Drawn Into Darkness(93)
“Right about this time last—no, a couple of nights ago.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t really okay, Quinn knew, and he gave his brother points for keeping his voice gentle. “Where?”
“At the fishing shack in the swamp. Asleep.”
“You left when she was asleep?”
Instead of answering, the kid dropped his sandwich to the ground as if he had lost all appetite. He sat staring into the night.
Quinn urged, “Justin, look at me.”
He did, his eyes narrowed with nearly tangible pain; Quinn felt its impact. Justin burst out, “It’s all my fault if Stoat got her. I didn’t rub out my tracks, I left a trail he could see, I’m so fricking stupid, and that really did sound like his van. . . .” He had started to sweat and shake. “But she has to be all right! She has to be home!” Wildly he gestured in the direction of the pink shack. “She has to!”
“She’s not,” Quinn said, and despite his best effort to be gentle, the words sounded stony bleak.
“But she has to be!” Justin cried. “I saw somebody open the windows over there!”
• • •
Stoat grabbed his shotgun, and I saw my death in his anaconda eyes.
I screamed as I had never screamed before. Shrieking, I jumped up from the sofa and ran with vague ideas of barricading myself in my bedroom. But Stoat, already on his feet, caught me easily. I barely made it halfway across the living room before he grabbed me by the arm and flung me onto the floor as if he intended to stomp me into the carpet.
I kept screaming like a smoke detector going off; I couldn’t stop. But I made up my mind that, anything Stoat did to me, he was going to have to face me down. Rolling onto my back, I looked straight up into his eyes, dead leaden things, hiding under the shadow of his brows.
Stoat ranted, “I’m getting out of here on foot if I got to, but first—”
With my big mouth at its most strident, I interrupted. “On foot? Stoat, you don’t have to do that. The car keys are right on the kitchen table.”
“What?”
“The car keys are in the pottery bowl on the kitchen table.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“Because you’re not going to just take them and let me be, are you.” This was a statement, not a question. The past few days had made a good Stoic of me. I met his glare with my own level stare, and maybe, just a little, I hoped the truth would be more than he could deal with.
No such luck. “I got to shut you up for good.”
The Stoics were okay but they had no damn sense of humor. I wanted to go out with some flair. Solemnly I reminded Stoat, “Don’t shoot me. The cops over at your house might hear.”
His mouth writhed like rattlesnakes, venomous, and I could actually see the blackened, dead part of his face start to open up in a sickening chasm as if to display his necrotic soul. Clutching his shotgun by its twin barrels, he lifted it. “I’m going to beat your tricky-ass brains out, you fucking ugly redhead bitch.” He swung the shotgun butt high.
I am nothing if not crazy when it counts. “Stoat, wait a minute,” I told him earnestly. “I’m concerned, and I think you need to seek medical attention.”
The shotgun swung down, but in a disorganized way, as if I had messed up Stoat’s aim and his impetus. I sat up, and the shotgun butt slammed into the carpet behind me. Stoat yelled, “What the fuck you talking about?”
I hoisted myself with my hands to get my feet under me. At the same time I cocked my head back to establish sincere eye contact. I said, “Parts of your face are falling off.”
Stoat didn’t say anything, but his mouth moved, twisting ugly as he swung his shotgun up like a golfer ready to tee off. My head being the metaphorical golf ball, I dived for an entirely different part of the carpet and screamed.
The shotgun butt swished over my head, but I kept right on screaming as I scuttled like an oversized cockroach under the coffee table. I grabbed the legs from below and held on hard. In that moment I comprehended to the bone why drowning people grasp at straws. With all the life energy in my body right down to my toes I shrieked, “Help! Somebody help me!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Stoat roared, swinging his shotgun-cum-club at the coffee table. Maybe he thought he could send it flying off me, but I hung on through the first impact and the second. And the third, for all the good it did me. That blow shattered the wood. Or the pressed processed chipboard or whatever the damn cheap thing was made of—Stoat’s rifle butt struck like a bomb to send jagged hunks of it flying off me.
Trapped between him and the sofa, I rolled over on my back because, damn his septic guts, if he was going to kill me, he was going to do it to my face. He looked like a homicidal gargoyle, lifting his weapon, and I raised my arms in a futile gesture to defend myself, but at the same time my brain burped and words spurted from my mouth. “Stoat! You know Justin actually told me you’re not a bad guy?”