“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said, knowing it was a forty-five minute drive. She hung up without waiting for a response and then ran.
TWENTY-FOUR
A deputy stood in the kitchen, peering at the broken glass like a mystic studying tea leaves, as if he thought he might divine some clue from the shape of the mess alone.
A man in jeans and a t-shirt, who might have been a cop or a doctor or a lumberjack for all Mike knew, swabbed the knife wound in Mike’s hip. “You’re very lucky, Mr. Pullman,” he said in an almost nonexistent accent that might have been British or Irish. “Something like this could have been much more serious.”
It’s just a booboo, Mike expected him to say, No big deal. Let’s get you a Big Bird band-aid.
Mike sat on the couch with his pants around his ankles, his underwear pulled just beneath his thatch of pubic hair but still covering his penis and testicles. Barely. He looked at the third man across the room, the quiet, bearded deputy with the inch-long scar just beneath his eye who had answered the phone when Libby called. “Listen,” he said, “isn’t there something else we can be doing? I mean, that asshole’s got my son. We’re not gonna find him sitting around my living room playing doctor.”
The man hovering over Mike’s lap huffed.
Rather than answer Mike’s question, the bearded deputy, Willis, asked one of his own. “This man you say took your son, did he have a dog with him?”
Mike shook his head, though not in answer to the question. “First of all, I don’t say he took my son, he did take him. They’re gone, and getting farther away every second. Did he have a dog? How the hell should I know? What kind of question is that? He had a knife and he had a foot the size of Texas. How’s that? Maybe if you get a sketch artist up here we can figure out what kind of sneakers he was wearing.”
The bearded man stared through the living room window and never turned to Mike. “We think he might have had a dog,” he said to the window, “and if you would answer my questions, we’d be that much closer to finding your boy.” He seemed focused on something outside.
Mike sighed and rubbed his face while the man on his knees before him continued his ministrations.
“Okay,” he said after a minute. “I think I might have heard some barking, but I never saw a dog. I’m not even a hundred percent sure about the barking. With all the stabbing and kicks to the head, I might have been out of it a little.” Mike saw the deputy’s face reflected in the window, looking transparent, ghostly. The lawman smiled.
“Of course, Mr. Pullman.”
“What’s the deal with the dog?” Mike asked. “How does that help us?”
Willis finally turned away from the window and came across the room. “Do you know a Bethany Winston?”
“Beth—” Mike started and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess. She lives just down that way.” He gestured with his head. “Why? Did something happen?”
Willis sat down on the edge of the coffee table, his holstered gun tapping against the tabletop and the leather of his utility belt creaking. “Bethany Winston was attacked earlier tonight,” he said simply and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guy stole her dog and cut her up a little.”
“Cut…my God,” Mike said. “Is she okay?”
“Will be,” Willis said. “She said the guy had a boy with him; little boy about her age.”
The second deputy came in from the kitchen, looking unsatisfied, thumbs tucked into his belt and chewing at his bottom lip.
Mike said, “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Skinny kid, maybe eleven years old. He attacked the guy in my bedroom. I don’t think he was exactly here voluntarily.”
“No,” said the deputy.
The doctor, if he was one, poked at Mike, who hissed. “Easy,” he said. He turned back to Willis. “So what? You’re saying there’s two kidnapped kids?”
The lip-chewing deputy, whose name Mike had already forgotten, opened his mouth to say something, but Willis held up a hand to him. “I’m not saying anything,” Willis said to Mike, “but that’s one possibility.”
Mike didn’t want to ask about the other possibilities—he could figure those out for himself—but he did say, “Isn’t there something else we could be doing right now? If he’s out there, if my son is with that lunatic and there’s another boy with him, shouldn’t we be doing something?”
“Trust me,” the deputy said, “we’re doing everything we can.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Libby raced the Honda down Mike’s driveway; it kicked up gravel and slid across the loose rocks for almost two feet after she finally applied the brakes. The car skidded to a stop beside and slightly behind a Ford Explorer emblazoned with the county name and the sheriff’s department’s emblem. Just one cruiser, no ambulances or fire trucks or any of that, but one was enough to mean something had happened.
Libby slipped the car into park, pulled the keys from the ignition, and threw open her door so quickly she felt like she’d done all three things simultaneously. Halfway to the house, she noticed she’d left her headlights on and didn’t bother to go back. She had to get into the house, had to know what had happened to her baby.
Her hair had dried funnily on the trip up, and it blew unevenly around her head, most of it on her left side and the top, only a few strands on the right and across her face. There was still beer on her breath, though the adrenaline pumping through her body seemed to have cancelled out the alcohol’s effect. She smelled the lingering bath salts on her skin and in her hair, but another smell hid just beneath, the smell of sweat and panic.
On the porch, she didn’t bother knocking or ringing the doorbell but simply let herself in through the front door as if it were her own house and she had every right to do so—which in her mind, she did, given the circumstances.
First she noticed the uniform: brown pants, khaki shirt, tie and hat to match the trousers, utility belt with holstered gun. The guy was Indiana Jones without the leather jacket or whip. At least outfit-wise he was. His face was bearded and scarred and a little pudgy.
“Ms. Pullman?”
Libby nodded and hurried into the room. Mike sat on the sofa beside a second deputy who held a pad of paper and a pen. The two of them looked up at her, and then Mike stood.
His face was puffed and bruised, especially around his chin. He looked like he’d been in a barroom brawl.
“What is it?” Libby asked him. “Where’s Trevor? What happened to your face?”
Mike looked like he wanted to hug her, but she hoped he wouldn’t. She’d had enough undesired physical attention today. Right now, she needed facts, not hugs.
Mike stayed at the couch, maybe seeing something in her eyes or her stance that told him to keep his distance. He said, “He, uh…Trevor’s—”
“Your son has been abducted,” the bearded deputy said from behind her.
Libby turned to him. “What do you mean? Like by aliens?” It was a stupid question, and she hadn’t meant to ask it. She was barely thinking.
The deputy smiled just a little, though he obviously tried not to, and said, “No, not by aliens. Your son has been kidnapped.” He added, “By a man.”
Libby stared at him. Somehow, she hadn’t expected this. She’d thought Trevor had been the victim of some kind of accident, a fire, a brain aneurysm, maybe a bad fall. She’d never considered kidnapping.
“What man?” she said and turned to Mike. “Who was it? Why would somebody take Trevor?”
Mike shook his head. “I don’t know who it was or why he did it. He had another boy too, and a dog. You know Beth Winston?”