Drawn Into Darkness(25)

With greatest love,



Mom



Stoat read this over my shoulder—revolver in hand, of course. When I had finished, he nodded. “I reckon that won’t hurt anything. Leave it lay where it is. Justin can mail it next week.”

I looked at Justin, who had just finished washing the dishes. Drying his hands on a dingy kitchen towel, he nodded, giving me a flickering glance of acknowledgment. I barely glimpsed his eyes, yet saw there a near replica of the blank terror that might have been in my own.

Maybe he realized, as I did, how extremely theoretical, almost fictitious, “next week” was for him; otherwise, Stoat would not have allowed me to write the letter. Logic told me that Justin was in as much danger of death as I was. Even before I came along, Stoat had wanted to replace him with a younger victim, and now would be the perfect time to kill him. Two for the price of one. Would Stoat leave Justin at home while he went to murder me? Of course not. He would keep Justin with him so the kid could not turn against him, run away, alert the police. And would he keep Justin alive after Justin had witnessed my murder? I doubted it.

“We can’t go till deep dark.” With a stab of his gun barrel, Stoat ordered me toward the living room. “Sit down and watch TV.”

So I did. Wrapped in my towel as if in an overlarge diaper, I sat on the sofa and looked at some program without comprehension. After a while Justin joined me on the other end of the sofa, while Stoat slumped in his chair, keeping the gun aimed at me. All the while my mind trolled near and far, fishing for any possibility of escape, any improvised weapon, any plausible ploy, but came up with none. I remembered having heard once that, when held at gunpoint, one should run while dodging back and forth, the rationale being that most criminals neglect their target practice, are indifferent shots, and it is better to risk a flesh wound than to be killed. My body, however, felt watery after being punched and kicked and handcuffed to a bed—not that I had ever been an athlete, far from it. My memories of school phys ed class, dodgeball in particular, were dismal. And the decades since had not helped any. (Jogging? I have never seen a smiling jogger.) After just two days of Stoat’s abuse, I felt incapable of jumping up and running to the door, much less dodging. Maybe later, once we got outside?

Maybe if adrenaline kicked in?

Maybe?





EIGHT





Stoat showed no impatience, not even a jiggling leg, as the television babbled and the sky darkened outside the living room window. He had decided beforehand what time to proceed, I inferred, and his plans were not to be rushed even by himself. When the TV changed programs at exactly nine o’clock, he stood up. “Leave it on,” he told Justin, who had reached for the remote. “If people drive by, it’ll look like we’re home. But they don’t need to see me standing here with this pistol. Kill the lights.”

Justin did so. Hardly anyone drove past in the daytime, much less at night, but Stoat took no chances.

“Go get a pair of handcuffs,” he ordered Justin.

The boy returned almost at once. Obviously it had not been necessary for him to untie some cuffs from the bed. I wondered how many pairs of handcuffs Stoat kept around this place.

“And an extra towel. So she don’t stink up the upholstery in the van.”

Or leave evidence there either. As I had come to expect of him, he had planned down to the smallest detail.

With my hands cuffed behind my back, I gave up thoughts of possible escape, thus, unintentionally, freeing myself in a different way. Freeing myself to breathe deeply of the wet nighttime air, to feel the raindrops with a perverse joy, to listen with a bittersweet pang to the frogs chiming, their croaking somehow as tuneful at a slight distance as a choir of angel bells. I had time to stand breathing and listening, for Stoat our goat man, so meticulous, would not turn on the porch light; someone might see us. So it took Justin a few minutes to feel his way down the steps before Stoat prodded me ahead of him with a hard little hollow circle pressed to my back.

I felt for the edge of the step with one foot. “Take your time so you don’t fall,” Stoat whispered. He sounded as if he meant it sincerely, frightening me worse than if he had cursed me. The scariest thing about Stoat was how normal-nice he could be. A little bit of good in the worst of us? A little bit of bad in the best of us? Bullshit. I knew then, as never before, that there is unfathomable capacity for both good and evil in every single one of us.

The rain poured down, drenching me to the bone, and I tilted my face up and opened my mouth, not because I was thirsty but because I needed to open myself and be cleansed. Rain, please wash away the stink of pee and sweat and fear. Rain, be my baptism into night, my last rite.