A Time of Torment (8 page)

He was right. She hadn’t.

‘It doesn’t have to be her call,’ said Brown.

‘If she’s okay with him, so am I.’

‘TP—’

‘I said no.’

TP hadn’t raised his voice – he rarely did – but Brown knew the tone. The discussion was over.

Now here they were, watching the house in front of which the car was parked, the trees masking it from the road so they couldn’t even see what was going on.

A house
, thought Brown.
Not a hotel, but a house. We’ve never tried it in a house before
.

He told himself that it might be simpler than a hotel because there would be no security.

But what about an alarm? And what if the guy isn’t alone in there?

TP took the gun from under his seat and tucked it into the waistband of his pants. Brown didn’t own a gun. He didn’t much care for them. But he was glad, just this once, that TP had no such qualms.

Then TP said something that he’d never before said to Brown.

‘You were right,’ he said. ‘We should have called it off.’

T
P and Barry Brown entered the yard of the house, Brown leading, skirting the car and van in the drive, moving quickly to the back of the property where they had the best chance of gaining access without being spotted. They hadn’t even discussed the possibility of a simple knock on the door, not since TP had recognized that Brown might have been right about the mark, which meant Corrie had become the mark instead. Now, in unison, each pulled down his ski mask, obscuring his features. Brown hoped that TP didn’t find cause to use the gun. They were in enough trouble as it was.

Brown heard a slapping sound as they reached the backyard, which caused him to tighten his grip on the bat he was carrying. He’d made the bat himself, wood turning being one of those skills that he just had, and from which he thought he might someday be able to make a living, or supplement a regular income. Brown’s view was that a gun did only two things well – it threatened, and it fired – while a baseball bat had a multitude of uses, and, unlike a gun, was capable of inflicting harm in subtle increments.

TP paused beside him. There was a stirring in the yard, but TP’s eyesight wasn’t great at the best of times – although, thanks to the miracle of self-diagnosis, his condition was not yet serious enough to merit glasses or lenses. It was left to Brown to pick out the tarpaulin over the pool before them. One corner of it had come loose, and the sound of its flapping had gradually risen in tempo and volume as the wind increased. Brown figured that the tarp must have become detached recently, because the noise was loud and annoying, the kind that came between a person and sleep. It would even have been persistent and distracting enough to draw the attention of neighbors had the house not been comparatively isolated and sheltered.

He risked a glance around the corner, and saw that, as at the front of the house, the drapes had been drawn across the windows. Glass patio doors led to a deck, and farther along was a wood door with a small glass window, possibly leading to a kitchen or utility room. Brown could see no sign of illumination within, and the rear windows on the second floor were also dark.

To his right, that damned tarp kept flapping. It was possible that it might draw someone from inside, which would be good, especially if both the patio and secondary door were secured. He glanced at the area of the pool revealed by the tarp and saw that it still had water in it. Brown didn’t know much about pools. His family had never owned one, and neither had the kinds of families with whom they’d associated. He assumed that pools had to be drained for winter, but perhaps the people here hadn’t managed to get around to it yet, or were holding out for one last warm weekend. Good luck with that in Maine.

Sections of the backyard were lit by solar-powered lamps, one of which stood not far from the exposed corner of the pool. It cast a little light on the water, and Brown thought he caught a glimpse of something lying at the bottom of the shallow end. It was strangely regular in form, and he experienced the immediate sense that, whatever it was, it had no business being there.

He drew closer to the pool. Behind him, he heard TP whisper.

‘Hey, where are you going?’

Brown was exposing himself to anyone who might happen to glance out a window, but he didn’t care. Curiosity had snagged him with its hook, and now it was drawing him in. What
was
that?

He stood at the edge of the pool and looked down. A television set, one of those big, expensive flat-screen models, lay on the tiles. Lengths of rope or cable crisscrossed it, binding it tightly to what was beneath, anchored by the TV to the bottom of the pool.

Brown was looking into the eyes of a dead boy.

C
orrie returned to consciousness to find herself lying facedown on a couch in an unfamiliar room. Her hands had been pulled behind her back and secured with what felt like metal cuffs. She could feel them biting into her wrists. Her legs wouldn’t move, and she saw that they were held together with wire. She had been gagged with a length of cloth.

She tried to control her panic. TP was on his way, and Barry with him. They had to be close. Any moment now she would hear the ringing of the doorbell, or the breaking of glass, and then Henry the Asshole would wish that he’d never made his way to Portland. She hoped Barry would break his legs, and maybe his arms too, just before TP killed him and his creepy friend.

She heard movement behind her, and Henry appeared to her left. He was holding a pistol in his hand. Of the other man, there was no sign.

Henry put the muzzle to Corrie’s left eye. She just had time to close it before she felt it pressing hard against the eyelid. The click of the hammer locking caused a little part of her to come loose inside.

‘Not a sound,’ said Henry. ‘Not a movement.’

The boy in the pool had dark hair. He was probably not yet a teenager, to judge by his size, although the distortion caused by the water made it difficult to tell.
He hasn’t been down there very long
, Brown thought. For the most part he looked undamaged, apart from the way his mouth bulged. Brown couldn’t be sure, but it appeared that a ball had been jammed into it. The ball was red. It protruded from between his upper and lower jaws like a half-eaten apple.

Brown gazed down at the boy, and the boy gazed back. The gentle lapping of the water in the pool caused his hair to move. One of his hands was visible, but Brown couldn’t see the other. He wondered if the boy had somehow managed to get his left hand free, and tried to push against the big TV as he drowned. That assumed, of course, that he’d been alive when he went in the water. If he was, did whoever was responsible for throwing him in the pool stay to watch him die?

Brown felt the weight of the bat in his hand, and the grain of the wood against his skin. It brought him back, and with that he thought of Corrie. She was in the house with whoever had killed this boy.

Now Brown was really glad that TP had his gun with him.

He turned to speak to TP, who was staring at him from the back wall of the house. Brown pointed at the pool, but TP just shook his head. He didn’t want to see whatever was down there, because it didn’t matter. Only Corrie mattered now.

TP moved to the patio doors.

Upstairs, on the second floor, Henry’s companion left the bedroom he’d been cleaning and stepped into the hallway. His name was Gideon, although it would be many years before that fact became known. For now, like his companion, he was sailing under a false flag. He was, as Corrie had quickly surmised, both excessively tall and excessively thin, like a stick insect given human form. His eyes were very small, and partly obscured by heavy lids, making him virtually blind in the upper visual fields on the lateral gaze. The hair on his head was a uniform half-inch in length, and already gray, even though Gideon was only in his thirties. He also suffered from asthma, gout, a peptic ulcer, and undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. He was a creature of the shadows and the depths.

Gideon had slept on a bed while they were in the house, but he always remained fully clothed, and the plastic garbage bag in his left hand now contained the pillowcase and the cover from the comforter, as well as the used towels from the bathroom. Earlier he’d poured bleach down the drains in the bath and the sink, although both he and Henry had been careful to use a drain stopper to catch any stray hairs. They had also worn double-layered plastic gloves and shower caps during their entire time in the house. While Henry was away, Gideon had vacuumed and cleaned, doing his best to ensure that they left as few traces of their presence as possible.

He passed by a second bedroom to his right. A dead woman was tied to the bed. Gideon had used her, but he’d been careful to wear a rubber. He’d cleaned her, too, after he killed her. Gideon was also responsible for killing the boy at the bottom of the pool. He had lost his temper when the boy attacked him. He had no idea why he chose to toss him into the pool with the TV to weigh him down, except that Gideon didn’t like TV and didn’t like the boy either. Henry had been absent from the house when Gideon murdered the boy, but he hadn’t said anything when he came back, although he’d been surprised to find the boy in the pool. The tarp had held until the wind picked up. Gideon thought that he’d better retie it, even though they were about to leave.

The woman had been too old to keep. She was the boy’s mother, but he must have been born when she was already in her forties, because her driver’s license said that she was fifty-four. Her husband was five years older. Henry had killed him. He’d shot him in the chest, and he was now lying in the basement, where it was cool. It had been Gideon’s decision to keep the woman alive for a while. Henry didn’t have the same obstacles to intimacy as Gideon. Women liked Henry. They most assuredly did not like Gideon, so he took his pleasures where he could.

This trip – or ‘range’, in their parlance – had produced a good haul: some designer clothes; jewelry; cash; a collection of coins and stamps; a couple of expensive phones; a handful of transportable electronic items, including some tablets; even a collection of old books that Henry thought might be worth something. Most of it was in the van, with the more valuable items hidden in a pair of compartments under the driver and front passenger seats. It was a shame that the woman had been so old, but Henry had made up for that. The girl downstairs would do just fine, although Gideon wouldn’t be given a chance to spend time with her, except maybe right at the end. He was glad that he’d used the other woman while he could.

Past the bedroom in which the dead woman lay was a hallway window overlooking the backyard. Gideon paused there to take in, for a last time, the view of the lawn and the flower beds, of the pool – and the figure of the man who was staring into it.

Gideon dropped the bag and scuttled down the stairs.

TP tested the patio door, expecting to find it locked, but it moved under the pressure of his left hand. He listened, heard no sounds of movement inside, and slowly began to open the door wider. He looked over his right shoulder to see Brown coming to join him, and even in the moonlight his face displayed his shock at what he had seen in the pool. A body, TP figured. What else could it be? But it wasn’t Corrie’s. There wouldn’t have been time for that. And all that mattered right now was Corrie.

He turned back toward the drapes, lifting them with his left hand, the other holding the gun. He saw Corrie lying on a couch. He saw—

Brown heard a sound like a paper bag bursting, and TP toppled backward and fell to the ground on his back. Another bag burst, and Brown was punched hard in the gut, pirouetting with the force of the blow and landing on the tarp covering the pool. It bowed under his weight, but held. Water flowed over him, but it wasn’t deep, and he could keep his face above it. Still, he was hurting now. The water was cold, but not cold enough to cancel out the heat of the pain in his belly.

A man appeared by the pool, watching him. He was tall but hunched, his legs too long for his body, his fingers too long for his hands. His eyes were barely there at all. One arm hung free, and the other was holding on to TP’s left hand. The man had dragged TP from where he had fallen to the edge of the pool. TP’s face was turned toward the water, and Brown could see, just below his right eye, the entry wound from the bullet that had killed his friend.

The man smiled, and Brown saw that his teeth were so perfect they could only be dentures, an impression confirmed when he ejected them into his right hand and dropped them in a pocket of the old army jacket he was wearing. But his hand was not empty when it reemerged from his pocket, and was instead holding one of those plastic boxes in which folks kept their mouth guards. He allowed TP’s arm to fall, freeing up two hands, and used them to place a new set of dentures in his mouth. Once they were in position, he displayed them to Brown. Each consisted of a pair of long blades set into the acrylic base at slight angles, leaving a gap in the middle of each row. The man reached down, lifted TP’s right hand, bit off the top half of TP’s index finger, and chewed for a time before spitting the resulting mess into the pool close to Brown’s head, the blades of the dentures now stained red.

Brown felt himself dying. He just prayed that it would come before this creature went to work on him.

A second man appeared, the one responsible for bringing them here, the one who had taken Corrie. Beside the other, he appeared unutterably normal. Brown tried to speak. He wanted to ask the man from the bar to prevent Corrie from being bitten, but death was stealing away all his words as a preparation for the great silence to come.

‘Time to go,’ he heard the man from the bar say.

The other one kicked at TP’s body, and it landed on the tarp by Brown’s feet, yet somehow the cover still held, although Brown felt himself beginning to slide. The man from the bar produced a knife and cut at the ropes holding the tarp in place – one, then another – until they came away, and TP and Brown drifted slowly down to join the dead boy.