He felt his face. The skin was taut and warm and his nose had taken a sharp left turn. It flared with pain at the slightest touch. With his tongue he probed the pits of missing teeth. Dried vomit scaled his shirt and pants. Bruises spread like an oil spill around the bulge of a snapped rib.
He grabbed the railing, shook it as hard as he could. It didn’t move. It was made of steel, formed in large sections, free of bolts, and anchored in concrete.
He got slowly to his feet and hopped along. The cuff allowed him six feet of lateral movement before he hit a cross-weld. Cupping his mouth with one hand he called toward the power station for help. He tried for a couple of minutes before deciding it was pointless. The station was farther off than he’d realized, and the fact that they’d brought him here, shackled him in the wide open, demonstrated that they weren’t worried about him attracting attention.
The exertion and the shouting had made his body ache. A cramp doubled him over. He couldn’t believe he’d chosen a burrito for his last proper meal. He breathed through it, then hopped to the corner and started to unfasten his pants.
Footsteps approached.
No Beard.
Stolid and dull. An overgrown kid.
He carried a canteen and a sandwich. “Down, fuckhead.”
Luke complied.
No Beard came into the stall and set the food and water just within Luke’s reach. Then he retreated to the aisle, like Luke was the dangerous one.
The sandwich was peanut butter on white. Luke choked down two or three bites. His throat was inflamed, chewing was agony. He drank the whole canteen.
No Beard said, “Throw it back.”
Luke resisted the urge to wing the canteen at the guy’s head. He lobbed it pathetically.
No Beard made to leave.
“Hang on, please,” Luke said. “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Go on the ground.”
“Can I have some paper or something?”
No Beard bit his lip.
He humped away to the farmhouse, coming back with a paperback book, which he tossed at Luke’s feet.
“Thank you,” Luke said.
No Beard left.
Squatting with bound ankles proved a challenge. Luke wondered if the blows to his head had done something to affect his balance. He steadied himself on the railing. After using several pages to wipe, he leafed through the paperback. It was a legal thriller.
Breakfast was the only meal he received, both that day and the next two. There were periodic checks to make sure he hadn’t escaped. His attempts at conversation went ignored.
They hadn’t killed him. So they needed him for something. It followed that he was the one they had come looking for, Rory the innocent victim.
Luke felt like weeping. Another life he had destroyed.
He wondered which part of his past this was, come to collect.
He meditated. He hopped his six feet of railing, watched the white truck come and go. The book’s courtroom scenes were more exciting than what he remembered from his own trial.
On day four he woke shivering. The truck had left in the predawn, and the darkness had a speckled quality to it, like a damaged negative. His face burned with fever, the rest of him was cold. The cuff rattled on his scabby wrist. In the last seventy-two hours he’d eaten less than one full sandwich. His body couldn’t hang on to water, he was peeing like crazy, drying out like a wrestler trying to make weight. Hopefully he could get skinny enough to slip the cuff.
He tested it. Not yet.
A few more days.
Did he truly think he would be here in a few more days?
More concerning to him were his feet. They had ballooned, his toes were hard as rocks, they were purple and severely tender, except at the tips, where they were beginning to blacken and lose sensation. Around his ankles the zip-ties bit into angry red flesh. He’d tried every method he could think of for getting them off: filing them against the railing or against the chain of the cuff, torquing his shins to stretch the plastic until the pain became too much to bear. He couldn’t get proper leverage. He lacked the strength. The will.
He was weak. Always had been.
He lay on his side, shivering, waiting for the sun to top the hills. Instead a viscid orange oozed out, coating the sky and everything beneath like a broken yolk.
The truck came back.
No one brought breakfast. No one checked on him.
He tried to read but he was shaking so hard the words wouldn’t stay in focus.
The sky began to lighten, to lower, floating downward like a bedsheet and breaking against the earth in a white froth that spread across the land.
A singed reek filled the air. Smoke wound through the stall posts. It collected around him. Inside him. He opened his mouth to call toward the farmhouse and coughs tore through him. It felt like his bones were separating.
It was evening again when they appeared. For hours he had been holding still, passing in and out of consciousness, trying not to provoke another coughing fit. Meanwhile the smoke continued to gather, forming a cataract over reality.
They climbed the rise, symmetrical figures relieved against the darkness.
The instant they entered the shed Luke sensed the change in them. Masked, dressed in camouflage, they walked up the aisle, brimming with fraught, nervous energy.
This was the time they had been waiting for.
Beard used Luke’s phone to take a picture of him. He tapped the screen. Frowned.
“It’s not sending.”
“Lemme see,” No Beard said.
Beard ignored him.
“Ty. Give it.”
Luke remembered, during the home invasion, hearing one of them call the other Jace. Therefore Jace was No Beard, and Beard was Ty.
“There’s no fucking bars,” Ty said. “I’ll drive around till it sends.”
“You need to get back fore he shows up.”
“Just shut up, okay?”
They left, still jawing at each other.
A few minutes later, the truck drove off.
A little while after that, Jace returned. A walkie-talkie was clipped to his grubby jeans. He stood in the aisle, took a coil of wire from his pocket, unspooled it.
“Who’s coming?” Luke asked.
Jace used a small folding knife to trim off a few inches of wire, then wrapped the ends around his hands to form a garrote.
“Is someone coming?” Luke asked.
“He’s your brother.” Jace yanked the wire, testing it for strength. “You tell me.”
His walkie-talkie blipped.
Clay said, “I’m here.”
Chapter 26
Luke had been talking, on and off, for three hours. A nurse came to take his vitals.
“That’s enough visiting,” she said.
Rigo and I stepped from the room.
My mother was at the nurses’ station. Andrea was with her, elbows on the counter, features slack as if she’d fallen asleep standing up.
My mother saw me and murmured something.
Andrea opened her eyes.
She pushed upright and came straight at me.
I got ready for a tongue-lashing: Everything that had happened to Luke was my fault.
My mother seemed to expect the same thing. She hurried behind Andrea, hand outstretched to restrain her, not quite making contact.
I squared toward Andrea. She walked right into me. Her arms wrapped my waist and she clung to me tightly. I peered down at the top of her head. Gray lined the part in her hair.
My mother looked on with a puzzled smile.
Cesar Rigo was writing in his notebook, like a scientist charting animal behavior.