Drawn Into Darkness (17 page)

“Hey, what?”

Quinn did not reply. Crouching, hands cupped beside his eyes to lessen the outdoor glare, he pressed his nose to the glass. The drapery fabric had left a small space through which he could glimpse the shack's dim interior.

Beside him, Forrest repeated, “Hey, what?”

Not much, Quinn thought. From what he could see, the rigidly arranged rectilinear furnishings looked bare and sparse, indeed Spartan. The inhabitant or inhabitants had to be masculine, he assumed almost unconsciously, and when he glimpsed a discordant object, an instinctive part of his mind gave him a jolt before he consciously recognized it. Then he stiffened and stared.

“What?” reiterated Forrest patiently.

Quinn straightened, stepped back, and motioned for Forrest to take his place at the window. “Look at the bag tucked down beside the sofa.”

“Bag?”

“Purse. Handbag.”

“I don't see it.”

“You will when your eyes adjust.”

“Oh, okay, I see it now. What about it?”

“Does it look like a Mom bag to you?”

Quinn knew that his brother knew exactly what he meant. Women's handbags in general did not interest them, but they knew their mother's funky taste as exemplified by her Hello Kitty collectibles, and they knew she liked her purses colorful and capacious. If there were such a thing as a large Hello Kitty purse, Mom would have bought it. The purse Quinn had seen was comparable to a baby elephant except in color, or rather colors. It combined scarlet, turquoise, white, and black in a kind of checkerboard, or rather plaid, or perhaps quilt pattern? Quinn felt his fashion vocabulary inadequate to describe it, as usual when regarding his mother's choice of apparel.

Abruptly Forrest left the window and strode to the back door, where he seized the knob as if he would like to tear it off. “Locked.” Judging by the tension in his voice, he agreed with Quinn about the handbag.

“We need some cops with a search warrant.” Quinn started to reach for his cell phone.

“Are you crazy?” Forrest was the one who looked crazy, giving Quinn a demented stare. “Mom may be dying in there. We don't have time to fool around.”

“But if we don't work with the police—”

“Look, they'd just hold us up. We don't know for sure that's Mom's bag in there. We don't have, whatchacallit, probable cause.”

“We could say we
are
sure—”

“Oh, for God's sake. The door's open.” Forrest whirled on one foot and planted a hefty kick beside the doorknob with the other. “There, see? It's open.”

It certainly was.

Speechless with the shock of watching his usually docile brother take charge, Quinn shot his hand out to halt Forrest from plunging through the doorway.

“
Now
what?” Forrest demanded.

With an effort Quinn spoke. “Now I expect somebody to pop out screaming, ‘What the hell you think you're doing?'”

“And has that happened?”

“Excuse me. Let's just be a little careful, okay?”

“Sure. You first.”

Quinn sighed forcefully and strode in without flinching at any shadows. He went over, set aside a tablet of cheap paper that had been parked on top of the purse, and picked up the massive handbag. He lifted the flap and peered within, but it was like looking into a well. He reached for a table lamp.

“No,” Forrest said, “no lights,” and he grabbed Quinn by the elbow, towed him across the room, and halted him at the back window, where he parted the drapes a few inches.

In bright daylight, it turned out that the black things on the purse were Scottie dogs cavorting on patches outlined in turquoise tartan plaid. “Mom,” said Quinn with near certainty even before he pulled out her wallet, unsnapped it, and flipped it open. Yet at the sight of his mother's face smiling at him from her none-too-flattering driver's license photo, he felt an unexpected heat stinging his eyes.

“Damn,” he said, his voice cracking. “What the hell is going on?”

L
ittle known fact: a rattlesnake can control the amount of venom it releases when it strikes. It doesn't want to waste venom on things it can't eat. So it can give you a warning with a dry bite. Or it can give you a punishment with a moderated bite. Or it can go all out and give you the works.

Standing in the fishing shack with Stoat's hand clawing my shoulder and his shotgun jabbing the back of my neck, I wished to all deities ever that the snake I had thrown at Stoat had gone all out and given him the works. Instead, it had bitten him just badly enough to make him somewhat dependent on me but extra mean. He marched me to the van through tall weeds hiding fire ants that stung my bare feet. He held me at gunpoint quite efficiently as he opened the van's sliding side door and reached inside for—a roll of duct tape?

Son of a bitch.

Wielding the duct tape expertly with one hand, he taped the shotgun barrel to the back of my neck. I couldn't see what he was doing, but I could feel it with wretched certainty and sickness in my gut. From time to time I heard him rip off another length of tape—with his teeth. His crooked, yellow, rotting teeth. I wished the duct tape would yank them right out of his foul mouth, but no such luck, apparently. I could hear Stoat go on ripping and taping for quite a while after he finished with my neck, and I wondered what he was up to.

At last my peripheral vision glimpsed a miniature UFO of silver gray, and I heard the roll of duct tape thump onto the seat of the van. “Now you listen, tricky bitch,” Stoat crowed at me. “This here shotgun is not only stuck to your dumbass spine but also to my hand so there ain't no way my finger can slip off the trigger. So you ain't got
no
options, you hear?” He yanked open the passenger side door. “Get in.”

With his shotgun connected to me like a long leech hanging from my neck, and with him at the other end of it, I did so.

“Head on over to the driver's seat.”

I moved from one bucket seat to the other, and as I did so, Stoat climbed in after me, stepping as spryly as a goat over the console and gearshift and into the backseat. He sat behind me with the shotgun barrel between my seat and its headrest. There had been a few moments of slippage, but none of them long enough for me to rip free of the duct tape, and now I felt the shotgun barrel pressed against the back of my neck as firmly as ever.

As I thought of throwing my weight against the tape and taking a sort of suicide plunge out of the van onto the ground, Stoat commanded, “Fasten your seat belt.”

Damn him.

Not until I was trapped in every conceivable way did he toss me the keys, describe in detail what he would do to me if I gave him any trouble, and then tell me, “Drive.”

I turned the key in the ignition and cursed it mentally because it worked. The van started.

I said, “I need to move the seat forward.” My feet barely reached the brake pedal and accelerator.

“No, you don't, slut. Drive.”

Okay, okay, I could manage. I put the van into gear and drove up the narrow weedy lane to the dirt road—more accurately, the sand road. “Which way?”

“Left.”

I turned, then accelerated, on the lookout for a good tree to crash into.

“And don't go wrecking my van,” Stoat said as if prescient, “because the way I got my finger taped onto the trigger of this here shotgun, if you give me any kind of jolt, it'll go off and blow your stupid brains out.”

Damn him.

Because sometimes he kind of liked my big mouth, I grumbled, “First I'm tricky, then I'm stupid.”

“Shut up and drive.”

So much for that.

In silence I drove along the narrow yellow-gray road in its green tangled tupelo-oak-magnolia tunnel, between sepia-toned swamp water, over wooden, barely there bridges. And then another swamp road to the right, and another to the left. It seemed too long yet not long enough before we reached the paved road. Stoat, who had not said a word except “Turn here,” now jabbed the shotgun harder into my brain stem and said, “Go right and hit the cruise control, forty miles an hour. Not thirty-nine or forty-one. Forty.”

As if he could even see the controls from where he was sitting in the back of the van. I fiddled with the cruise control but could not make it work, so with my right leg rather painfully stretched to toe the accelerator and one eye on the speedometer, I kept the van going around forty. The fact that Stoat did not say anything about my disobeying orders told me he was still feeling weak, and I allowed myself a chirp and twitter of hope. I tried to plan how I might escape when we got to Stoat's house, how there had to be an instant when the shotgun barrel slipped askew in the duct tape, and if I saw a passing car—

Damn. There it was already, his shack the color of a skink's neon blue tail—

My jaw dropped. I frankly gawked.

Stoat barked, “What the fuck?” He saw it too. A small, newish but nondescript car parked in front of his home.

He shoved the shotgun harder into the back of my long-suffering neck. “Keep driving. Don't you dare honk the horn.”

Shucks, why hadn't that occurred to me?

Heading on up the road, I had only a glimpse of my own fuchsia home on the passenger side, because I did not dare to turn my head and look. A moment later, Stoat commanded, “Turn here!”

A very rutted and rudimentary lane ran off to the right.

With mental eyebrows raised, wondering what the crazy old pervert was up to now, I took the turn and sent the van into thick woods at a bumpy crawl. I remained terrified, of course, but after a person has been scared fit to pee her pants for long enough, fear becomes a chronic condition to be endured like arthritis or a bad back or the common cold.

The woods gave way to what had maybe once been a pasture but was growing up in scrub—scratchy bushes, shaggy junior pine trees, twisty vines with chalk white leaves. Judging from the crudest of all possible twin-rutted trails winding through the obstacles, I saw that kids had been riding four-wheelers here, cheerfully trespassing while risking their fool necks by crossing the road to jump the ditches on either side.

“Turn right,” Stoat ordered.

Mine not to wonder why; mine but to do or die, or postpone death slightly. Anyway, it was his van that was going to be scratched silly and break an axle. I turned into a space so narrow that thorny branches skittered across the metal on both sides. Necessarily, I slowed the van from a crawl to a creep on terrain more appropriate for tank treads than tires. Plowing through ditches, trundling over logs, all the while I wondered what the heck Stoat was planning. Inwardly I trembled; was I driving him into this hinterland so that he could kill me and nobody would ever find my body?

The four-wheeler trail diminished, faded, then vanished altogether, leaving the van surrounded by privet so thick and tall I felt justified in taking my toes off the gas pedal, relieving my overstretched leg muscles.

Stoat barked, “Whatcha stopping for?”

“We can't go any farther.”

Stoat actually chuckled. “You ain't never been no man. Sure you can. Just ram on through.”

“You want me to ruin your van?”

“Go right ahead. You ruined my life already, ain't you?”

Interesting. I'd never thought of our unfortunate acquaintance in that way.

“Go!” Stoat barked.

Fine. Okay. Whatever. I extended my protesting leg and punched the gas pedal, sending the van crunching through and over the privet, which alternately lifted the vehicle clear off the ground, then set it down again with a wildly slewing vengeance. In the backseat, Stoat lurched and swayed, but I still felt his hand on the business end of the shotgun he had duct-taped to both of us, clever bastard. He could not have foreseen that we would go four-wheeling in a vehicle with two-wheel drive, and that I could have been out of the van and away, but there I still was, stuck to a shotgun stuck to him.

Out of the privet at last, the van struggled through brambles and saplings.

“Just aim between the big trees,” Stoat instructed. “Don't bother about nothing else.”

Following instructions, I ran the van like a bucking Bubba truck over crepe myrtle, but shied away from a thick catalpa, zigzagged through a grove of water oaks, trundled beneath pink-furred boughs of mimosa—

Mimosa?

“Stop here,” Stoat commanded. But before my foot touched the brake, the van coughed, choked, gasped, exhaled a malodorous steamy cloud from beneath its hood, and died. The engine went shockingly silent.

“Punctured something,” Stoat grumbled. “Don't matter. This is where we git out.”

Quite illogically, I turned off the ignition, removed the key, and put the gearshift in park, discombobulated to see where “here” was: the woods immediately behind my so-called home. Between the pink fuzz-flowers and plumy kelly green leaves of drooping mimosa boughs, I could glimpse planks painted fuchsia.

“You better goddamn well hope you got some eggs that ain't gone rotten,” Stoat said.

Trying to remember whether I had eggs in the refrigerator was like trying to revisit a previous life. As if through a glass darkly I recalled that, yes, there were eggs, but it all seemed so long ago, maybe they had gone rotten like Stoat.

“And some halfway decent bread,” Stoat added.

Bread? Did I have any bread, and if so, was it decent or otherwise by Stoat's unpredictable standards? My brain froze like an overtaxed computer.

“Move your ass,” Stoat growled far too close to my head; I jumped. He edged his way between the bucket seats, his duct-taped shotgun turning my head for me, forcibly. “Gimme them van keys,” he demanded. “We get out the way we got in.”

Sure thing, Mr. Stoat, sir, whatever you say. I handed him the keys, noticing that he was taking the duct tape with us; he had lodged it, an oversized silver bracelet, on his arm. Like a pair of mediocre contortionists linked by duct tape and a dangerous stick, we got out of the van and, hampered by trees, sticker vines, and armadillo holes, bumbled toward the house.

The sight of my own white aluminum back door, once we finally got there, seemed like the strangest, most bizarre and grotesque thing in the world to me, utterly alien. Hazy with anxiety about eggs and bread, I could not remember whether I had left the door locked. And the stench coming from inside the house didn't help. I knew what smelled but I did not want to see it or think about it. Poor Schweitzer. So much had happened since I'd left him yapping his cute little dachsie-moron bark, and almost none of it good.

Stoat prodded me with the shotgun from behind. I reached out to open the door and it gave way like an ulcerating wound beneath my touch. I walked into my own home a stranger and a hostage. I saw the items lined up, Stoat-fashion, on my kitchen table. I knew what else Stoat had done in my house. I tried not to look for Schweitzer, but my eyes refused to obey me. They forced my mind to focus on the place where Schweitzer must have met Stoat at the front door—

My dead pet wasn't there. Instead, I saw a rectangle of carpet cut away.

I felt my jaw drop and I must have made some sort of involuntary yawp. Stoat demanded, “What?”

I pointed.

“What the fuck?” Stoat complained, dumping the van keys and his duct tape on top of my microwave. “Some asshole got rid of your dead dog. Big hairy deal.”

But it was a big deal. It was huge. Somebody had been here, blessedly turned on the air-conditioning, and taken care of Schweitzer. Somebody was aware and maybe even cared that I was in some kind of trouble. Who could it be?

Justin! Had Justin gone to the police?

Eerily, as if he had heard me thinking, Stoat gave a laugh like a gunshot, explosive and brief. “No, it ain't Justin,” he said curtly. “He's in the swamp. Feeding the gators. I took care of him.”

•   •   •

Sitting in the living room with Chad and his father while they all sipped iced tea and talked, Amy very much saw Chad in the slim, quiet older man. Watching him, she imagined Chad as he might become when age had beaten him into a more refined, stronger if less shining kind of steel. She intuited that Ned—“Please call me Ned,” he had told her with a shy smile—Chad's father could be counted on. Maybe that hadn't been the case in the past, but Amy believed people could change. Otherwise, what hope was there for the world?

“It's all right, Oliver.” Amy patted the dog, who was sitting on her feet after trying to make friends with Meatloaf, who did not return the sentiment. “You just let him alone and he'll let you alone.” Although smaller than Oliver, Meatloaf didn't seem to know it.

“That's right, Oliver.” Chad spoke solemnly from across the room. “You listen to Amy.”

She glanced at her husband, unsure whether he was being snide or serious, but the moment she looked at him, he looked away. Okay, so he was going through some kind of crisis that had driven him to his father for help, but she wished she knew what it was. Coming home, he hadn't hugged her or kissed her, which was no surprise. But she felt as if he wasn't as angry at her as before, and oddly, that concerned her. Chad seemed to be following his father's lead, unsure of himself. Where had his confidence gone?

He bit his lower lip, swallowed, and turned suddenly to look at her. For the past hour and a half, he had let his dad do most of the talking as Ned and Amy got to know each other and caught up on missing years. They had even talked about a heartache named Justin.

But now Ned seemed almost out of questions, and Amy felt sure Chad had something to say to her, yet felt hesitant. It was not like Chad to need help.

Would he welcome hers?

Amy took a chance. “Chad, what is it? What's got you spinning your tires?”

He swallowed hard, then said, “Us.” He sat on the edge of his chair to lean toward her, his elbows on his knees and his big hands clutching each other. “It's just that, um . . .” He took a deep breath, then spoke rapidly, as if he needed momentum to get through this. “Amy, why don't we go away for a week or ten days, you and me, to try to get us back the way we used to be? We can go camping or something. Dad will take care of things here.”