Too Close to Home (24 page)

“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me, too!” his partner said.

The bald one managed to pull himself together, let out a couple of enthusiastic hoots, then walked over to the wall, where the yellow extension cord disappeared behind some cardboard boxes. He kicked them aside, exposing the wall outlet, and I could see that the cord had not been plugged in.

He knelt down, grabbed the end of the cord, and shoved it firmly into the receptacle.

He walked back over to me, rubbing his hands together, still smiling inside his mask. He grabbed the trimmer, lifted it, and my hand, up to the level of his waist, and said, “The next time, it’ll be the real deal.”

TWENTY-SIX

N
OW, to get to the business at hand, so to speak,” said the bald one, the one I knew went by the name Mortie, if his associate was to be believed. “There’s some things I’d like to ask you.”

“What?” I said. My fingers, still held in the teeth of the hedge trimmer, were sweating inside the tape.

“You have a copy of a certain book,” he said. “On a disc? Am I right?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t know if you’ve got a printout of it, too, or it’s just on a disc, or two discs, or what the fuck, but we want it.”

“Okay,” I said, my mind racing. “You can have it. But I want to see that my wife is okay. I’m not telling you where it is until I see that my wife is unharmed.”

Mortie laughed. “I don’t think so, pal, because—”

I cut him off mid-sentence. “I want. To see. My wife.”

“What I was trying to tell you, asshole,” he said, moving around the hedge trimmer, “is that you’re not in a position to negotiate.”

I mustered as much courage as I could, given my circumstances. “I don’t care if you cut off all my fingers and all my toes. You can cut off my dick and suck on it if you want, but I’m not telling you anything until I see that my wife is okay.”

Mortie thought, weighed his options, then glanced over at the dark-haired one with the tattoo. “Go get his fucking wife.”

“I gotta take this thing off my head,” he said. “Just for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll go get her.”

As he left the shed and my field of vision, he was peeling the stocking off his head. “Jesus,” I heard him say. It didn’t sound like Lance to me. And besides, why would Lance want that disc?

“You must be getting a bit warm, too,” I said to Mortie.

“The heat doesn’t bother me,” he said.

“So Conrad sent you,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’d never have thought that a college president would know where to find people who do your kind of work.”

“I said shut the fuck up. You want me to squeeze this?” He waved his index finger playfully about the trigger of the hedge trimmer. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “You want me to put all your fingertips in a sandwich bag or something, you can take them to the hospital later?”

I had nothing to say. And for the better part of a couple of minutes, we said nothing to each other. Finally, Mortie said, “Jesus, I
am
starting to get hot.” He walked out the shed door and stepped around the side of the building, presumably to slip off the mask where I couldn’t see him.

I looked around the room I was in, my own shed, looking for some sort of inspiration, some idea of how to get loose. But they had me well tied into the chair, and even though my right arm was not secured to it, with my hand taped to the trimmer, it was useless to me.

When it became clear to me I couldn’t actually escape, I started thinking about other plans. Assuming they brought Ellen in, and she was okay, what was I going to do then?

Because I did not have the disc. I had given it to Natalie Bondurant for safekeeping.

Which was the better way to play this? Tell them I didn’t have the disc, but could get it for them? Would that buy me time, or would they just kill both of us? The Langleys certainly hadn’t found a way out of this alive, and, as far as I’d been able to determine, they’d handed over the computer.

The thing that really worried me was, we knew, and I was sure Mortie and his buddy knew that we knew, what was on the disc. Because I’d run my mouth off to Conrad. So, even if these two were able to leave with the disc, there was the problem of what we still might say. We could still do a lot of damage to Conrad’s reputation, telling people he’d ripped off his bestseller from one of his students.

But how credible would we be without proof?

I could tell them the disc was on Derek’s desk, next to his computer. There were probably dozens of discs there. They could leave with all of them, be tricked into thinking they had what they wanted. But there was no guarantee they still wouldn’t kill us.

Mortie came back in, mask pulled down over his face.

I said, “I guess, when you got the computer from the Langleys, you figured your problems were over. But you don’t have to kill us like you did them. We’re not going to say anything. We don’t care. Honest to God, we just don’t give a shit anymore.”

Mortie appeared to be squinting at me, as though puzzled. “Shut up. Your wife’ll be along in a minute.”

Outside, I heard our kitchen door slam shut, then steps shuffling across the gravel lane. Seconds later, the dark-haired one, mask in place, appeared at the door, dragging Ellen along with him.

She was alive. That was some relief. But it didn’t last long, not when I saw how frightened she was.

They’d taped her wrists in front of her, then run tape around her body at the elbows, and tape around her head over her mouth. There were torn pieces of tape stuck to her jeans down around her ankles, which had clearly been removed so she could be led over here.

Her eyes were wide with terror, and I could tell she’d been crying.

“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “Have they hurt you?” She shook her head nervously from side to side. “That’s good.” I could see her looking at my hand, how it was attached to the hedge trimmer, and her eyes seemed to open even wider. They followed the cord from the trimmer itself to the wall outlet.

“Okay,” Mortie said. “Your wifey’s here, and as you can see, she’s perfectly all right. So, where’s the disc?”

“First of all,” I said, “there’s some pages printed out of the thing I think you’re looking for. I’m pretty sure it’s up in our bedroom, next to the bed. On the table. It should be there.” Looking at Ellen, I said, “Isn’t that where it is, honey?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” Mortie said. To the dark-haired one, he said, “Go check it out.”

“Okay!” he said, clearly relieved that if he wasn’t in our presence, he wouldn’t have to wear the hot nylon on his head. “What about her?”

“She’s okay here with me,” Mortie said. He motioned for Ellen to come farther into the shed, to go over by the wall. “You stay over there. You move and I’ll be after you in a second.”

I could hear a door open and close. The dark-haired one was in our house now.

Ellen positioned herself over by the wall. Mortie stood about halfway between the two of us.

“Now what about the disc?” he asked.

“I don’t have it,” I said.

Mortie cocked his sheathed head to one side. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t have it. Not here.”

“Don’t fucking tell me this.”

“But I can get it,” I added hurriedly. “It’s in a safe place. I gave it to someone else to hold on to.”

“A safe place where?”

Outside, in the darkness, I thought I saw a shadow moving somewhere between the shed and the house. If Mortie’s friend was in our house, who was this?

“I gave it to someone,” I said.

“Who?” Mortie was sounding very pissed.

“I gave it to my son’s lawyer,” I said, figuring the truth was as good as anything at this point. “But only for safekeeping. I don’t think she looked at it. I didn’t tell her to. If I asked her to give it back to me, she would.”

Mortie patted the top of his nylon-clad head with the palm of his hand, thinking. “How the fuck are we supposed to accomplish that?”

I said, “Let my wife go. You hold me here. She can go see our lawyer, get the disc back, and when she gets back here with it, we give it to you, and you’re on your way.”

“That’s your plan,” Mortie said derisively. “We let your wife go, send her on an errand. And while she’s gone, she calls the police.”

And I was thinking,
I sure hope so
. But I looked over at her and said, “You wouldn’t do that, would you, honey?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, now I’m convinced,” Mortie said. “How about this? We keep her, let you go get the disc. I’m pretty sure you don’t want anything to happen to her. We could tape her hand to the hedge trimmer every bit as easy as we did it to you.”

Outside, I saw the shadow again. Hanging around my truck. And then it was gone. I felt my pulse racing.

“What?” Mortie said, looking over his shoulder. “Is he back already?” At least Mortie was smart enough not to use his partner’s name, and didn’t seem to have noticed that his had been uttered before.

Mortie walked over to the door and peered outside, shrugged, and came back in. This time, instead of positioning himself between me and Ellen, he was much closer to me. I, after all, was the one he wanted answers from.

“Uh, I think your plan’s not, what do they say? Viable,” Mortie said. “Once I let your wife go, no matter what she says, she’s going to call the cops. Unless she’s the stupidest bitch who ever walked the earth. I got a better idea. Tell me the name of the lawyer.”

I didn’t want to do that. And I realized I’d already made a mistake telling him my son’s lawyer had it. Even though it wouldn’t take long for him to find out her name—it had been all over the news in the last couple of days—I feared that if I gave it to him now, he’d go straight to Natalie Bondurant’s house in the dead of night and kill her, if he had to, to get the disc from her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Ellen was inching her way along the side of the shed. So slowly, it was almost imperceptible. She was standing, with her back to the wall, her eyes on us the whole time. Every few seconds, Mortie would glance her way, but she wasn’t making any fast moves, and he’d failed to notice that in the last couple of minutes she’d moved about two feet.

“I asked you a question, shithead,” Mortie said to me.

“I’m telling you we can get the disc. It doesn’t matter who the lawyer is.”

Mortie shook his head. “I’ve had enough.” He took hold of the hedge trimmer sitting on my lap, one hand on the bar across the top, the other on the handle where the trigger was located.

“The tricky thing for you,” Mortie said, “is going to be getting gloves. You’re going to be needing pairs with one hand about an inch shorter than the other. I guess you could just put the glove on, put your hand back in this thing, turn it on, and you’ve got ’em custom made.”

“Wait!” I shouted, squirming my fingers beneath the tape, trying to wriggle them out of the grooves so the blades wouldn’t get them. “Listen to me!”

“Fuck it,” Mortie said, and squeezed.

I held my breath, hoping Ellen would get to the plug in time. Just as his finger went to tighten on the trigger, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her drop. If her hands had been bound behind her, she’d have had to hunt blindly for the plug, or tried to knock it out of the wall outlet with her feet, but they were tied in front. Once she’d dropped to her knees, she leaned in close to the wall, got her fingers on the plug, and yanked.

She cut the power at the very instant the trimmer blades were getting the message. I felt them start to move, but before the blades could begin their back-and-forth cycle, they stopped. The ends of my fingers were now pinched even more than they’d been before, but I was pretty sure they were still connected to the rest of me.

“What the—” said Mortie. He clicked on the trigger a couple of times, then whirled around and saw the source of the problem.

“You bitch!” he said, his voice full of rage. He dropped the trimmer back onto my lap and moved in on Ellen, who was still down on her knees by the wall, looking terrified.

“Leave her alone!” I shouted. “Stop!”

That was when Drew Lockus ran into the shed.

He was wielding a shovel in his hands, one of the tools I kept in the back of the pickup, and as he closed in on Mortie he swung it like a baseball bat into the side of his head.

The shovel blade rang out like a tuning fork.

Mortie went down in an instant, collapsing over the lawn mower that had had the cord ripped out of it that afternoon.

“Drew!” I said. “God, Drew!”

I thought maybe Mortie would try to get up, at the very least twitch a bit. But he wasn’t doing anything. From where I sat, he didn’t even appear to be breathing.

Drew stood over him, looking a bit dumbfounded, like maybe he couldn’t believe what he’d just done, that Mortie wasn’t making any sort of objection to what had just happened to him.

“Jesus,” Drew said slowly, not taking his eyes off Mortie.

“Drew!” I said. “There’s another one, in the house!”

That woke him up. As he took his eyes off Mortie, the dark-haired one appeared at the shed door, a handful of pages in his hand. Although he had the stocking pulled down over his face, he was able to see instantly that things had taken, from his perspective, a turn for the worse.

He dropped the pages and bolted. Drew grabbed for the shovel he’d used to whack Mortie in the head, but as he turned, the blade of the shovel caught in the handle of the lawn mower and was yanked out of his hand. He stumbled, then reached down to grab for it again, but by that time the other guy had disappeared into the night.

Drew ran after him anyway.

I started squirming frantically. I twisted and wriggled my trapped fingers and managed to get them out of the teeth of the trimmer. Now I had to try to free myself from the tape.

At the same time, I was trying to free my left hand from the chair. Whichever one I could free first, I’d use to release the other.

But now Ellen was on her feet and moved into position in front of me. The fingers of her duct-taped hands were free, and she used them to pick away at the tape on the hedge trimmer. Even though it was now unplugged from the wall, she seemed afraid it would somehow magically start up. I felt possessed by the same illogical fear.

Drew reappeared a few seconds later. “I couldn’t catch him,” he said, out of breath. “He got in his car and took off.”

Ellen freed my hand from the trimmer and I reached up to gently peel the tape away from her mouth. “Oh, Jim, oh my God,” she said.

Drew helped both of us get freed of the tape. I threw my arms around Ellen, held her a moment, and with one hand reached over and patted Drew on the shoulder.

“I came to fix the mower,” he said.