“No, it’s not!” He grabbed for the remote, his voice a frightened squeak, but it was too late. The words MISSING, ENDANGERED, plus a phone number, had appeared on the screen, and the announcer was saying, “Justin Bradley, shown here at the age of twelve, was last seen riding his bike away from his Delaine, Alabama, home—”
Justin killed the TV, and as for me, fear preceded rational thought, but what was the use of that when I didn’t have a scream-and-run reaction? I was brought up to be civilized, and to freeze like a baby bunny when the shadow of the hawk passes over. Now, still mentally struggling to define what sort of faux pas I had committed, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” in a voice that completely failed to sound casual, and I started to stand up.
As if I could unring a bell? It had been all over the moment I gasped.
“I guess you’d better not,” the Stoat man said tonelessly. “Sit down.” On his feet, pushing me back into the depths of the sofa, he stood over me, and although his only weapons were his hands and his stare, I might have felt less intimidated if he had been a stereotypical bad guy with a snarl and a handgun. Truly, I might have felt less freaked-out if he had looked mean and cruel. Or dangerous and panicky, or anything except blank like a reptile, the way he was watching me. “Justin,” he said without shifting his attention from me, “have you seen that ad on TV before?” His voice, although not loud at all and not very deep, nevertheless made me start to tremble.
“No, sir.” Not Uncle Steve, but “sir.” Justin was afraid of him too.
“You sure?”
“Positive, sir.”
“Just the same, you shouldn’t have left the TV on in front of her. And you shouldn’t have answered the door. You think just because it’s been a while, now it’s okay to take chances? It’s not. The rules are still the rules. Don’t you go to the door if anybody knocks. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you shouldn’t have let her in. You know you don’t let anybody in unless I say, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.” He sounded wretched. Even though I sat trapped in the corner of the sofa shaking like a rabbit in a snare, I felt for him.
“All right.” He snapped his fingers at Justin. “Get me a bottle of beer.”
Only sometime after I woke up did I appreciate how clever he was. If he had asked Justin to bring him his gun, there was a slight chance that the boy, even as thoroughly indoctrinated as he was, might have reverted to being the kid his parents had raised, might have tried to use the weapon to save me. If he had said bring him the baseball bat, there was still the same remote chance. But by demanding a beer, he sounded as if he wanted to relax.
Justin jumped up to get him a cold bottle of Coors from the fridge. And even I unfroze enough to whisper, “Listen, you don’t have to worry about me. I won’t tell anybody. If you say Justin is your nephew, I believe you. I—”
Didn’t get to say any more. Justin handed Stoat the beer, and without opening it he swung the bottle hard at my head.
Blackness.
• • •
Regaining consciousness felt visually and mentally like being in a kaleidoscope, needing to put the shifting pieces together. At first I thought I was back in my longtime home in Pennsylvania, and then with a jolt of heartache I remembered the divorce, and my own parents siding with my ex, damn them, and my new fuchsia cottage in the weirdest part of Florida, where I had spent many hours miserably lying on the bed looking up at the ceiling—but there was something different about this ceiling, and who—my double vision was trying to tell me—who was looking down at me?
My heart started pounding. I knew I was in trouble even before I managed to focus on the sparse man holding a handgun, a long-barreled revolver that seemed too big for him. But that was an illusion caused by his slim build. One look into his empty eyes showed that no weapon was too big for this—this psycho standing over me as I lay immodestly spread out on the bed.
My arms and legs jumped, jerked. Some instinct even more atavistic than fear made me want to curl up, roll away from him, drop off the bed onto the floor, crawl under it. But I couldn’t. Only my left hand flew up. Hard, hurtful tethers bit my ankles and my right wrist. I squeaked, but shut up immediately as—what was his name?—Steven Stoat angled the gun barrel toward my head. At the same time an anomalously gentle hand gripped my left wrist, swung it back to the bed, and snapped something metallic around it. Then I felt the arm drawn straight by some force fastening it to the corner of the bed.
“Tighter, Justin,” Stoat said.