“I’ll be sure to tell him that. And thank you, Jake. I appreciate it.”
“Next time the dog is on me. With extra kraut.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
A moment after disconnection the phone slips from my nerveless hands. With a deft move the man in the mask retrieves it, checks to make sure I’ve really disconnected.
“I’m impressed,” he says. “You’re good. Even I believed you.”
The flood of relief makes tears come, but I fight it. Determined never to weep again in the presence of this vile man. This monster in my house, sitting in my chair, holding my phone. Holding my son.
“You should know that every call to this address is being monitored,” he says. “So if you tried something silly, I’d be informed. If, for instance, your friend Jake had said he’d like to drop by for a little post-game nooky with the widow Bickford, I’d know about it.”
Nooky. A word so sly and ugly that it makes my jaw clench. I’m not a prude, but certain words have that effect on me. Get over it, Kate, I urge myself. Do not react. Don’t allow him any more control over you than he’s already got.
“As you’ve no doubt already figured out, we can’t transfer funds until your bank opens tomorrow morning. What I have in mind requires a personal appearance from the account holder. You, Kate. All prettied up and looking happy and relaxed because you’re buying a condo in the Cayman Islands. So pretty that soon I want you to get some sleep, Kate. Think you can do that?”
I shake my head no. Is he crazy? Sleep? Not a possibility. “My son. You said—”
“Shh.”
I shut up.
“Better. You had a little relapse there, speaking without permission. You’re forgiven this time, Kate. I’m in a forgiving mood because you did so well with the phone call. Tell you what, before beddy-bye we’ll call your kid, okay?”
I nod furiously.
“Before we get to that, I need to do a little walking around in your beautiful house. Check out a few things. So I’m going to cuff your ankles. Put your feet out in front of you and hold them together.”
I do as instructed and a moment later my ankles are cuffed together with a thick, white plastic strap.
“Can’t be released,” he informs me as he straightens up. “All it can do is tighten. If you don’t want the circulation cut off to your feet, you’ll leave it alone. I’m going to be out of the room for five minutes, tops. If you leave the chair, I’ll know and you’ll be punished. Very unpleasantly.”
In a blink, he’s gone. Out of my line of vision and prowling somewhere in my house. When I realize what it might mean, that the man in the mask has pressing business elsewhere in my house, my heart starts to race. Hope rings through my body like a gong. Tommy is right here in the house! He’s been here all along! He’s in the next room, unconscious but alive!
I leap to my feet, fall over with a thump. Facedown on my own plush carpet, I think, Don’t be a fool, he’ll hear you. He’ll punish you, and worse, he may punish Tommy.
Cautiously, silently, I get up on my knees and begin to crawl. A kind of bunny hop because I can’t move my feet. Hop, hop, hop. Dragging myself along with my hands. Making a line straight for the door where the man in the mask vanished. Leading me to my son.
Tommy is in his own bedroom, I’m thinking. Yes, yes! He was there all along and I never looked! Must be there, why else would the man leave me alone? Why else would he say, “I want to check out a few things”? Couldn’t be anything that important, with one exception. My precious son.
Even before I get out of the family room, I’m already thinking about how to get up the stairs. Should I make a diversion for the kitchen, find a knife, cut the ankle cuffs? No time. Follow the man to Tommy’s room. See with your own eyes that your son is alive and safe in his own bed.
I crawl to the stairs and prepare to ascend. My baby is up there in his own bedroom and he’s in danger, terrible danger.
I make it as far as the first step. That’s when the man in the mask emerges from the downstairs bathroom with his pants around his knees.
“Son of a bitch!” he exclaims, hastily yanking up and zipping his fly. “Can’t a man take a piss around here?”
Then he’s on me in a heartbeat, boot stomping into my back, forcing me down off the bottom stair, grinding me into the floor, forcing the air from my lungs.
Breathing heavily, he towers over me as I groan and roll over, trapped between his legs. “Kate, Kate,” he says with a sigh of disappointment. “What were you thinking?”
“Tommy!” I blubber. “In his room. You were g-going to ch-check on him!”
And then I weep convulsively. As I did the morning after Ted died, when I awoke thinking he was in the bed next to me. The awful disappointment crashing through me, rending me to pieces, dissolving me in tears and phlegm and shuddering misery.
The man in the ski mask kneels next to me, making soothing noises, stroking my back as it convulses with grief. “Shh, shh. Go on, let it all out. Do you good to cry, Mrs. Bickford. You thought your boy was here, in the house, huh? So you went to him. That was really, really stupid. We never keep the package in the target house, Mrs. Bickford. We’re very organized. We have a method.” He strokes my forehead, his rough thumb tenderly tracing the imprint of the gun barrel. “Do you understand? Am I getting through to you?” He pauses, dark eyes staring at me from out of the mask. “You may answer.”
“Y-yes.”
“Good. Now you must be punished.”
He reaches behind his back. Something glitters in his hand. Then he plunges a needle into my shoulder. Blackness flows from the needle, making my arm numb, oddly warm. A pulse of warmth carries the numbness into my head. Before I can organize my thoughts and fight it, I’m swirling around a drain, a dark hole in the center of my brain, going, going.
Gone.
7 where’s jesse?
Cutter uses a key and lets himself into the foyer of his boxy little house. Only five rooms, but then he’s never been a man who needed a lot of space. Hell, he practically lived in a Hummer once, for five very long weeks. Calmly but quickly he punches in the disable code to the security system—real state-of-the-art, unlike poor Mrs. Bickford’s pathetic excuse for a security system. An item he’d liberated from the depot at Fort Dix, last time he passed through. Actually on the way out the door. Sorry to see you go, Captain Cutter. Here’s your hat, there’s the door.
Assholes. After all he’d done for the army, for the country, for the unit. Risking his life, time and again. Shedding blood for the so-called greater good. One small screwup and he was no longer wanted, no longer a valuable member of the team. Should have demanded a court martial instead of letting them shoo him away with an honorable discharge, but he’d had other things on his mind at the time.
“Lyla? I’m home.”
He hears her slippered feet shuffling on the linoleum as she wanders in from the kitchen, wringing her hands. Actually wringing her hands, as if trying to remove something from her skin. Invisible blood, perhaps, like Lady Macbeth?
The idea makes him shudder.
“Where’s Jesse?” she asks, her gorgeous gray eyes twitching. Not really focusing on her husband, but aware of his sudden presence in the house. “I looked in his bedroom. I looked in the basement. I looked everywhere. Where’s my son?”
“He’s away for a little while. You know that.”
Lyla hasn’t been eating lately and her weight, always petite, has dropped to less than a hundred and fifteen pounds, but her grip on his arm is unnaturally strong. Fierce with her anxiety. “Jesse needs his mother. How could you forget that?”