The three of us finally looked like a family.
Pruitt
CHAPTER 16
The first thing Lane Kelly saw when he woke up was me standing at the foot of the bed. The room was dark except for the faint green light coming from the alarm clock on the table by his head. He’d opened his eyes to the sound of me tapping the Louisville Slugger’s barrel against the footboard. His wife lifted her head from the pillow and stared out into the darkness.
“Get up.” Neither of them moved, as if they hoped that lying still would make me disappear. The bat tapped the footboard again. “Get up.”
In the green glow, I watched Kelly’s hand feel around for the pistol he’d left sitting beside the alarm clock. He didn’t know that while he was sleeping the room had already been cleared, the gun found and moved to the dresser behind me, just like he didn’t know that a stranger had been in his house for twenty minutes, moving from room to room after coming through the front door with one of their spare keys. I reached into the darkness for the pistol. My thumb cocked the hammer. “No use looking for that gun. It’s right here.”
Kelly’s hand froze when he realized what he’d heard, and then it lifted up toward the lamp. “No lights,” I said. His hand kept moving, and I set the pistol back on the dresser and closed both hands around my bat. The lamp on the table clicked on just as I was in midswing. The bulb exploded with a pop and the base of the lamp shattered against the wall. His wife screamed in the one second that light filled the room before it fell into darkness again.
My eyes readjusted after the blast of light as Kelly’s face and shoulders set themselves off in blurred edges. The bat came to rest barrel down against his neck, pinning him to the bed, his Adam’s apple sending a vibration through the wood when he swallowed. His wife whimpered beside him, the sheets rustling as her hand searched the bed, reaching out for him. I slid the barrel of the bat from his neck to his chest, pushing the covers off him and his wife and down toward the foot of the bed until reaching the footboard. “Both of you. Get up. Now.”
The inside of the house was pitch black as Lane Kelly and his wife inched down the hallway in front of me, their fingertips tracing the wall, grazing both the framed photographs as well as the empty frame whose picture was still folded and tucked inside my glove compartment along with the picture of Wade Chesterfield’s kid.
Their back door was newly repaired, and it squeaked when Kelly pulled it toward him. His wife stumbled when she stepped out onto the deck, and she fell to her knees and stayed that way, crying, her hands covering her eyes. He bent down and whispered to her, and then he helped her to her feet and down the steps into the grass.
Neither of them seemed surprised to find that the door to the garage was unlocked or that the blinding construction lights had been turned on and pulled into a circle with a folding chair in the center. It wasn’t until Kelly was sitting in the chair in that bright light with his wrists bound together that he thought to ask a single question. “What do you want?”
His wife was also sitting in a chair somewhere in the dark in front of him, just far enough outside the light that he couldn’t see her. I’d already fastened her wrists behind her back, and her ankles were now being duct-taped to a chair just like the one he was sitting in. “Who are you?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She was crying and trying to see my eyes through my sunglasses where I knelt at her feet, my hands tearing strips of duct tape from the roll. Her short white gown left her legs exposed.
“Are you going to hurt us?” she asked.
“That depends.”
“On what?” Kelly asked behind me.
“On what you know.” I used my teeth to tear off a long piece of tape that wrapped twice around his wife’s head, covering her mouth. She screamed into it.
“If you hurt her I’ll kill you,” Kelly said.
“You shouldn’t be worried about her.”
He wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of white jockeys, and his stomach sagged slightly over his waist. In the bright light, both his underwear and his skin were whiter than they should’ve been. An industrial table saw sat eye level with him in the center of the lights. He stared past it in the direction my voice had come from, and then his eyes focused on the saw as if he’d never seen it before.
But his wife must have seen it before, and she must’ve been thinking about what she’d seen it do, because she began to grunt and toss her head from side to side, rocking her chair back and forth off the concrete floor. Kelly looked in her direction and called out, “Honey! It’s okay!” She either didn’t hear him or didn’t believe him, because she didn’t stop rocking. “If you hurt her-”
“Stop talking and listen.” My shadow fell across him, blotting out the light. “Do you know why this is happening?”
“The money?”
“Yes. This is definitely about the money.”
“Let her go, and I’ll talk.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t know anything,” he said.
“You haven’t been asked any questions yet.”
“I saw Wade take it. That’s all.”
“See? You do know something.” I’d taken off my batting gloves earlier to string the zip ties and tear off pieces of duct tape, but my right hand found them in my back pocket and slid them on before removing the safety guard from the saw. Kelly’s eyes followed my gloved hand while it moved, but his eyes stayed on the blade once it was exposed.
“I don’t know anything,” he said again. “I swear.” His voice had changed, gone higher, more desperate.
“How much was it?”
“How much what?”
“How much did he take?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A lot. Couple hundred thousand-maybe more. It was too much to count.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I swear. I have no idea.”
“You need to have a better answer than that.” When the saw turned on, a sharp, guttural whine came from the darkness behind me and immediately melded with the scream of the blade until the two sounds were indistinguishable. My fingers closed around Kelly’s forearms and pulled him out of his chair. His wrists slammed down on the bridge of the saw. “Wait!” he screamed. “Wait!” His hands clenched themselves in tight fists, but they weren’t strong enough to keep his right index finger from being pried loose and pushed toward the blade. “Charleston!” he screamed.
My hands let go of his wrists, and Kelly fell back against the chair, knocking it over onto its side. The saw powered down and the sound of it faded away.
“What about Charleston?” He laid at my feet in the fetal position, his right hand tucked against his stomach as if it were already missing. He wasn’t going to answer, so my hand closed around his face and squeezed his cheeks together before the question came again. “What about Charleston?”
“His mom,” he finally said. When my hand let go of his face his head bounced against the concrete floor.
“Is that where he’s going?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just can’t think of anything else. Please.”
The sounds of his wife’s crying came out of the darkness, and he raised his head and looked toward her. The saw turned on again, and the sound of it sucked the air out of the garage. When he heard it, Kelly closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest, but he opened them when he felt my hands on his again, and he screamed when his wrists hit the saw’s bridge.
My mouth was right by his ear, the wind from the saw blowing across my face. “Is that where he’s going?” But if he answered, I didn’t hear him.