Dressed, he substituted one of his own baseball hats for the green relic Lee had found, turned off the bedroom light, then headed for the kitchen. He didn’t need to turn on a light there, just open the refrigerator. He gulped some Mountain Dew straight from the two-liter bottle, then grabbed the loaf of bread, the pink salami, and some sliced cheese. But no matter how much his stomach howled and gnawed, sitting at the table to make a sandwich seemed out of the question. Carrying the food, Justin headed for the back door.
But the moment he opened it, he heard the panting breath and pounding feet of someone running toward him. He dropped his food and froze, trying to see who it was. Not Stoat, thank God. Young man—no, young men. Two of them now, barely visible, but he could hear their voices.
“Quinn, it’s him. The one on the tapes.”
Justin’s mind seized upon nothing of this beyond the word “Quinn.” In the fading light he saw nothing except the faces of the two young men, and he saw Lee in them, and he knew them; they were Lee’s sons, Forrest and Quinn. He could not question how they had come to be there; it was simply a miracle. He named them like Adam naming creation. “Quinn and Forrest?” And a great sunrise of emotion suffused him.
TWENTY-SIX
“Um, car keys, the keys to my car,” I babbled as Stoat pressed his way-too-sharp knife blade to my throat. I had three choices: tell him where the keys were and be killed, or not tell him where the keys were and be killed, or come up with some convincing prevarication to live a few hours longer. The survival instinct made me a time miser, hanging on to every minute no matter how miserable. I needed a lifesaver lie, stat.
Bless my control freak husband, he had made me a good liar.
The thought of Georg inspired me.
“I know where there’s a key. I think I know,” I prattled. “It’s under, um, I remember my ex-husband put a spare somewhere on the underside of the car in one of those little magnetic boxes, you know the kind I mean? On the whatchacallit, undercarriage of the car.”
Stoat’s already tight grip constricted around my shoulders, his knife bit the skin of my neck, and he said several harsh things, concluding with, “Where on the undercarriage of the car, bitch?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly. That’s where he put them. It was his idea. I never—”
“Oh, shut up.” Suddenly Stoat turned me loose, not so much letting me go as unable to stand me anymore; he thrust me away from him, hard. I fell onto the sofa and decided to stay there.
Stoat raged, “You expect me to crawl under your bitty-ass stupid Yankee car to find the fucking key?”
At first I thought this was rhetorical, but he glowered at me as if he wanted a reply, so I said, “Sir, I expect nothing, sir.”
“You’re goddamn right. It’s getting dark out there. I don’t suppose you got a freaking flashlight?”
I did not. Practical equipment has never been my forte. I did not own any flashlight. . . . Wait a minute.
“There’s a little one in my, um . . .” I could not help hesitating, terrorized, dreading to displease him.
“In your what?”
“In my purse, sir. A little LED light shaped like Eeyore.”
“What the hell?”
“Kind of a—a blue donkey, sir . . .”
“Shut the fuck up. Just goddamn shut up, would you, and let me think.”
I did as he said. I shut up, and from my seat on the sofa, I watched him think. In the darkening room he loomed over me, buck knife in hand, way too much like doom incarnate. I knew what he was thinking. He was considering his options. He could go to his house and get the car keys out of my purse, but meanwhile, what was he to do with me? Duct-tape me to the chair again? It seemed to me that he must be running out of duct tape. He could take me with him, walk me over there at gunpoint? Make that knife point? Either way, somebody might drive past, and I might make a break for it, try to get away, and it was too goddamn long of a walk. He wouldn’t like that option. But the other one was to crawl under my car searching for a goddamn key box on its murky underside, with what illumination? And even supposing he could find a flashlight, maybe hike to his disabled van and get one out of the glove box, then what was he supposed to do with me meanwhile? Tie me up with something other than duct tape, like what, Schweitzer’s leash? Or take me along, when he knew damn well I would try to escape?
Most people, when they are thinking, gaze off into space. Stoat did not. He stared straight at me, looking down his unlovely nose with his stony eyes—yes, I realized with a shock, eyes, plural. His second reptilian eye had reappeared, showing that his swelling was down. He had to be feeling better. Damn.