Where had he stuffed all the stuff? Under the couch?
“Your boyfriend was just telling me that he hopes there’s no hard feelings about our little contretemps yesterday.”
Contra-what? What was Mac talking about? He had a funny look in his eyes. Was he looking to start a fight?
“We don’t want no hard feelings with nobody,” Poppy said. “We just want this thing over and done with.” She was going to say more but something white by the rear leg of the coffee table caught her eye. It lay between her two dumbbells. She didn’t want to lean closer so she had to focus out of the corner of her eye. Something white with a little bit of red…
Oh, Jesus, the bandage! Katie’s foot bandage! If Mac saw it he’d start asking questions, maybe want to see Katie’s foot! Oh, Jesus, oh, Christ, oh. Mother of God, she couldn’t let Mac spot it!
“I’m sure you do,” Mac told her. He turned to Paulie. “But am I to take that as an apology?” Poppy edged closer to the coffee table. If she could get herself between Mac and the bandage…
Paulie shrugged. “If you want. All I’m saying is you’re the boss, you’re calling the shots, but we got our limits.” She watched Mac shrug out of his Orioles jacket and toss it onto a chair. He tried to make it look casual, but as soon as Poppy saw the dark-brown pistol handle jutting from the little leather holster next to the beeper on his belt, she knew he wasn’t being casual.
What’s Mac up to? she wondered. Trying to scare us? I’m already plenty scared.
She saw that Paulie had noticed it too. Don’t mention it, Paulie, she told him, wishing he could read her mind. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
She edge closer to the bandage. More important now than ever to keep him from seeing it.
Mac said, “Let me get this straight: You’re saying I’m the boss, but only up to a certain point. After that, you’re the boss?”
“No, Mac,” Paulie said, his voice easy. “It don’t mean that at all. It means you hired me, you didn’t buy me.”
Mac stared at him, like he was thinking about what Paulie had said. Poppy used the lull to make it the rest of the way to the coffee table. The bandage was right near her foot. She wished she could simply step on it and keep it under her sneaker, but it was on the other side of the stretcher. All right, she’d just stay here and block it from Mac.
But then Mac started wandering around the room again. Cold dread seeped through Poppy. He was going to spot it, she just knew it.
“I think you’ve got a point there, Paulie,” Mac was saying. “And maybe it’s a good one.” Jesus, he was moving her way. He couldn’t miss it.
Quickly Poppy put her right foot up on the coffee table and began fooling with her sneaker lace, like it was loose and she needed to retie it. Mac was about five feet away. With her heart thumping, she undid the knot, made a loud, “Tsk,” then turned, sat on the edge of the table, and bent over to retie the sneaker. While her hands were down near the floor, she snatched the bandage and balled it up in her fist.
Got it!
“What’s that?” Mac asked. He’d stopped twirling his key ring and was staring at her.
She glanced up at him, then at her hand.
“Hmmm?” What could she say? “Oh, just a tissue.” Mac looked like he was going to say something else when his beeper went off. As he angled it up to read the message. Poppy sniffed, made a quick swipe at her nose, then stuffed the gauze in her pocket. And held her breath.
Mac pressed a button and released the beeper.
“ ‘Immediately’ might take a little while,” he muttered, then began wandering again.
“Yeah, Paulie,” he said, talking slow, like he didn’t really have a point, like he was just killing time, “but a guy hires on to do a job, don’t you think he should do that job?”
“Absolutely,” Paulie said. “Take me and Poppy, for instance. We hired on to baby-sit. And that’s cool. That’s the job and that’s what we do, and do it good. But we didn’t hire on to slice and dice a kid. That wasn’t in the job description, so to speak.” Poppy was barely listening. She just sat there, feeling weak, breathing deep while her muscles relaxed and her heartbeat wound down to a normal rate.
They were okay now. Long as Mac didn’t go in there and check Katie’s feet, they were home free.
And then she heard a click and looked up and thought her slowing heart was going to stop dead because there was Katie standing in the doorway to the guest room with no cords and no blindfold and no sock on her right foot.
Fighting through her panic. Poppy snapped around and saw that Mac had his back turned. But Paulie was facing this way and he looked like he’d just swallowed a couple of feet of razor wire. Poppy coiled to make a sprint for the door, to tackle Katie and carry her back into her room—
But then Katie spoke.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” Mac whirled and time seemed to stop, like the projector of her life’s movie got stuck and all action screeched to a halt. All the air seemed to get sucked out of the room but that didn’t matter because no one was breathing.
Her life became a photograph. But only for a single, long, agonized instant. And then it all returned to horrific life.
Mac’s eyes bulged and his face turned a dark, furious red as he gaped at Katie.
“What the fuck? She’s… she’s… I” He couldn’t seem to believe what he was seeing. And then his eyes widened even further as he pointed to her bare foot.
“Her toes! How come she’s got all her fucking toes?”
“Hey, Mac,” Paulie said. “It’s not like you think.” But Mac was pulling the pistol from his belt. He thumbed back the hammer and aimed at Katie.
Poppy couldn’t move. She seemed’to be stuck to the table, the floor. But she could scream.
“Mac, no! Jesus, NO!” Whether Mac heard her or not, she couldn’t say.
Maybe he was afraid of the noise a shot would make, and the attention it would attract. Whatever, he jammed the gun back into his belt, thank God.
“Goddamn!” he shouted and started looking around for something—what, Poppy couldn’t guess. He kept saying it over and over. “Goddamn!”
“Easy, Mac,” Paulie was saying.
“Goddamn!” Mac couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for in the living room so he stalked into the kitchen.
Finally Poppy could move. Paulie was looking in her direction with a stricken expression, motioning her to get Katie out of sight, but Poppy was already on her way.
She was just dragging Katie back when Mac reappeared.
His face was back to normal color but had lost all expression, and his eyes… his eyes were flat and cold, like everything human had gone out of them. He gripped something long and slim in his right hand. Sunlight flashed off its steely surface as he passed the window.
Oh, sweet Jesus, a knife—the big, foot-long Ginsu knife she’d seen in the utensil drawer.
Poppy whimpered as she pulled Katie close against her and cowered back into the room. Oh, no, he couldn’t… he wasn’t going to try and cut her toe off now, was he?
This couldn’t be happening.
“Paulie!” she cried. “Paulie, he’s got a knife!” But Paulie was way ahead of her. He stepped in front of the door and put his hands out.
“Stop right there, Mac. Don’t do anything crazy now. It’s not like it looks.”
Mac slowed but didn’t stop. “It’s not?” he said in a voice as cold as his eyes.
“We sent the persuader just like you told us,” Paulie said, rattling out the words like a machine gun. “A little kid’s toe. Only it just wasn’t this kid’s toe. And it worked, didn’t it? I mean, you said yourself the guy was ready to do anything after he opened that envelope. So there’s no harm done. Everything worked out okay, right? So what’s the point in cutting off her toe now? What’s that gonna get you?”