He railed, “I said git up! What the hell’s the matter with you—oh.” Belated realization did not make him any less pissed off. He swore luridly as he got out his knife, and I could not help cringing at the sight of the long blade shining in the dim kitchen—why so dim? The answer took a moment to float into the mist of my mind: Stoat and I had slept for hours. Day was fading. An unmistakably evening breeze reached me on the floor, and belatedly I realized the smoke had cleared; Stoat must have opened some windows. Come to think of it, the noise from the smoke detector had stopped.
Bending over, he cut me free of the chair, and very nearly sliced my legs in the process. Then, barely giving me time to flex my numb feet, he grabbed my elbow and hauled me up—I think he would have dislocated my shoulder if I hadn’t managed to get my feet deployed. The muffler on my mouth kept my scream of pain from sounding like much. He sawed and ripped to remove the duct tape from my wrists. I whimpered when the weight of my nearly lifeless arms swung forward to hang from my traumatized shoulders. Stoat shook his mangy head in mild rebuke. “See, my extra bedroom don’t seem so bad now, does it?” He meant being spread-eagled and handcuffed hands and feet, and fuck him with a salty dick, he was right.
Then, orderly creep that he was, he could not seem to help picking up the chair and positioning it neatly at the table where it belonged.
Once I had reacquainted myself with my hands, I ripped the tape off my own mouth. Ouch. But why, at this point, should anything not hurt?
“Where’s your damn car keys?” Stoat growled close to my ear.
The words were clear enough, yet I couldn’t seem to comprehend them; maybe I had been hit on the head too many times. “Huh?”
He had not put his knife away. He lifted it slightly and glared.
“Huh, sir?” I blurted.
He gave me a look that said Read my lips.
“You want my car keys?” In order to look for them, I reached toward the kitchen light switch.
Stoat struck my hand away. “No damn lights! You want the cops to see?”
“Um, cops?”
“What the hell you think I want the car keys for?”
Ah. My weary and perhaps damaged brain began to function. “Are they still there?” Meaning at his house.
He railed, “How the hell should I know? I don’t see no fucking cars, but there’s fucking yellow cop tape out front. If I didn’t feel so goddamn crappy, I’d kill you and steal your fucking car.”
Either he did not feel strong enough to drive, or he did not feel strong enough to break my steering column and start my car with a screwdriver. If the former, he would kill me eventually. If the latter, he would kill me when I found the keys. That part, the murderous part, was so shockingly clear it worked like a jump start on my mind. I must be as helpful to Stoat as I could, as long as I helped him get tired and get nowhere.
With clarity as if my mental lights had switched on, I remembered where my car keys were. In my purse. Which, according to Justin, Stoat had stolen and taken to his house—but he didn’t know I knew that. Meanwhile, the spare keys lay right there under his hatchet nose in the pink pottery bowl on my kitchen table, along with Scotch tape, rubber bands, a coupon cutter, a three-socket electrical outlet converter, emery boards, a lint roller, and various other household detritus, including a small stuffed aardvark that had belonged to Schweitzer.
Looming over me with his head weaving like a water moccasin ready to strike, Stoat hissed, “For the last time, where’s your keys?”
“In my purse!” I chirped just like my mother at her most virtuous and helpful moments.
“And where’s that?”
“Um, in the living room, I guess,” I said, pretending not to know it was right where he had put it, at his house. If he didn’t remember that, let him figure it out.
He grabbed me by the arm, yanked me forward, then stood behind me and nudged me in the middle of my back with the tip of his knife. “Walk.”
I walked. We progressed past the kitchen table, where the pink pottery bowl was barely to be seen in the dusk, and after that, each step took us farther away from it. But I didn’t congratulate myself much, because psychosis only knew what Stoat would do when we didn’t find my purse.
I led him to the place where I ordinarily parked it, between sofa and armchair, then made what I hoped was a convincing show of peering into the shadows. “It’s not there.”
Stoat snapped, “Then where the hell—” He stopped, and I wished I could see his ugly face as he remembered. His tone changed when he said, “Oh, fuck.”
Gee, wherever could it be? But I had the good sense to remain silent.