He followed Davy out of the garage and saw Georgie standing there with the broken piece of wood in his hand; he didn’t know whether to clout the boy or shake his hand. He settled on neither.
The mark on Davy’s head was so well defined that Dave could almost see the wood grain stamped into his skin. It bled, but a little pressure would stop it up easily. He yanked at the sleeve of his shirt three times before it ripped free, then pulled it down over his hand and folded it into a small rectangle.
“Georgie.”
The boy stared, mouth opened so wide Dave thought he could have stuck both fists inside.
Dave pressed the pad to Davy’s head and waited for a response. None came, and he picked up the smaller boy and cradled him to his chest. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said. “Go get the dog from wherever you tied him. We’re going home.”
Georgie didn’t move until Dave took a step toward him; then he turned and ran through the grass, pine needles, and fallen leaves.
Clap clap clap.
Dave held the boy to him with his still-sleeved arm and kept the compress tight against his head with the other.
Davy, his Davy.
And only then did Dave realize what had happened. He’d gotten Davy, he’d replaced himself. His name had been Davy, and then Dave, but now it was neither. He was Hank Abbott. And he was Daddy.
Fifteen minutes after the intruder absconded with his son, Mike Pullman jerked on the bedroom floor and opened his eyes.
The lower portion of his face felt raw and broken, like he’d tried to eat a land mine. He reached for it, his finger pulling back once before he’d made contact and then a second time after a poke so gentle he wouldn’t normally have felt it at all.
Tonight, the soft touch was like a full-body tackle without pads or a helmet. He winced, and the movement of his head hurt him that much more.
In addition to the pain in his face, his hip throbbed where the lunatic had stuck him.
He tried to scream his son’s name despite the agony in his jaw and cheeks but couldn’t get past the first syllable. He flipped onto his hands and knees and finally wobbled to his feet.
He didn’t normally keep a phone in the bedroom, but he’d brought the cordless in from the living room the previous night while making pick-up plans with Libby; it was still here, lying on the bedside table and blinking red.
Low battery.
He tried walking to it, ended up going about forty-five degrees in the wrong direction, and stopped. On the second try, he made it to the phone.
He pressed the talk button with one hand and grabbed his hip with the other. He brought the phone close enough to hear the dial tone but not close enough that it made contact with his face.
Had to hurry before the battery went out on him. He dialed 9-1-1, a service they’d only recently gotten out here in the boonies, which was good because he had no idea what the local number for the sheriff’s department might be and didn’t want to have to bother with the operator. He waited for someone to pick up. Waited. And waited.
He collapsed on the bed before the woman’s voice came onto the line and dropped the phone on the bedspread beside him.
“—emergency—”
It was the only word he heard. “Hemp,” he said and then tried again: “Heelmp ee. Help—”
Beep. Beeb beeb.
The phone had gone dead. Mike thought he might as well have joined it.
PART III
RESCUE
TWENTY-THREE
Libby had scrubbed her face, ears, and hands three times before stripping, draining an inch or two of water, and lowering herself into the tub. She could have cleaned herself in the bathwater just as easily as in the sink, but she hadn’t wanted to soil it. Washing off the creep’s saliva and then lounging in the water with it floating all around her naked body would have been like taking a bath in a giant, unflushed toilet. Maybe worse.
The water hadn’t yet cooled, which seemed wrong, impossible. In all that time downstairs, her search for the coffee filters, her struggle with Marshall, her frenzied door and window-locking session, the water hadn’t cooled a bit. Not that she minded; the bath-salted water was heaven in a tub.
She lit one of her candles, left the others with the book and the matches on the wide ledge between her head and the bucket of beer, and lolled in the water for a long time with her eyes closed, half asleep and savoring the warmth in her back and legs. Almost half an hour passed before she opened her first beer.
From the bedroom, Paul sang on. The CD had started over at least once and maybe twice since she’d put it on. She hadn’t heard the album enough times to memorize the track listing, didn’t know where in the mix she was, but she knew for sure she’d heard this particular song once already.
For her first beer, she didn’t bother with the lime. She wasn’t going to savor it, though she probably should have. No, this first one was for chugging. If she got one drink in her system fast, she might relax enough to really enjoy the rest.
Images of Marshall pushed their way into her forethoughts, and despite all her mental attempts, she couldn’t shove them all back down into her subconscious. She saw brief glimpses of his shattered glasses and the red mark across his broken nose. She saw the paperbacks fluttering out of his hand like clumsy birds and landing wounded on the countertop and in the sink. She saw the bulge in his pants, which had been surprisingly large, saw the way it throbbed and shifted when he got his hands around her waist, like it was alive down there, trying to chew its way through his trousers.
She took a long swallow of beer, closed her eyes and urged the alcohol to never mind with her liver and kill her brain cells already.
His tongue on her face—she still felt it working its way from her lips to her earlobe and leaving behind a wide, sticky trail.
Oh God. Maybe she should have shoved the potato peeler into his brain while she’d still had the chance. Or maybe she should have shoved it into her own once he’d left. Anything to avoid these god-awful memories.
She finished the beer and tried unsuccessfully to suppress a burp worse than any you’d hear at a Friday night frat party, not that she’d been to any of those in years.
She mentally excused herself before letting loose a second, only slightly less garish belch.
She set the empty bottle down beside the tub. It clinked on the tile. Before she let herself have the second, she lit the rest of her tea lights and distributed them around the tub. She cut into her lime, both the air and the water around her flickering like she was in a pool of molten gold. Lime juice dripped from the fruit as she sectioned it and landed on the unsubmerged slopes of her breasts. She looked down and saw something near her nipple that she hadn’t noticed before. A bruise, long and curved around the contour of her chest, finger shaped. Libby shuddered.
The last thing she needed was a visible reminder of the attack, something she would see every time she changed clothes or took a shower, when she was naked and already feeling her most vulnerable. She grabbed a washcloth from beside the bar of soap on the ledge and draped it over the offensive mark. The damp material clung to her chest, its weight comforting. She hadn’t realized her breasts were sore until the washcloth began to ease some of the pain.
She opened another beer and twisted one of the lime slices through the mouth. Juice sprayed her check and dribbled down the side of the bottle, but most of it stayed inside the bottle’s neck and fell down into the beer along with the misshapen piece of fruit. Libby took a sip and set the bottle on the tub’s ledge.