“Speaking of which,” said Libby, sitting on her bent legs, wiping a strand of hair from her face, “would you mind if I stayed here? There’s no way I’ll ever fall asleep, but maybe I could camp out on the couch, wait for the phone to ring.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t let you leave if you wanted to. I’d go crazy if you left. Probably will anyway.”
Libby smiled despite the handful of bloody rags. “Thanks.”
“You should be here if anything happens. If they find him, I mean.” He stepped to his bed, which the deputies had moved to get to the knife, and pushed it back against the wall. Their tea sat on the nightstand. Mike picked up the mugs and handed Libby hers.
“You really got stabbed?”
Mike shrugged. “I guess technically.” Libby was still sitting on the floor, and Mike eased onto the edge of the bed. “Actually, I’m surprised it wasn’t worse. He really jabbed me good.”
Libby swallowed a mouthful of warm tea and shivered anyway. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be in the hospital?”
Mike shrugged again. “No, but I don’t think their doctor guy would have been so casual about it if he thought there was any chance it might turn worse. The way he talked, you’d have thought I just stubbed my toe.”
“I guess that’s lucky.” She shifted her legs beneath her so she sat cross-legged.
Mike raised his eyebrows, and Libby guessed lucky wasn’t the word he’d have picked.
She said, “I still don’t understand this. Why would anybody take Trevor? Some random psycho just wandered onto your property?”
“I don’t know.” He rested his mug on his leg. “You sure you didn’t hire out one of your boyfriends to do it?”
She frowned. “That’s not funny.”
He raised his hand in apology, smiling a little. “Sorry. Just a tease. I know it’s nothing like that.”
“I want to know what happened. Those cops weren’t exactly chatterboxes when it came to details.”
“Let’s get more tea first,” Mike said, “and then I’ll tell you.”
They did, and then they sat together on the couch and Mike talked for a long time.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Zach caught just a glimpse of the place through the trees before they turned onto the driveway. He shivered. The barbwire fence along the road was in shambles, some of the wooden uprights rotted completely through and in pieces on the ground, sections of wire loose and coiled like rusted robot snakes. Zach didn’t know what the fence was originally intended to keep in (or out), but it did nothing now except make the place ugly.
It became obvious very quickly that the owners of this property weren’t especially concerned with either upkeep or looks. The mailbox looked about a hundred years old, though Zach wasn’t sure people had mailboxes a hundred years ago, or mail for that matter. The driveway was gravel, like his own, and Trevor Pullman’s, and most of the driveways this far into the mountains, but in this case the rock was spread too thin, leaving bare patches of ground in which weeds and grass thrived. Zach would have thought the passage of the truck would keep the vegetation down, but maybe Crazy Dave usually left the property from a different access point, or maybe he didn’t leave much, maybe he was one of those hermits Zach had read about, the kind of weirdo who lived off the land and hardly came into the real world.
The truck jounced along the uneven ground, its headlights lighting the shack of a house at times, at other times the sky or the ground or the encircling trees. Zach and the Pullman boy, Trevor, both sat up in the truck’s bed, but the dog—Zach guessed he’d have to call the animal Manny, for lack of a legitimate name—lay flat on his belly, sniffing occasionally and whimpering.
Smells something bad, Zach thought. He knew dogs had a fantastic sense of smell, that they could detect odors from a great distance that humans couldn’t smell from right up close, like sickness or a coming storm.
Manny whined again and buried his head beneath his paws.
“You think he lives here?” Trevor whispered.
Zach nodded, watching the ramshackle dump as the driveway curved toward it and smoothed out so that the headlights quit their erratic bouncing. The small front porch, hardly wider than the entry door, had two weathered columns. Zach thought you called a little porch like that something else—a covered stoop?—but wasn’t sure. Unpainted shutters hung from the window frames; in some cases they had disconnected completely and fallen to the dirt beneath. From one of the windows drooped a flower box that appeared to have held nothing but weeds for many years.
The truck circled around the house and came to a stop in the back yard. Not that you could really call it a yard. The back dirt patch might have been a better name. They’d stopped with the front bumper almost touching a tree-stump chopping block from which an ax stuck out at an angle, but Zach could only just make out the thing from his place in the truck bed and lost sight of it altogether when the pickup’s headlights flicked off.
“I’m scared,” Trevor said to him.
Zach said, “Me, too.”
Manny panted and let out a little woof, as if not wanting to be left out.
“Do you think he’ll kill us?” Trevor asked, still holding the bloody shirtsleeve to his forehead.
He looked away, couldn’t bear to see what he’d done to the poor little kid. “No,” he said, “not if we kill him first.”
The truck’s door creaked open, and they went silent.
“Boys?” The man’s voice sounded strange somehow, as if he was a little scared himself. But why should he be scared? Zach wondered.
Neither of them answered, though the dog panted a little and then sneezed.
“I don’t want to ever have to hurt you again,” the man said. “So don’t go and do anything stupid, okay?”
Silence.
“Okay, Georgie?”
Zach thought it might be easier—and safer—to respond. “Fine.”
“Okay, Davy?”
Zach elbowed Trevor in the ribs and whispered, “I think that’s you.”
“Oh,” Trevor said. “Uh, okay.” He waited for a while before adding, “Sir.”
Beside the truck, Dave smiled. Zach saw it with his adjusting eyes and shuddered.
“Georgie, you open up the tailgate and get out with Manny. Go straight inside. And don’t think I haven’t forgotten what you did.”
Of course, Zach’s first thought was that he should jump out of the truck, go directly to the ax, pluck it free like King Arthur’s sword from a stone, and swing it into Dave’s head. Except too many things could go wrong with that plan. He might twist his ankle jumping out of the truck, he might not manage to get the ax free, or he might get it free only to swing it accidentally into Trevor or himself. Dave said he hadn’t forgotten what Zach tried to do, but neither had Zach forgotten what he had done: cracked Trevor in the head with a nail-studded club. Luckily, the nail had missed the other boy. If you could call that luck. He might not be so lucky a second time.
He decided to follow the maniac’s instructions. They would have other chances to escape, better chances.
He hoped.
The handle felt rough beneath his fingers, maybe with rust or maybe only with wear and tear. The tailgate squeaked open and fell from his grip, thudding to a stop at an angle almost level with the truck bed. The dog started to rush off the pickup, but Zach grabbed him by the collar and quickly snapped the leash, which he’d removed during their ride, back into place.
“Good,” said Dave. He waited until they’d gotten to the back door and opened it before he said, “Now you, Davy.”