“That’s a dangerous neighborhood,” Mr. Fussel said.
“Then let me out—dammit!—right—here! Kootie, let me talk! It’s kidnapping if you people keep me in this vehicle!”
Mrs. Fussel spoke up. “Let’s let him out and forget the whole thing.”
“Eleanor, he’s sick, listen to him! It would be the same as murder if we left him out on these streets. It’s our duty to call the police.” The man had got up out of the passenger seat and turned swayingly to face Kootie. “And even if we have to call in the police, we’ll still get the twenty thousand dollars.”
Kootie spun toward the sliding door in the side of the van, but before he could grab the handle the man had lunged at him and whacked him hard in the chest with his open palm, and Kootie jackknifed sideways onto the back seat; he was gasping, trying to suck air into his lungs and get his legs onto the floor so that he could spring toward Mrs. Fussel and perhaps wrench at the steering wheel, but Mr. Fussel gave him a stunning slap across the face and then strapped the seat belt across him, and pulled the strap tight through the buckle, with Kootie’s arms under the woven fabric.
The boy could thrash back and forth, but his arms were pinioned. He was squinting in the new brightness, for the man had knocked his sunglasses off.
“If you,” Kootie gasped, his heart hammering, “let me go—I won’t tell the police—that you hit me—and tied me up.”
Mr. Fussel had to duck his head to stand in the back of the minivan, and now he rocked on his feet and slapped the ceiling to keep his balance. “Drive carefully!” he shouted at his wife. “If a cop pulls us over right now we’re fucked!”
Kootie could hear Mrs. Fussel crying. “Don’t talk like that in front of the boy! I’m pulling over, and you’re going to let him out!”
“Do as she says,” Edison grated, “or I’ll say you gave me the shiner, too. Kept me for days.”
Mr. Fussel was pale. For a moment he looked as though he might hit Kootie again; then he disappeared behind the rear seat and began clanking around among some metal objects. When he reappeared he was peeling a strip oh a silvery roll of duct tape.
A sudden intrusive vision: two stark figures strapped into chairs with duct tape, eye sockets bloody and empty…
Edison was blown aside in Kootie’s mind as the boy screamed with all the force of his aching lungs, clenching his fists and his eyes and whipping his head back and forth, dimly aware of the minivan slewing as the noise battered the carpeted interior—but the strip of tape scraped in between Kootie’s jaws and then more tape was being wound roughly around the back of his head, over his chin, around his bucking head again and over his upper lip.
Kootie was breathing whistlingly, messily, through his nose. He heard tape rip, and then Mr. Fussel was taping Kootie’s elbows and forearms to the seat belt.
Against the tape that his teeth were grinding at, Kootie was grunting and huffing, and after two or three blind, impacted seconds he realized that his lips and tongue were trying to form words; they couldn’t, around the tape, but he could feel what his mouth was trying to say:
Stop it! Stop it! Listen to me, boy! You might die even if you calm down and stay alert watch for a chance to run, but you’ll certainly die if you keep thrashing and screaming like a big baby! Come on, son, be a man!
Kootie let the mania carry him for one more second, howling out of him to swamp Edison’s words in a torrent of unreasoning noise; finally the muffled scream wobbled away to silence, leaving his lungs empty and aching. He raised his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, held it for a moment, and then let them slump back down—and the panic fell away from him, leaving him almost calm, though the pounding of his heart was visibly twitching his shirt collar.
Kootie was motionless now, but as tense as a flexed fencing foil. He told himself that Edison was right; he had to stay alert. Nobody was going to kill him right here in these people’s minivan; eventually someone would have to cut him free of this seat, and he could pretend to be asleep when they did, and then jump for freedom in the instant that the tape was cut.
He was in control of himself again, coldly and deeply angry at the Fussels and already ashamed at having gone to pieces in front of them.
And so he was surprised when he began weeping. His head jerked down and he was wailing “Hoo-hoo-hoo” behind the tape, on and on, even though he could feel drool moving toward the corner of his distended mouth.
“For…God’s sake, William,” said Mrs. Fussel in a shrill monotone. “Have you gone crazy? You can’t—”
“Pull over,” the man said, blundering back up toward the front of the van. “I’ll drive. This is the kid. El, it’s Koot Hoomie Parganas and he’s obviously an escaped nut! They’ll put him back in restraints as soon as we turn him over to them! I’ll…bite my arm, and say he did it. Or better, we’ll buy a cheap knife, and I’ll cut myself. He’s dangerous, we had to tape him up. And it’s twenty thousand goddamn dollars.”
Kootie kept up his hoo-hooing, and did it louder when Mrs. Fussel turned the wheel to the right to pull over; and then he felt his drooling mouth try to grin around the tape as the three of them were jolted by the right front tire going up over the curb. Edison’s enjoying this, Kootie thought.
Mr. Fussel slapped him across the face—it didn’t sting much this time, through the tape. “Shut up or I’ll run a loop of tape over your nose,” the man whispered.
Edison winked Kootie’s good eye at Mr. Fussel. Kootie hoped Edison knew what he was doing here.
The Fussels found a place to park in a lot somewhere—the windshield faced a close cinder-block wall so that no passersby would see the bound and gagged boy in the back of the minivan—and then Mr. Fussel picked some quarters out of a dish on the console and climbed out, locking the passenger door behind him.
After several seconds of no sound but the quiet burr of the idling engine, Mrs. Fussel turned around in the drivers seat.
“He’s a nice man,” she said. Kootie could almost believe she was talking to herself. “We want to have children ourselves.”
Kootie stared at the floor, afraid Edison would give her a sardonic look.
“Neither of us knows how to deal with…a child with problems,” she went on, “a runaway, a violent runaway. We don’t believe in hitting children. This was like when you have to hit someone who’s drowning, if you want to save them. Can you understand? If you tell the people from the hospital—or wherever it is that you live—if you tell them Bill hit you, we’ll have to tell them why he hit you, won’t we? Trying to bite, and yelling obscenities. That means nasty words,” she explained earnestly.
Kootie forgot not to stare at her.
“Your parents were murdered,” she said.
He nodded expressionlessly.
“Oh, good! That you knew it, I mean, that I wasn’t breaking the news to you. And I guess someone hit you in the eye. You’ve had a bad time, but I want you to realize that today really is the first day of your, of the rest of your—wait, you were living at home, weren’t you? The story in the paper said that. You weren’t in a hospital. Who’s put up this reward for you?”
Kootie widened his eyes at her.
“Relatives?”
Kootie shook his head, slowly.
“You don’t think it was the people that murdered your parents, do you?”
Kootie nodded furiously. “Mm-hmmm,” he grunted.