Maddox stared after her for a moment, then looked at Talley.
'She's wound kinda tight.'
Talley nodded, but said nothing. He had thought that he would feel relieved when he turned over command of the scene.
He didn't.
Alone in his dark room, Thomas held his breath, better to hear past the changing whup-whup-whup of the helicopters. He feared that Mars might pretend to leave, then creep back to see if he was trying to get untied. Thomas knew every squeak in the upstairs hall because Jennifer liked to spy on him; one squeaky spot was right outside his door, the other about halfway to Jennifer's room. So he listened.
Nothing.
Thomas was spread-eagle on his lower bunk, face up, his wrists and ankles tied so tightly to the corner bedposts that his feet felt numb. After Mars had finished tying him, he stood by the bed, towering over him like some kind of retard with his slack jaw hanging open like one of those public-bathroom perverts his mother always warned him about every time he went to the mall. Then Mars had taped over his mouth. Thomas was SCARED; sweat gushed from him like he was a lawn sprinkler and he thought he was going to suffocate. He struggled and pulled at the wires that held him, straining to get free until he felt Mars's breath on his cheek. Then he couldn't move at all, like his mind and body had disconnected and all he could do was just lie there like a turtle waiting for a car to squash it flat.
Mars placed a hand on his chest, and now the breath went to his ear. Warm and moist. Then, a whisper.
'I will eat your heart.'
Thomas's body burned from the inside out, a kind of wet heat that grew hotter and hotter. He messed his pants.
Mars went to the door, shut the lights, and left, pulling the door closed. Thomas waited, counting slowly to one hundred. Then he set about working his way free.
Thomas was good at working his way free. He was also good at sneaking out of his house, which he had done almost every night this summer. He would sneak out after his parents had gone to bed to hook up with Duane Fergus, who lived in a big pink house on King John Place. Sometimes they threw eggs and wads of wet toilet paper at the cars passing on Flanders Road. When that got old, they would sneak across Flanders to a development that was still under construction where teenagers parked to make out. Duane Fergus (who was a year older and claimed to shave) once threw a rock at a brand-new Beemer because (he said) the lucky turd behind the wheel was getting 'road head.' They both shit a brick when the car roared to life, bathing them in its lights. They ran so hard back across Flanders that a monster 18-wheeler had almost turned them into blacktop pie.
Thomas had perfected the art of moving through his home without being seen because he had changed some of the camera angles. Just a bit, just a nudge, so that his mom and dad couldn't see everything. He knew that most people didn't live in houses where every room was watched by a closed-circuit television system. His father explained that they had such a system because he handled other people's financial records and someone might want to steal them. It was a big responsibility, his father had said, and so they had to protect those records as best they could. His father often warned both Thomas and Jennifer to be careful of suspicious characters, and to never discuss the alarms and cameras with their friends. His mother was fond of saying that she thought the whole mess was nonsense and just their father's big toy. Duane thought they were da bomb.
The wire holding his left wrist was slack.
When Mars was tying Thomas's right wrist to the post, Thomas had scrunched away just enough so that now the cord held a little bit of play. Now he worked harder at it, pulling the knots tighter but creating enough slack to touch the knot that held him to the post. The knot was tight. Thomas dug at it so hard that the pain in his fingertips brought tears, but then the knot loosened. He worked frantically, terrified that Mars or one of the others would throw open the door, but then the knot gave and his left hand was free. The tape hurt coming off his mouth worse than getting a cavity filled. He untied his right hand, then his feet, and then he was free. Like Duane said, you had to risk being street pizza if you wanted to see a guy getting road head.
Thomas stayed on the bed, listening.
Nothing.
I know where Daddy has a gun.
Thomas felt calm and certain in what he needed to do. He knew exactly what the cameras could see and what they couldn't. He wanted to go to his bathroom to clean himself, but knew he would be visible on the monitor if he did. He pulled off his pants, used his underwear to clean off the poo as best he could, then balled the underwear and pushed them under the bed. He slipped to the floor and crawled along the wall toward his closet, passing under his desk. Someone had ripped his phone out of the wall, leaving the plug in the socket but tearing free the wires. Turds.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the children found a secret door at the rear of their wardrobe that let them escape the real world into the magical land of Narnia. Thomas had his own secret door at the back of his closet: An access hatch to the attic crawl space that ran beneath the steep pitch of the roof. It was his own private clubhouse (his and Duane's), through which he could move along the eaves to the other access hatches dotted around the house.
Thomas pulled open the hatch and wiggled into the crawl space, being careful not to bump the rafters with his head. The heat in the closed space of the attic enveloped him like a gas. He found the flashlight that he kept just inside the hatch, turned it on, then pulled the hatch closed. The crawl space in this part of the house was a long triangular tunnel that followed the back edge of the roof. Where windows were cut into the roof, the triangle became a low rectangle, forcing Thomas to crawl on his belly. He worked his way along until he came to a second access hatch, this one in Jennifer's closet. He listened until he grew satisfied that the turds weren't in her room, then he pushed it open, knocking over a tumble of shoes.
The closet was dark, its door closed.
He eased his way out over the shoes and through a rack of her dresses, then turned off his flashlight. He listened at the closet door, and again heard nothing. He eased open the door. The lights in Jennifer's room were off; that was good because he knew that most of her room could be seen on the monitors. He opened the door so slowly that it seemed to take forever to get it open enough for him to stick out his head. The room was lit by pale blue moonlight. He could see Jennifer bound to the chair near the front of the room, her back to him.
'Jen?'
She lurched in the chair and mumbled. He called to her, his voice low.
'I'm in your closet. Just relax, okay? If they're watching, they can see you on the monitors.'
She stopped struggling.
Thomas tried to remember what the camera saw of Jennifer's room. He and Duane sometimes went into the security room when his parents were away so that Duane could see her naked. He was pretty confident that if he crept out of the closet on his belly, then hugged the wall beneath the windows where the shadows were darkest, he could get pretty close to the chair. If he heard Mars or those other turds coming, he could haul ass back into the crawl space, then go back to his room or run for the garage.
'Jen, listen up, okay? I'm going to come over there.'
She shook her head wildly, mumbling frantically into the tape.
'Be QUIET! I can untie you.'
He pushed open the closet a few inches wider, then edged forward on his elbows into the shadows. As he passed her desk, he saw that her phone had also been torn from the plug. Turds.