Standing in the fishing shack with Stoat’s hand clawing my shoulder and his shotgun jabbing the back of my neck, I wished to all deities ever that the snake I had thrown at Stoat had gone all out and given him the works. Instead, it had bitten him just badly enough to make him somewhat dependent on me but extra mean. He marched me to the van through tall weeds hiding fire ants that stung my bare feet. He held me at gunpoint quite efficiently as he opened the van’s sliding side door and reached inside for—a roll of duct tape?
Son of a bitch.
Wielding the duct tape expertly with one hand, he taped the shotgun barrel to the back of my neck. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I could feel it with wretched certainty and sickness in my gut. From time to time I heard him rip off another length of tape—with his teeth. His crooked, yellow, rotting teeth. I wished the duct tape would yank them right out of his foul mouth, but no such luck, apparently. I could hear Stoat go on ripping and taping for quite a while after he finished with my neck, and I wondered what he was up to.
At last my peripheral vision glimpsed a miniature UFO of silver gray, and I heard the roll of duct tape thump onto the seat of the van. “Now you listen, tricky bitch,” Stoat crowed at me. “This here shotgun is not only stuck to your dumbass spine but also to my hand so there ain’t no way my finger can slip off the trigger. So you ain’t got no options, you hear?” He yanked open the passenger side door. “Get in.”
With his shotgun connected to me like a long leech hanging from my neck, and with him at the other end of it, I did so.
“Head on over to the driver’s seat.”
I moved from one bucket seat to the other, and as I did so, Stoat climbed in after me, stepping as spryly as a goat over the console and gearshift and into the backseat. He sat behind me with the shotgun barrel between my seat and its headrest. There had been a few moments of slippage, but none of them long enough for me to rip free of the duct tape, and now I felt the shotgun barrel pressed against the back of my neck as firmly as ever.
As I thought of throwing my weight against the tape and taking a sort of suicide plunge out of the van onto the ground, Stoat commanded, “Fasten your seat belt.”
Damn him.
Not until I was trapped in every conceivable way did he toss me the keys, describe in detail what he would do to me if I gave him any trouble, and then tell me, “Drive.”
I turned the key in the ignition and cursed it mentally because it worked. The van started.
I said, “I need to move the seat forward.” My feet barely reached the brake pedal and accelerator.
“No, you don’t, slut. Drive.”
Okay, okay, I could manage. I put the van into gear and drove up the narrow weedy lane to the dirt road—more accurately, the sand road. “Which way?”
“Left.”
I turned, then accelerated, on the lookout for a good tree to crash into.
“And don’t go wrecking my van,” Stoat said as if prescient, “because the way I got my finger taped onto the trigger of this here shotgun, if you give me any kind of jolt, it’ll go off and blow your stupid brains out.”
Damn him.
Because sometimes he kind of liked my big mouth, I grumbled, “First I’m tricky, then I’m stupid.”
“Shut up and drive.”
So much for that.
In silence I drove along the narrow yellow-gray road in its green tangled tupelo-oak-magnolia tunnel, between sepia-toned swamp water, over wooden, barely there bridges. And then another swamp road to the right, and another to the left. It seemed too long yet not long enough before we reached the paved road. Stoat, who had not said a word except “Turn here,” now jabbed the shotgun harder into my brain stem and said, “Go right and hit the cruise control, forty miles an hour. Not thirty-nine or forty-one. Forty.”
As if he could even see the controls from where he was sitting in the back of the van. I fiddled with the cruise control but could not make it work, so with my right leg rather painfully stretched to toe the accelerator and one eye on the speedometer, I kept the van going around forty. The fact that Stoat did not say anything about my disobeying orders told me he was still feeling weak, and I allowed myself a chirp and twitter of hope. I tried to plan how I might escape when we got to Stoat’s house, how there had to be an instant when the shotgun barrel slipped askew in the duct tape, and if I saw a passing car—
Damn. There it was already, his shack the color of a skink’s neon blue tail—
My jaw dropped. I frankly gawked.
Stoat barked, “What the fuck?” He saw it too. A small, newish but nondescript car parked in front of his home.