kneels and carefully parts the woman’s hair. What he sees is bad, but nowhere near as bad as it could be; this woman has won the only lottery that really matters. The bullet put a groove six inches long in her scalp, has actually exposed her skull in one place, but a scalp wound isn’t going to kill her. She’s lost a lot of blood, though, and is suffering from both shock and concussion. This is no time to question her, but he has to. Morris Bellamy is laying down a trail of violence, and Hodges is still at the wrong end of it.

‘Holly. Call an ambulance.’

‘Pete … already did,’ Linda says, and as if her weak voice has conjured it, they hear a siren. It’s still distant but approaching fast. ‘Before … he left.’

‘Mrs Saubers, did Pete take Tina? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘No. He. The man.’

‘Did he have red lips, Mrs Saubers?’ Holly asks. ‘Did the man who took Tina have red lips?’

‘Irish … lips,’ she says. ‘But not … a redhead. White. He was old. Am I going to die?’

‘No,’ Hodges says. ‘Help is on the way. But you have to help us. Do you know where Peter went?’

‘Out … back. Through the gate. Saw him.’

Jerome looks out the window and sees the gate standing ajar. ‘What’s back there?’

‘A path,’ she says wearily. ‘The kids used it … to go to the Rec. Before it closed. He took … I think he took the key.’

‘Pete did?’

‘Yes …’ Her eyes move to a board with a great many keys hung on it. One hook is empty. The DymoTape beneath it reads BIRCH ST REC.

Hodges comes to a decision. ‘Jerome, you’re with me. Holly, stay with Mrs Saubers. Get a cold cloth to put on the side of her head.’ He draws in breath. ‘But before you do that, call the police. Ask for my old partner. Huntley.’

He expects an argument, but Holly just nods and picks up the phone.

‘He took his father’s lighter, too,’ Linda says. She seems a little more with it now. ‘I don’t know why he would do that. And the can of Ronson’s.’

Jerome looks a question at Hodges, who says: ‘It’s lighter fluid.’

50

Pete keeps to the shade of the trees, just as Morris and Tina did, although the boys who were playing basketball have gone home to dinner and left the court deserted except for a few crows scavenging spilled potato chips. He sees a small car nestled in the loading dock. Hidden there, actually, and the vanity license plate is enough to cause any doubts Pete might have had to disappear. Red Lips is here, all right, and he can’t have taken Tina in by the front. That door faces the street, which is apt to be fairly busy at this time of day, and besides, he has no key.

Pete passes the car, and at the corner of the building, he drops to his knees and peers around. One of the basement windows is open. The grass and weeds that were growing in front of it have been beaten down. He hears a man’s voice. They’re down there, all right. So are the notebooks. The only question is whether or not Red Lips has found them yet.

Pete withdraws and leans against the sunwarmed brick, wondering what to do next. Think, he tells himself. You got Tina into this and you need to get her out of it, so think, goddam you!

Only he can’t. His mind is full of white noise.

In one of his few interviews, the ever-irritable John Rothstein expressed his disgust with the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. Story ideas came from nowhere, he proclaimed. They arrived without the polluting influence of the author’s intellect. The idea that comes to Pete now also seems to arrive from nowhere. It’s both horrible and horribly attractive. It won’t work if Red Lips has already discovered the notebooks, but if that is the case, nothing will work.

Pete gets up and circles the big brick cube the other way, once more passing the green car with its tattletale license plate. He stops at the front right corner of the abandoned brick box, looking at the going-home traffic on Birch Street. It’s like peering through a window and into a different world, one where things are normal. He takes a quick inventory: cell phone, cigarette lighter, can of lighter fluid. The can was in the bottom desk drawer with his father’s Zippo. The can is only half full, based on the slosh when he shakes it, but half full will be more than enough.

He goes around the corner, now in full view of Birch Street, trying to walk normally and hoping that no one – Mr Evans, his old Little League coach, for instance – will hail him.

No one does. This time he knows which of the two keys to use, and this time it turns easily in the lock. He opens the door slowly, steps into the foyer, and eases the door closed. It’s musty and brutally hot in here. For Tina’s sake, he hopes it’s cooler in the basement. How scared she must be, he thinks.

If she’s still alive to feel anything, an evil voice whispers back. Red Lips could have been standing over her dead body and talking to himself. He’s crazy, and that’s what crazy people do.

On Pete’s left, a flight of stairs leads up to the second floor, which consists of a single large space running the length of the building. The official name was The North Side Community Room, but the kids had a different name for it, one Red Lips probably remembers.

As Pete sits on the stairs to take off his shoes (he can’t be heard clacking and echoing across the floor), he thinks again, I got her into this, it’s my job to get her out. Nobody else’s.

He calls his sister’s cell. From below him, muffled but unmistakable, he hears Tina’s Snow Patrol ringtone.

Red Lips answers immediately. ‘Hello, Peter.’ He sounds calmer now. In control. That could be good or bad for his plan. Pete can’t tell which. ‘Have you got the notebooks?’

‘Yes. Is my sister okay?’

‘She’s fine. Where are you?’

‘That’s pretty funny,’ Pete says … and when you think about it, it actually is. ‘Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet.’

‘I’m in no mood for cryptic humor. Let us do our business and be done with each other, shall we? Where are you?’

‘Do you remember the Saturday Movie Palace?’

‘What are you—’

Red Lips stops. Thinks.

‘Are you talking about the Community Room, where they used to show all those corny …’ He pauses again as the penny drops. ‘You’re here?’

‘Yes. And you’re in the basement. I saw the car out back. You were maybe ninety feet from the notebooks all along.’ Even closer than that, Pete thinks. ‘Come and get them.’

He ends the call before Red Lips can try to set the terms more to his liking. Pete runs for the kitchen on tiptoe, shoes in hand. He has to get out of sight before Red Lips can climb the stairs from the basement. If he does that, all may be well. If he doesn’t, he and his sister will probably die together.

From downstairs, louder than her ringtone – much louder – he hears Tina cry out in pain.

Still alive, Pete thinks, and then, The bastard hurt her. Only that’s not the truth.

I did it. This is all my fault. Mine, mine, mine.

51

Morris, sitting on a box marked KITCHEN SUPPLIES, closes Tina’s phone and at first only looks at it. There’s but one question on the floor, really; just one that needs to be answered. Is the boy telling the truth, or is he lying?

Morris thinks he’s telling the truth. They both grew up on Sycamore Street, after all, and they both attended Saturday movie-shows upstairs, sitting on folding chairs and eating popcorn sold by the local Girl Scout troop. It’s logical to think they would both choose this nearby abandoned building as a place to hide, one close to both the house they had shared and the buried trunk. The clincher is the sign Morris saw out front, on his first reconnaissance: CALL THOMAS SAUBERS REAL ESTATE. If Peter’s father is the selling agent, the boy could easily have filched a key.

He seizes Tina by the arm and drags her across to the furnace, a huge and dusty relic crouched in the corner. She lets out another of those annoying cries as she tries to put weight on her swollen ankle and it buckles under her. He slaps her again.

‘Shut up,’ he says. ‘Stop being such a whiny bitch.’

There isn’t enough computer cord to make sure she stays in one place, but there’s a cage-light hanging on the wall with several yards of orange electrical cord looped around it. Morris doesn’t need the light, but the cord is a gift from God. He didn’t think he could be any angrier with the thief, but he was wrong. Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet, the thief had said, and what right did he have to reference John Rothstein’s work? Rothstein’s work was his.

‘Turn around.’

Tina doesn’t move quickly enough to suit Morris, who is still furious with her brother. He grabs her shoulders and whirls her. Tina doesn’t cry out this time, but a groan escapes her tightly compressed lips. Her beloved yellow blouse is now smeared with basement dirt.

He secures the orange electrical cord to the computer cord binding her wrists, then throws the cage-light over one of the furnace pipes. He pulls the cord taut, eliciting another groan from the girl as her bound hands are jerked up almost to her shoulder blades.

Morris ties off the new cord with a double knot, thinking, They were here all along, and he thinks that’s funny? If he wants funny, I’ll give him all the funny he can stand. He can die laughing.

He bends down, hands on knees, so he’s eye to eye with the thief’s sister. ‘I’m going upstairs to get my property, girlfriend. Also to kill your pain-in-the-ass brother. Then I’m going to come back down and kill you.’ He kisses the tip of her nose. ‘Your life is over. I want you to think about that while I’m gone.’

He trots toward the stairs.

52

Pete is in the pantry. The door is only open a crack, but that’s enough to see Red Lips as he goes hustling by, the little red and black gun in one hand, Tina’s phone in the other. Pete listens to the echo of his footfalls as they cross the empty downstairs rooms, and as soon as they become the thud-thud-thud of feet climbing the stairs to what was once known as the Saturday Movie Palace, he pelts for the stairs to the basement. He drops his shoes on the way. He wants his hands free. He also wants Red Lips to know exactly where he went. Maybe it will slow him down.

Tina’s eyes widen when she sees him. ‘Pete! Get me out of here!’

He goes to her and looks at the tangle of knots – white cord, orange cord – that binds her hands behind her and also to the furnace. The knots are tight, and he feels a wave of despair as he looks at them. He loosens one of the orange knots, allowing her hands to drop a little and taking some of the pressure off her shoulders. As he starts work on the second, his cell phone vibrates. The wolf has found nothing upstairs and is calling back. Instead of answering, Pete hurries to the box below the window. His printing is on the side: KITCHEN SUPPLIES. He can see footprints on top, and knows to whom they belong.

‘What are you doing?’ Tina says. ‘Untie me!’

But getting her free is only part of the problem. Getting her out is the rest of it, and Pete doesn’t think there’s enough time to do both before Red Lips comes back. He has seen his sister’s ankle, now so swollen it hardly looks like an ankle at all.

Red Lips is no longer bothering with Tina’s phone. He yells from upstairs. Screams from upstairs. ‘Where are you, you fucking son of a whore?’

Two little piggies in the basement and the big bad wolf upstairs, Pete thinks. And us without a house made of straw, let alone one made of bricks.

He carries the carton Red Lips used as a step to the middle of the room and pulls the folded flaps apart as footfalls race across the kitchen floor above them, pounding hard enough to make the old strips of insulation hanging between the beams sway a little. Tina’s face is a mask of horror. Pete upends the carton, pouring out a flood of Moleskine notebooks.

‘Pete! What are you doing? He’s coming!’

Don’t I know it, Pete thinks, and opens the second carton. As he adds the rest of the notebooks to the pile on the basement floor, the footfalls above stop. He’s seen the shoes. Red Lips opens the door to the basement. Being cautious now. Trying to think it through.

‘Peter? Are you visiting with your sister?’

‘Yes,’ Peter calls back. ‘I’m visiting her with a gun in my hand.’

‘You know what?’ the wolf says. ‘I don’t believe that.’

Pete unscrews the cap on the can of lighter fluid and upends it over the notebooks, dousing the jackstraw heap of stories, poems, and angry, half-drunk rants that often end in mid-thought. Also the two novels that complete the story of a fucked-up American named Jimmy Gold, stumbling through the sixties and looking for some kind of redemption. Looking for – in his own words – some kind of shit that means shit. Pete fumbles for the lighter, and at first it slips through his fingers. God, he can see the man’s shadow up there now. Also the shadow of the gun.

Tina is saucer-eyed with terror, hogtied with her nose and lips slathered in blood. The bastard beat her, Pete thinks. Why did he do that? She’s only a little kid.

But he knows. The sister was a semi-acceptable substitute for the one Red Lips really wants to beat.

‘You better believe it,’ Pete says. ‘It’s a forty-five, lots bigger than yours. It was in my father’s desk. You better just go away. That would be the smart thing.’

Please, God, please.

But Pete’s voice wavers on the last words, rising to the uncertain treble of the thirteen-year-old boy who found these notebooks in the first place. Red Lips hears it, laughs, and starts down the stairs. Pete grabs the lighter again – tight, this time – and thumbs up the top as Red Lips comes fully into view. Pete flicks the spark wheel, realizing that he never checked to see if the lighter had fuel, an oversight that could end his life and that of his sister in the next ten seconds. But the spark produces a robust yellow flame.

Peter holds the lighter a foot above the pile of notebooks. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘No gun. But I did find this in his desk.’

53

Hodges and Jerome run across the baseball field. Jerome is pulling ahead, but Hodges isn’t too far behind. Jerome stops at the edge of the sorry little basketball court and points to a green Subaru parked near the loading dock. Hodges reads the vanity license plate – BOOKS4U – and nods.

They have just started moving again when they hear a furious yell from inside: ‘Where are you, you fucking son of a whore?’

That’s got to be Bellamy. The fucking son of a whore is undoubtedly Peter Saubers. The boy let himself in with his father’s key, which means the front door is open. Hodges points to himself, then to the Rec. Jerome nods, but says in a low voice, ‘You have no gun.’

‘True enough, but my thoughts are pure and my strength is that of ten.’

‘Huh?’

‘Stay here, Jerome. I mean it.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. You don’t happen to have a knife, do you? Even a pocketknife?’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘All right, then look around. Find a bottle. There must be some, kids probably come back here to drink beer after dark. Break it and then slash you some tires. If this goes sideways, he’s not using Halliday’s car to get away.’

Jerome’s face says he doesn’t much care for the possible implications of this order. He grips Hodges’s arm. ‘No kamikaze runs, Bill, you hear me? Because you have nothing to make up for.’

‘I know.’

The truth is he knows nothing of the kind. Four years ago, a woman he loved died in an explosion that was meant for him. There’s not a day that goes by when he doesn’t think of Janey, not a night when he doesn’t lie in bed thinking, If only I had been a little quicker. A little smarter.

He hasn’t been quick enough or smart enough this time, either, and telling himself that the situation developed too quickly isn’t going to get those kids out of the potentially lethal jam they’re in. All he knows for sure is that neither Tina nor her brother can die on his watch today. He’ll do whatever he needs to in order to prevent that from happening.

He pats the side of Jerome’s face. ‘Trust me, kiddo. I’ll do my part. You just take care of those tires. You might yank some plug wires while you’re at it.’

Hodges starts away, looking back just once when he reaches the corner of the building. Jerome is watching him unhappily, but this time he’s staying put. Which is good. The only thing worse than Bellamy killing Peter and Tina would be if he killed Jerome.

He goes around the corner and runs to the front of the building.

This door, like the one at 23 Sycamore Street, is standing open.

54

Red Lips is staring at the heap of Moleskine notebooks as if hypnotized. At last he raises his eyes to Pete. He also raises the gun.

‘Go ahead,’ Pete says. ‘Do it and see what happens to the notebooks when I drop the lighter. I only got a chance to really douse the ones on top, but by now it’ll be trickling down. And they’re old. They’ll go up fast. Then maybe the rest of the shit down here.’

‘So it’s a Mexican standoff,’ Red Lips says. ‘The only problem with that, Peter – I’m speaking from your perspective now – is that my gun will last longer than your lighter. What are you going to do when it burns out?’ He’s trying to sound calm and in charge, but his eyes keep ping-ponging between the Zippo and the notebooks. The covers of the ones on top gleam wetly, like sealskin.

‘I’ll know when that’s going to happen,’ Pete says. ‘The second the flame starts to go lower, and turns blue instead of yellow, I’ll drop it. Then, poof.’

‘You won’t.’ The wolf’s upper lip rises, exposing those yellow teeth. Those fangs.

‘Why not? They’re just words. Compared to my sister, they don’t mean shit.’

‘Really?’ Red Lips turns the gun on Tina. ‘Then douse the lighter or I’ll kill her right in front of you.’

Painful hands squeeze Pete’s heart at the sight of the gun pointing at his sister’s midsection, but he doesn’t close the Zippo’s cap. He bends over, very slowly lowering it toward the pile of notebooks. ‘There are two more Jimmy Gold novels in here. Did you know that?’

‘You’re lying.’ Red Lips is still pointing the gun at Tina, but his eyes have been drawn – helplessly, it seems – back toward the Moleskines again. ‘There’s one. It’s about him going west.’

‘Two,’ Pete says again. ‘The Runner Goes West is good, but The Runner Raises the Flag is the best thing he ever wrote. It’s long, too. An epic. What a shame if you never get to read it.’

A flush is climbing up the man’s pale cheeks. ‘How dare you? How dare you bait me? I gave my life for those books! I killed for those books!’

‘I know,’ Pete says. ‘And since you’re such a fan, here’s a little treat for you. In the last book, Jimmy meets Andrea Stone again. How about that?’

The wolf’s eyes widen. ‘Andrea? He does? How? What happens?’

Under such circumstances the question is beyond bizarre, but it’s also sincere. Honest. Pete realizes that the fictional Andrea, Jimmy’s first love, is real to this man in a way Pete’s sister is not. No human being is as real to Red Lips as Jimmy Gold, Andrea Stone, Mr Meeker, Pierre Retonne (also known as The Cat Salesman of Doom), and all the rest. This is surely a marker of true, deep insanity, but that must make Pete crazy, too, because he knows how this lunatic feels. Exactly how. He lit up with the same excitement, the same amazement, when Jimmy glimpsed Andrea in Grant Park, during the Chicago riots of 1968. Tears actually came to his eyes. Such tears, Pete realizes – yes, even now, especially now, because their lives hang upon it – mark the core power of make-believe. It’s what caused thousands to weep when they learned that Charles Dickens had died of a stroke. It’s why, for years, a stranger put a rose on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave every January 19th, Poe’s birthday. It’s also what would make Pete hate this man even if he wasn’t pointing a gun at his sister’s trembling, vulnerable midsection. Red Lips took the life of a great writer, and why? Because Rothstein dared to follow a character who went in a direction Red Lips didn’t like? Yes, that was it. He did it out of his own core belief: that the writing was somehow more important than the writer.

Slowly and deliberately, Pete shakes his head. ‘It’s all in the notebooks. The Runner Raises the Flag fills sixteen of them. You could read it there, but you’ll never hear any of it from me.’

Pete actually smiles.

‘No spoilers.’

‘The notebooks are mine, you bastard! Mine!’

‘They’re going to be ashes, if you don’t let my sister go.’

‘Petie, I can’t even walk!’ Tina wails.

Pete can’t afford to look at her, only at Red Lips. Only at the wolf. ‘What’s your name? I think I deserve to know your name.’

Red Lips shrugs, as if it no longer matters. ‘Morris Bellamy.’

‘Throw the gun away, Mr Bellamy. Kick it along the floor and under the furnace. Once you do that, I’ll close the lighter. I’ll untie my sister and we’ll go. I’ll give you plenty of time to get away with the notebooks. All I want to do is take Tina home and get help for my mom.’

‘I’m supposed to trust you?’ Red Lips sneers it.

Pete lowers the lighter farther. ‘Trust me or watch the notebooks burn. Make up your mind fast. I don’t know the last time my dad filled this thing.’

Something catches the corner of Pete’s eye. Something moving on the stairs. He doesn’t dare look. If he does, Red Lips will, too. And I’ve almost got him, Pete thinks.

This seems to be so. Red Lips starts to lower the gun. For a moment he looks every year of his age, and more. Then he raises the gun and points it at Tina again.

‘I won’t kill her.’ He speaks in the decisive tone of a general who has just made a crucial battlefield decision. ‘Not at first. I’ll just shoot her in the leg. You can listen to her scream. If you light the notebooks on fire after that, I’ll shoot her in the other leg. Then in the stomach. She’ll die, but she’ll have plenty of time to hate you first, if she doesn’t alre—’

There’s a flat double clap from Morris’s left. It’s Pete’s shoes, landing at the foot of the stairs. Morris, on a hair trigger, wheels in that direction and fires. The gun is small, but in the enclosed space of the basement, the report is loud. Pete gives an involuntary jerk, and the lighter falls from his hand. There’s an explosive whump, and notebooks on top of the pile suddenly grow a corona of fire.

‘No!’ Morris screams, wheeling away from Hodges even as Hodges comes pelting down the stairs so fast he can barely keep his balance. Morris has a clear shot at Pete. He raises the gun to take it, but before he can fire, Tina swings forward on her bonds and kicks him in the back of the leg with her good foot. The bullet goes between Pete’s neck and shoulder.

The notebooks, meanwhile, are burning briskly.

Hodges closes with Morris before he can fire again, grabbing at Morris’s gun hand. Hodges is the heavier of the two, and in better shape, but Morris Bellamy possesses the strength of insanity. They waltz drunkenly across the basement, Hodges holding Morris’s right wrist so the little automatic points at the ceiling, Morris using his left hand to rip at Hodges’s face, trying to claw out his eyes.

Pete races around the notebooks – they are blazing now, the lighter fluid that has trickled deep into the pile igniting – and grapples with Morris from behind. Morris turns his head, bares his teeth, and snaps at him. His eyes are rolling in their sockets.

‘His hand! Get his hand!’ Hodges shouts. They have stumbled under the stairs. Hodges’s face is striped with blood, several pieces of his cheek hanging in strips. ‘Get it before he skins me alive!’

Pete grabs Bellamy’s left hand. Behind them, Tina is screaming. Hodges pounds a fist into Bellamy’s face twice: hard, pistoning blows. That seems to finish him; his face goes slack and his knees buckle. Tina is still screaming, and the basement is growing brighter.

‘The roof, Petie! The roof is catching!’

Morris is on his knees, his head hanging, blood gushing from his chin, lips, and broken nose. Hodges grabs his right wrist and twists. There’s a crack as Morris’s wrist breaks, and the little automatic clatters to the floor. Hodges has a moment to think it’s over before the bastard rams his free hand forward and upward, punching Hodges squarely in the balls and filling his belly with liquid pain. Morris scuttles between his spread legs. Hodges gasps, hands pressed to his throbbing crotch.