Dave and the door. Only then did he stand. The boy walked toward the broken door, and Dave watched him closely, especially his hands, still expecting him to pick up a screwdriver or a hammer or a saw. When the boy ran instead, Dave sighed and shook his head.
This was his fault. All of it. Zach sat against the outside of the garage, so chilly now his teeth actually chattered.
Obviously, his crappy line in the dirt hadn’t been enough. He’d gotten another kid kidnapped and the kid’s dad maybe killed because he hadn’t been clever enough to think of some other way to warn them. Whatever happened to the two of them, and whatever happened to Zach himself, would be as much his own fault as the psycho’s.
He pulled at a tuft of weeds growing along the garage’s foundation; something pricked his finger, a thorn or some sort of insect, he assumed. Did bees come out at night? He didn’t know. He looked at his finger, saw a droplet of blood, and sucked it clean before he pawed through the area again, more carefully this time.
If he’d caught a thorn or a rock, it probably wouldn’t matter, but the prick could also have been a spider’s bite. Those things could be dangerous, deadly. Not that he guessed he could do much about it anyway. It wasn’t like Crazy Dave would bring him to the hospital. But maybe, if it had been a spider, he could at least try to suck out the poison. Could you do that with spiders, or was it only snakes?
He pushed aside the weeds he’d picked at. Beneath them, a long, sharp piece of metal pointed up at the sky. A nail. He tugged at it and ended up with a two-foot chunk of wood. Someone had pounded the nail through the wood at an angle, and the wood itself was a weird size, maybe excess cut from the rafters when the garage was built and lost here among the grass and weeds ever since. Who knew?
Zach swung the piece of scrap material through the air. It whizzed, and though it seemed a little flimsy, he thought it would last for at least one good, solid swing. Maybe that was all he’d need.
He heard movement inside and hurried to his feet. He was a natural righty, but he couldn’t swing right handed without moving across the open doorway, which might ruin whatever chance he had. Scrambling, he got into position on his side of the door and raised the club over his shoulder. Never in his life could he have hit a baseball like this, but tonight’s baseball would be six feet tall with a head almost the size of home plate, and if he couldn’t manage that, he might as well take the kidnapper’s knife and kill himself. He tensed his arms. When the guy came running through the doorway, he swung his hardest, swung so hard it tingled all the way to his shoulders.
Except it wasn’t the guy.
The other boy stumbled forward and came to rest on his back in the grass, the stripe across his forehead bright red and already bubbling blood. The stick in Zach’s hands had broken clean in half.
Dave saw what happened but thought for a second the kid must have hit his head on the doorjamb, that maybe he hadn’t seen where he was going and walked face first into the splinters of ruined wood Dave had left when kicking his way in.
He followed Davy out of the garage and saw Georgie standing there with the broken piece of wood in his hand; he didn’t know whether to clout the boy or shake his hand. He settled on neither.
The mark on Davy’s head was so well defined that Dave could almost see the wood grain stamped into his skin. It bled, but a little pressure would stop it up easily. He yanked at the sleeve of his shirt three times before it ripped free, then pulled it down over his hand and folded it into a small rectangle.
“Georgie.”
The boy stared, mouth opened so wide Dave thought he could have stuck both fists inside.
Dave pressed the pad to Davy’s head and waited for a response. None came, and he picked up the smaller boy and cradled him to his chest. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said. “Go get the dog from wherever you tied him. We’re going home.”
Georgie didn’t move until Dave took a step toward him; then he turned and ran through the grass, pine needles, and fallen leaves.
Dave held the boy to him with his still-sleeved arm and kept the compress tight against his head with the other.
Davy, his Davy.
And only then did Dave realize what had happened. He’d gotten Davy, he’d replaced himself. His name had been Davy, and then Dave, but now it was neither. He was Hank Abbott. And he was Daddy.
Fifteen minutes after the intruder absconded with his son, Mike Pullman jerked on the bedroom floor and opened his eyes.
The lower portion of his face felt raw and broken, like he’d tried to eat a land mine. He reached for it, his finger pulling back once before he’d made contact and then a second time after a poke so gentle he wouldn’t normally have felt it at all.
Tonight, the soft touch was like a full-body tackle without pads or a helmet. He winced, and the movement of his head hurt him that much more.
In addition to the pain in his face, his hip throbbed where the lunatic had stuck him.
He tried to scream his son’s name despite the agony in his jaw and cheeks but couldn’t get past the first syllable. He flipped onto his hands and knees and finally wobbled to his feet.
He didn’t normally keep a phone in the bedroom, but he’d brought the cordless in from the living room the previous night while making pick-up plans with Libby; it was still here, lying on the bedside table and blinking red.
Low battery.
He tried walking to it, ended up going about forty-five degrees in the wrong direction, and stopped. On the second try, he made it to the phone.
He pressed the talk button with one hand and grabbed his hip with the other. He brought the phone close enough to hear the dial tone but not close enough that it made contact with his face.
Had to hurry before the battery went out on him. He dialed 9-1-1, a service they’d only recently gotten out here in the boonies, which was good because he had no idea what the local number for the sheriff’s department might be and didn’t want to have to bother with the operator. He waited for someone to pick up. Waited. And waited.
He collapsed on the bed before the woman’s voice came onto the line and dropped the phone on the bedspread beside him.
“—emergency—”
It was the only word he heard. “Hemp,” he said and then tried again: “Heelmp ee. Help—”
The phone had gone dead. Mike thought he might as well have joined it.
PART III
RESCUE
TWENTY-THREE
Libby had scrubbed her face, ears, and hands three times before stripping, draining an inch or two of water, and lowering herself into the tub. She could have cleaned herself in the bathwater just as easily as in the sink, but she hadn’t wanted to soil it. Washing off the creep’s saliva and then lounging in the water with it floating all around her naked body would have been like taking a bath in a giant, unflushed toilet. Maybe
