Drawn Into Darkness(89)

Not run or jog. Walk. Even when he found the four-wheeler track he would follow the rest of the way through the woods, he couldn’t get his wretchedly hungry body or his painful, bloody, plodding feet to move any faster. It was just about all he could do to stay upright and moving. When he finally saw the bright blue house through the trees, he could have cried.

Until he saw something was wrong. He stopped as if he’d hit a wall.

He knew without having to get any closer what that yellow stuff across the back door was. Police tape.

What the hell? Lee must have found a way out of the swamp, because it looked like she had gone and called the cops.

This was a good thing, he reminded himself, that Lee was safe. Lee was the best. She understood him better than anybody. He wished she would have let him stay with her and be her son. He knew she didn’t mean any harm, calling cops to his house. But there they were. Now what the hell was he supposed to do?

Justin dropped to his hands and knees, at first in despair, then in caution. He crawled forward to have a closer look. Nearing the edge of the woods, he bellied down to combat crawl, peering at the back of the bright blue Stoat shack for any sign of movement. At a distance, across the road, he could see the front and side of Lee’s bright pink shack too.

Maybe she was home and he could go over there and she would give him something to eat. She would. And she wouldn’t shout at him or curse him or hit him for running away either.

Justin blinked, trying to get his thinking into focus. He had run away, but why? The night when they had bedded down on bunks in the fishing shack seemed as far away as something on Star Trek, as if the swamp were an alien planet. He had run because—because Lee wanted him to go back to his parents. Dad. Mom. Mythical beings he could barely remember as he lay in the sandy dirt just being tired and starved, even his thoughts almost too tired and starved to move. “Mom” was a blank, yet the word caused a hot ache in his chest that tugged him toward Lee.

His body responded, trying to get up. Get up. Go. Somebody was at home over there, opening the windows, he could see them opening. But over here it was only cops—

Duh. He couldn’t go to Lee because Lee had called the cops. Because Lee was a good person, not messed up like him, and she wanted to do things right. She couldn’t help it that Justin just wasn’t ready.

Justin’s body let go of all hope and sagged back into the sandy dirt at the verge of Stoat’s backyard. He lay there without moving as the sun set and the day began to darken. He wanted to give up and sleep, but hunger tore at him like a wolf, insisting that he had to stay awake and do something. His own body, ordering him around.

From where he lay, he could see only the back and one side of the shack. But the place was so small he could tell nobody had turned on any lights inside. Not like he’d been watching for lights to come on, not like he still had brains enough for that, but all of a sudden he noticed there weren’t any. Not even the blue flickering glow of a TV set. Could it be there was nobody in the house? Not even Stoat?

What were the chances that anybody was in there waiting in the dark? He could see that Stoat’s van was not parked in its usual spot at the corner. As for cops, who cared anymore? Hunger made him reckless and willing to take the risk. He heaved himself to his feet in the bushes, waited a moment until a spinning sense of vertigo passed. Then he took a deep breath and stepped into the open.

He traversed the backyard quickly, noting that his feet hurt even worse than his gut; despite his hunger, socks and shoes had to come first. He ripped the yellow tape away from the back door, then pushed it open in the dark as he had done many times before. But even though he lived here, supposedly, he did not turn on a light yet. A sense of constant guilt had been beaten into him for the past couple of years, making him feel as if he must be sneaky. He found his way through the shack to the bedroom just by shuffling his feet. But in the bedroom they encountered obstacles. Clothing seemed to be strewn all over the floor. In order to find his shoes he needed to turn on the light.

He groped for the switch on the wall, found it, flipped it, then blinked in the blaze of the ceiling fixture, staring at the mess. The cops had really tossed the place. What the hell had they been looking for?

His clothing lay all over. Quickly he shucked off the filthy clothes he had been wearing for three days and found clean ones to put on. He felt too uneasy to shower; his dunk in the creek last night would have to do. He should have soaked his feet in soapy water, smeared them with antibiotics, and bandaged them, but that would have taken as much time as a shower. Instead, he found two pairs of cushy white cotton tube socks and put them on one over the other. He didn’t see his comfortable old Chucks, so they were probably still under his side of the bed where they belonged. Stepping over piles of clothing, he went there, and yes! He found the floppy, forgiving shoes, and by lacing them loosely, he was able to put them on.