She wanted to turn and see him, but looking away from the one on the couch seemed risky. He had the only pistol she’d seen but surely the other one was armed too. My brother, he’d said. She wondered where they were from. They spoke without accent. Flat affect. Someplace in the Midwest. Someplace near the center of hell. They had not taken her jacket from her and so she still had the bear spray, but what use it might be she couldn’t imagine now. Cause them some pain, but that would only anger them more. Blinding them in a cloud of poison and running through it for the shotgun? It would never work.
“Tell me, then,” Allison said.
That brought a tilt of the head and an almost amused stare from the man on the couch. “Tell you?”
“Yes. Why are you here?”
For a long time he looked at her and did not speak. Then he said, “I believe your husband is in the mountains. Leading a group of boys. Troubled boys. Very honorable thing to do. Because if you don’t stop the trouble in a boy early? Well, then. Well.”
“It simply won’t stop,” his brother said. “Once trouble takes hold, Mrs. Serbin? It won’t stop.”
The man on the coach leaned forward and braced his arms on his knees. “Do you know which boy it is?”
Allison shook her head. “I don’t.”
“This time I believe you. But it’s irrelevant. Because we know which one he is. So we don’t require that information from you. What we require is his location.”
She knew what was coming now as if a map had been drawn for her. They wanted the boy and they wanted to move with speed. The thing she had wanted to take from them, time, was the very thing they could not afford to grant. There were other ways to find Ethan, but not faster ways, not for them. So they intended to travel via shortcuts. She was one of those.
He commenced rubbing his face again with a gloved hand. Somewhere behind Allison, his brother shifted, but still she did not turn. Let him move. She couldn’t watch them both, so there was no point in trying. They would ask her for Ethan’s location now, and when she did not tell them, it would go bad fast. She saw that on the map but she also saw that the destination was the same no matter which route she took. There were detours available to her but no exits.
So it would go this way, then. They would ask and she would answer and they would be done with her. Or they would ask and she would not answer and they would not be done with her.
“We’re going to need to catch up with your husband,” the man on the couch said. “I assume you realize that by now.”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell us where we might find him? Remember that he, personally, is of no interest to us.”
He was willing to try one tactic, at least, before resorting to more direct means. Willing to pretend. She would now hear that no harm would come to Ethan if she told them where he was, and no harm would come to her. His heart wasn’t in it, though. At some point he had looked at her and an understanding had transpired between them. He would not waste his efforts on a lost cause, and convincing her that she had any hope of safety was a lost cause. She knew that they were here to kill a boy because that boy had seen them, and now she had seen them. All of this lay unspoken between them. And what it meant.
“He will be,” she said.
That earned a raised eyebrow. “You think?”
She nodded. “You won’t just take the boy. Not from Ethan.”
“But we’re going to have to.”
“It won’t go easy for you.”
He seemed pleased by that prediction. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”
He left the couch and leaned down on one knee and reached for the woodstove. Opened the door and let smoke out into the room. A few embers clung to life. There was a basket of kindling beside the stove and he took a handful and began to build a fire.
“The technique has been good to us today,” he said.
“It has,” his brother answered. “Cold in here too. A cold night.”
The flames caught the fresh fuel and grew and he added a log then and sat back and watched the fire take hold. There was an iron rack of tools on the wall-ash broom and dustpan, poker, tongs. He ran his fingertips over all of them as if undecided on the best option and then let his hand float back to the tongs. Removed them from the rack and dipped the business end into the flame and allowed the iron to soak in the scorching heat.
“Please,” Allison said, and he looked up at her as if with genuine surprise.
“Pardon?”
“Please don’t.”
“Well, you’ve had your opportunity to cooperate. Surely you can’t blame me for the consequences of your own decisions, your own actions?”
“You’ll spend your life in prison for this,” she said. “I hope the days are long for you there. I hope they are endless.”
He removed the tongs from the fire and smiled at her. “I don’t see anyone here to arrest me, Mrs. Serbin. In fact, it is my understanding that your sheriff is dead. The law has changed with our arrival, do you see? You are now in the jurisdiction of a new judge.”
“This is the truth,” his brother acknowledged, and then the deep red glow of the iron tongs was approaching Allison and she spoke again.
“There’s a GPS.”
He seemed almost disappointed. As if he’d expected her continued resistance and had not thought she would be so easy to break.
“Cooperation,” he said. “Marvelous.” That word again, said slow, as if he liked the flavor. “Where is this GPS?”
“Nightstand. By the bed.”
His brother moved without a word and quickly returned with the GPS in his hand. He was studying it.
“Does it track them or does it just have the planned route?”
“Tracks them.”
The one by the fire rose and hung the tongs back on the wall. Allison prayed that he would come closer, join his brother in looking at the GPS, finally be close enough that she would have a chance to get them both with one shot of the bear spray.
He didn’t. He walked to the end of the couch, the two men still well separated, and said, “Show us where they are.”
She reached for the device. Her hand was trembling. The man who smelled of smoke and blood handed her the GPS and she tried to make it look as if she fumbled it on the transition, tried to hide the way her thumb came down on the red emergency button, the one that issued the distress signal. You couldn’t just tap it, though; the emergency responders didn’t want to be inundated with accidental SOS calls. You had to hit it three times in succession.
She’d hit it twice before the first punch came, and as she fell she hit it the third time and then dropped it as a kick caught her high in the stomach and hammered the air from her lungs and left her curled in a ball of agony, trying to choke in a breath as blood flowed from her shattered nose and torn lips.
“Emergency signal,” the man who’d struck her said, not even looking at her, his attention back on the GPS. “She just called for a rescue.”
“Can you stop it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see.”
Allison writhed on the floor and tried to suck in air, but all that came was the taste of hot copper. She wanted to reach for the bear spray but first she needed to breathe, and her hand went to her stomach instead of her pocket, a reflex action-touch where it hurts. The long-haired man bent and grabbed her by her hair and dragged her backward, fresh pain flooding in even as she drowned in what was already there.
“She should hope,” he said, “that the rescue team is very fast.”
He dragged her close to the fire and dropped her on the floor and then knelt to take the tongs from the rack. His brother was still looking at the GPS, trying to abort the signal. Allison rolled onto her shoulder and found the bear spray and withdrew it. There was a plastic guard on the trigger. She snapped that off with her thumb, and at the sound of the breaking plastic, the long-haired one turned back. When he spotted the pepper-spray canister, she saw something unsteady in his eyes for the first time. Saw all of the anger he kept wrapped behind the cloak of cold calm. It was there for a flicker and then gone. The cloak returned, and with it a menacing amusement. A smile spreading beneath that frosted stare.