“Because I like knives, Miss Lee Anna. I am fixing to do you the same way. Give me one good reason not to kill you right now.”
I had been wondering the same thing since he’d finished eating his fried eggs and stopped acting sick, although the side of his face remained grotesquely swollen; I could feel it right now, plump and hot against my head.
“Answer the question, bitch!”
“Sir, because the twin jets of blood spurting from my carotid arteries would make one hell of a mess, sir.”
“I’ll take you out in the back woods and slit your throat like a deer.”
“Sir, then I’ll scream like a witch with her broom up her nose, sir.”
I hoped to lighten him up. Sometimes I had known him to react to my “big mouth” with a flicker of transient kindness. But it was not my crude humor that saved me. It was the sound of a car scrunching through the sand and leaf litter to park in front of my house.
I felt Stoat go as rigid as I-bar while he and I remained in our position of weird, perverse intimacy.
“Shhhh,” Stoat hissed in my ear, tightening his hug-hold on me, pressing the knife harder against my throat and me harder against him. “No noise or you’re dead.”
Sir, yes, sir.
Yet this might be my last, best chance of rescue. . . . I waited, my mind clutching at straws of possibility, expecting to hear the car turn off, then someone knock at the front door, maybe yell something so I’d have a clue who it was and a chance to do something. But no, not so. Moments passed, the mystery car kept running, and I didn’t hear another sound. The silent strain between Stoat and me was reaching a crescendo. When the tension climaxed, he would kill me.
I closed my eyes, opened them again, clenched my teeth, then whispered to Stoat, “Aren’t you curious to see who it is?”
His grip shifted; his head reared in wrath. “Shut up or—”
Before he could complete the threat, I slammed my head back as hard as I could into the injured side of his face.
I’d never been snakebitten, but I figured this would have to hurt enough to give me a chance, and it did. Stoat yelped like a kicked dog, all his limbs flew out in a spasm, and he dropped the knife. I heard it hit the kitchen floor as I was already sprinting toward the front door.
Speed boosted by adrenaline, I flipped the lock and the dead bolt, turned the knob—but it wouldn’t open. Damn Stoat! However he had rigged the back door, he had done the same to the front. More in frustration than in any hope that I might be heard, I pounded my fists against the inside of the door, then regained some wit and scrambled to flip back the drapes and look out the front window. There sat that same stupid car that had been parked in front of Stoat’s blue house. If—
If nothing. Nothing but blackness, because Stoat hit me very hard on the back of my head.
TWENTY-TWO
In the rental car, Forrest shoved Quinn’s hand off the steering wheel, noticed tears in his brother’s eyes, and started to sob even though there was no damn time for crying; tears made him angry at himself and at Quinn, who was being a pain, trying to take control as usual, reaching for the keys in the ignition. Forrest whacked his hand away but somehow in the process ended up bawling in his brother’s arms, making too damn much undignified noise. But Quinn was weeping too, the Aveo’s engine still chugging away, and the car’s air conditioner droning. A blast of cool air from the dashboard helped Forrest to gear down from sobs to sniffles, pull away from Quinn, and find a paper napkin amid the fast-food debris that littered the car. He wiped his face, blew his nose, and said, “Shit.”
“Shit and a half,” Quinn agreed huskily. “Did you just hear some kind of a pounding noise?”
“No.”
“Must have been in my head.”
“Mine feels like it’s about to explode.”
“Yeah. And we need to go to the cops.”
Dully Forrest studied the rental car’s controls. Somehow the gearshift had ended up in park. He reached for it.
Quinn’s hand stopped his. “You’re in no condition to drive.”
“Neither are you.” Forrest didn’t need to look at his brother to know this, or to know that if their eyes met, both of them would break down again. He stared up through the windshield at pink and green mimosa.
Quinn said, “We’ll just have to call the cops, then.”
Forrest nodded.
“You want to go inside?”
“Here?” The pink shack. Mom’s house. And Forrest’s gut quivered at the thought of Mom. “I—I don’t know.”
“Not as bad as the other place.” Quinn still sounded shaky.