Just After Sunset

didn’t like Pickering, and Pickering’s choice of female companionship? Well guess what, Pickering didn’t like Deke, either! This was nothing but an elaborate practical joke. Pickering would go back across the bridge with the trunk deliberately ajar, that fake blond hair fluttering, and-

But there were smells rising out of the trunk now. They were the smells of shit and blood. Em reached forward and touched the cheek below one of those staring eyes. It was cold, but it was skin. Oh God, it was human skin.

There was a sound behind her. A footstep. She started to turn, and something came down on her head. There was no pain, but brilliant white seemed to leap across the world. Then the world went dark.

5. He looked like he was trying to play creep-mouse with her.

When she woke up, she was duct-taped to a chair in a big kitchen filled with terrible steel objects: sink, fridge, dishwasher, a stove that looked like it belonged in the kitchen of a restaurant. The back of her head was sending long, slow waves of pain toward the front of her head, each one seeming to say Fix this! Fix this!

Standing at the sink was a tall, slender man in khaki shorts and an old Izod golf shirt. The kitchen’s fluorescent fixtures sent down a merciless light, and Em could see the deepening crow’s-foot at the corner of his eye, the smattering of gray along the side of his short power haircut. She put him at about fifty. He was washing his arm in the sink. There appeared to be a puncture wound in it, just below the elbow.

He snapped his head around. There was an animal quickness to him that made her stomach sink. His eyes were of a blue much more vivid than Deke Hollis’s. She saw nothing in them she recognized as sanity, and her heart sank further. On the floor-the same ugly gray as the outside of the house, only tile instead of cement-there was a dark, filmy track about nine inches wide. Em thought it was probably blood. It was very easy to imagine the blond girl’s hair making it as Pickering dragged her through the room by her feet, to some unknown destination.

“You’re awake,” he said. “Good deal. Awesome. Think I wanted to kill her? I didn’t want to kill her. She had a knife in her gosh- damn sock! I pinched her on the arm, that’s all.” He seemed to consider this, and while he did, he blotted the dark, blood-filled gash below his elbow with a wad of paper towels. “Well, also on the tit. But all girls expect that. Or should. It’s called FORE-play. Or in this case, WHORE-play.”

He made quotation marks with the first and second fingers of his hands each time. To Em, he looked like he was trying to play creep-mouse with her. He also looked crazy. In fact, there was no doubt about his state of mind. Thunder crashed overhead, loud as a load of dropped furniture. Em jumped-as well as she could, bound to a kitchen chair-but the man standing by the stainless-steel double-basin sink didn’t glance up at the sound. It was as though he hadn’t heard. His lower lip was thrust out.

“So I took it away from her. And then I lost my head. I admit it. People think I’m Mr. Cool, and I try to live up to that. I do. I try to live up to that. But any man can lose his head. That’s what they don’t realize. Any man. Under the right set of circumstances.”

Rain poured down as if God had pulled the chain up there in His own personal WC.

“Who could reasonably assume you’re here?”

“Lots of people.” This answer came without hesitation.

He was across the room in a flash. Flash was the word. At one moment he was by the sink, at the next beside her and whacking her face hard enough to make white spots explode in front of her eyes. These shot around the room, drawing bright cometary tails after them. Her head snapped to the side. Her hair flew against her cheek, and she felt blood begin to flow into her mouth as her lower lip burst. The inner lining had been cut by her teeth, and deep. Almost all the way through, it felt like. Outside, the rain rushed down. I’m going to die while it’s raining, Em thought. But she didn’t believe it. Maybe no one did, when the deal actually came down.

“Who knows?” He was leaning over, bellowing into her face.

“Lots of people,” she reiterated, and the words came out losh of people because her lower lip was swelling. And she felt blood spilling down her chin in a small stream. Still, her mind wasn’t swelling, in spite of the pain and fear. It knew her one chance at life was making this man believe he’d be caught if he killed her. Of course he would also be caught if he let her go, but she would deal with that later. One nightmare at a time.

“Losh of people!” she said again, defiantly.

He flashed back to the sink and when he returned, he had a knife in his hand. A little one. Very likely the one the dead girl had taken from her sock. He put the tip on Em’s lower eyelid and pulled it down. That was when her bladder let go, all at once, in a rush.

An expression of somehow prissy disgust momentarily tightened Pickering’s face, yet he also seemed delighted. Some part of Em’s mind wondered how any person could hold two such conflicting emotions in his mind at the same time. He took a half step back, but the point of the knife didn’t waver. It still dimpled into her skin, simultaneously pulling down her lower eyelid and pushing her eyeball up gently in its socket.

“Nice,” he said. “Another mess to clean up. Not unexpected, though. No. And like the man said, there’s more room out than there is in. That’s what the man said.” He actually laughed, one quick yip, and then he leaned forward, his vivid blue eyes staring into her hazel ones. “Tell me one person who knows you’re here. Don’t hesitate. Do not hesitate. If you hesitate I’ll know you’re making something up and I’ll lift your eye right out of its socket and flip it into the sink. I can do it. So tell me. Now.”

“Deke Hollis,” she said. It was tattling, bad tattling, but it was also nothing but reflex. She didn’t want to lose her eye.

“Who else?”

No name occurred to her-her mind was a roaring blank-and she believed him when he said hesitating would cost her her left eye. “No one, okay?” she cried. And surely Deke would be enough. Surely one person would be enough, unless he was so crazy that-

He drew the knife away, and although her peripheral vision couldn’t quite pick it up, she felt a tiny seed pearl of blood blooming there. She didn’t care. She was just glad to still have peripheral vision.

“Okay,” Pickering said. “Okay, okay, good, okay.” He walked back to the sink and tossed the little knife into it. She started to be relieved. Then he opened one of the drawers beside the sink and brought out a bigger one: a long, pointed butcher knife.

“Okay.” He came back to her. There was no blood on him that she could see, not even a spot. How was that possible? How long had she been out?

“Okay, okay.” He ran the hand not holding the knife through the short, stupidly expensive tailoring of his hair. It sprang right back into place. “Who’s Deke Hollis?”

“The drawbridge keeper,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, wavering. “We talked about you. That’s why I stopped to look in.” She had a burst of inspiration. “He saw the girl! Your niece, he called her!”

“Yeah, yeah, the girls always go back by boat, that’s all he knows. That’s all he knows in the world. Are people ever nosy! Where’s your car? Answer me now or you get the new special, a breast amputation. Quick but not painless.”

“The Grass Shack!” It was all she could think of to say.

“What’s that?”

“The little conch house at the end of the key. It’s my dad’s.” She had another burst of inspiration. “He knows I’m here!”

“Yeah, yeah.” This didn’t seem to interest Pickering. “Yeah, okay. Right, big-time. Are you saying you live here?”

“Yes…”

He looked down at her shorts, now a darker blue. “Runner, are you?” She didn’t answer this, but Pickering didn’t seem to care. “Yeah, you’re a runner, damn right you are. Look at those legs.” Incredibly, he bowed at the waist-as if meeting royalty-and with a loud smack kissed her left thigh just below the hem of her shorts. When he straightened up, she observed with a sinking heart that the front of his pants were sticking out. Not good.

“You run up, you run back.” He flicked the blade of the butcher knife in an arc, like a conductor with a baton. It was hypnotic. Outside, the rain continued to pour down. It would go on that way for forty minutes, maybe an hour, and then the sun would come back out. Em wondered if she would be alive to see it. She didn’t think so. Yet this was still hard to believe. Impossible, really.

“You run up, you run back. Up and back. Sometimes you pass the time of day with that old man in the straw hat, but you don’t pass it with anyone else.” She was scared, but not too scared to realize he wasn’t talking to her. “Right. Not with anyone else. Because there’s nobody else here. If any of the tree-planting, grass-cutting beaners who work down here saw you on your afternoon run, will they remember? Will they?”

The knife blade ticked back and forth. He eyed the tip, seeming to depend on this for an answer.

“No,” he said. “No, and I’ll tell you why. Because you’re just another rich gringa running her buns off. They’re everywhere. See ’em every day. Health nuts. Have to kick ’em out of your way. If not running, on bikes. Wearing those dumb little potty helmets. Okay? Okay. Say your prayers, Lady Jane, but make it quick. I’m in a hurry. Big, big hurry.”

He raised the knife to his shoulder. She saw his lips tighten down in anticipation of the killing stroke. For Em, the whole world suddenly came clear; everything stood out with exclamatory brilliance. She thought: I’m coming, Amy. And then, absurdly, something she might have heard on ESPN: Be there, baby.

But then he paused. He looked around, exactly as if someone had spoken. “Yeah,” he said. Then: “Yeah?” And then: “Yeah.” There was a Formica-topped island in the middle of the room, for food preparation. He dropped the knife on it with a clatter instead of sticking it into Emily.

He said, “Sit there. I’m not going to kill you. I changed my mind. Man can change his mind. I got nothing from Nicole but a poke in the arm.”

There was a depleted roll of duct tape on the island. He picked it up. A moment later he was kneeling in front of her, the back of his head and the naked nape of his neck exposed and vulnerable. In a better world-a fairer world-she could have laced her hands together and brought them down on that exposed nape, but her hands were bound at the wrists to the chair’s heavy maple arms. Her torso was bound to the back by more duct tape, thick corsets of the stuff at the waist and just below her breasts. Her legs were bound to the chair’s legs at the knees, the upper calves, the lower calves, and the ankles. He had been very thorough.

The legs of the chair were taped to the floor, and now he put on fresh layers, first in front of her, then behind. When he was finished, all the tape was gone. He stood up and put the empty cardboard core on the Formica island. “There,” he said. “Not bad. Okay. All set. You wait here.” He must have found something funny in this, because he cocked his head upward and loosed another of those brief, yapping laughs. “Don’t get bored and run off, okay? I need to go take care of your nosy old friend, and I want to do it while it’s still raining.”

This time he flashed to a door that proved to be a closet. He yanked out a yellow slicker. “Knew this was in here somewhere. Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those mystery facts. Okay, girlfriend, sit tight.” He uttered another of those laughs that sounded like the bark of an angry poodle, and then he was gone.