He slapped me. Open palm, but a hard physical blow. My head rocked back. The pain was as sudden and astonishing. For a moment I couldn’t see anything.
“Tell us what’s happening out there,” he said, “unless you want to come along with us.”
I tasted blood, like salty copper. “Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t know.” Which, at this point, was absolutely true.
“Fire truck,” the guy at the window said.
Tom turned. “What?”
“Looks like a fire truck up at the road.”
I could see it now from where I sat, a big fire-and-rescue vehicle, guys in yellow slickers climbing out of it. But no Toyota, no actual fire.
It wasn’t hard to imagine what had gone wrong. As soon as the phones came to life, Trev must have called Damian or taken a call from him. Trev would have said the rescue was underway. And Damian would have told him there was no rescue, that I had been told to drop it, that the entire thing was a completely unauthorized clusterfuck, to be cancelled immediately, full stop.
“Help,” Geddy said.
I guess it was the sight of the fire truck that set him off. Or the sight of the blood on my face. His voice was small at first, as if he couldn’t collect enough breath to squeeze out the word. His second try was better, more like a bark: “Help!” Then the panic welled up in him and took a grip on his lungs: “HELP! HELP!”
Not that anyone outside could hear him.
He leaped off the sofa. The nearest Het tried to put a hand on him, but Geddy bulled past him. He was halfway to the door when the guard by the window tackled him and pinned him to the floor. Geddy kept shouting, though the sound was strangled now by the pressure of the guard’s forearm on his throat.
I considered the window. Murky old glass. Maybe I could break it. And maybe that would attract the attention of the firefighters up the lane. But Tom had taken his pistol from under his belt, and he put it to my head. “Sit,” he said crisply. “Everybody else, out back and into the cars now. And secure that hostage!”
Three more Hets came down the stairs and headed for the rear of the house where the back door opened through the kitchen. The guard from the front window rolled Geddy over and tried to haul him to his feet. They were too busy to see what I saw:
The Toyota, at last, fishtailing around the rear of the Onenia fire truck, kicking up a plume of gravel as it steered wildly for the farmhouse.
“Two hostages,” the Het guy said. “Not your lucky day, Adam. Stand up.”
I stood up.
The car gained speed. I couldn’t make out who was behind the wheel, but it wasn’t Trevor Holst. Somebody smaller, somebody without the swirl of facial tattoos. The Het guy saw me looking and followed my gaze. “Shit!” he said.
The Toyota sped up as if the driver had no intention of stopping. And maybe she didn’t. The car was close enough now that I recognized the halo of curled hair behind the steering wheel. It was Geddy’s girlfriend, Rebecca.
The Het guy raised his pistol as if he meant to shoot through the window, and I grabbed his arm and put my weight on it, and we both fell to the floor. I felt more than saw what happened next. The car struck the farmhouse’s ancient porch, bounced up the wooden risers, and toppled a wooden pillar; the roof of the porch collapsed around it, shattering the front window and filling the room with billows of plaster dust and shards of rotted wood.
The Het guy struggled under me, eyes wide with rage and frustration. I felt him trying to raise his right arm and I let my knee bear down on his elbow until he screamed. Through the dust I saw Geddy break free of his captor and lunge toward the gap where the window had popped out of its jambs. Glass crunched under his feet. The farmhouse groaned as if the rafters had been stressed to their breaking point, as if the roof might come down around us.
I managed to stand up just as Geddy pushed himself through the empty window frame into the tumbled ruins of the porch. The Toyota was obscured by dust and debris, but Geddy had recognized Rebecca behind the driver’s-side window. He shouted her name. He used his hands to shovel away raw boards and broken lathing.
I looked down at the Het guy, who was trying to get up, but his injured arm wouldn’t cooperate. His face was white with plaster dust, a clown’s face. He met my eyes.
“You dumb fuck,” he said.
Then the room was full of Onenia County paramedics.
Chapter 24
Rebecca spent a night in the county hospital, under observation for the mild concussion she suffered when she drove the car up the farmhouse steps. The detonation of the airbag had left her with a pair of black eyes and a swollen nose worthy of a prizefighter, but she was basically okay. Geddy stayed at her bedside, apart from a brief interview with local police and a few hours’ sleep at my father’s house, until she was released.
I spent the night at the Motel 6. Telecommunications had been fully restored, but no one was returning my calls. Not Amanda, not Damian, not even Trevor Holst. By now, of course, they knew I had lied to them in order to get Geddy released, and I assumed they were working out some kind of appropriate response—whatever that might be. I did manage to get hold of Shannon Handy, but when I identified myself she said, “Uh, sorry, Adam—it’s complicated, I can’t talk,” and hung up.
So I watched the news, local and international. The end of the telecom blackout had produced a flood of footage from India and Pakistan, much of it terrifying. Mumbai had been hit by drone-delivered conventional weapons, not a nuclear device, but the destruction had been brutally widespread. No significant government building had been left untouched. A firestorm that began in the Dharavi slums had killed tens of thousands: the full accounting of the dead would eventually top one million.
Here in Schuyler, there was nothing about the events at the house on Spindevil Road. I guessed the local Taus, or Hets, or both, were well connected enough to shut down any real investigation. Rebecca had told the paramedics she couldn’t remember how she had “lost control” of the car, and the Het owner of the property would have been instructed not to press charges.
In the morning I took a cab to the hospital, shortly before Rebecca was discharged. Geddy told me it was no use calling Mama Laura—neither she nor my father was in a mood to speak to me right now.
In other words, I had no reason to stay in Schuyler. I also had no ride home. The hospital rolled Rebecca to the curb in a completely unnecessary wheelchair, and Geddy helped her into their car. They were driving straight back to Boston. I asked Geddy whether he could drop me at the regional airport.
Rebecca leaned out of the passenger-side seat and said, “You’ll need to take a puddle-jumper to some bigger airport. Why not come with us? Fly out of Logan?”
Geddy nodded vigorously: “Yes, come with us! Come with us, Adam.”
So I said yes. In part because I craved their company, in part because I didn’t want to face the other big question: when I went home, would I have a home to go to?
Rebecca was intermittently groggy from the pain meds she had been given, and Geddy had never been especially happy behind the wheel of a car, so I did most of the driving, which was easy enough, the New York State Thruway to the Massachusetts Turnpike, clear skies and cool weather all the way. Driving provided an excuse for my lapses into silence, during which I contemplated and then tried not to contemplate what I had done.
Geddy chatted with Rebecca whenever she was awake. I had been afraid the events of the weekend had traumatized Geddy, but he spoke about them freely, and though he tensed up when he described how the Hets had surrounded his car and forced him into one of their vehicles, it seemed to have affected him no more or less profoundly than the bullying he had occasionally suffered at the hands of my father. Geddy had always seemed to shrug off those episodes … at least by daylight, though they came back, weightier and more terrifying, in his dreams. Rebecca might have to learn how to deal with his nightmares.