Dismember

ignition or a flooded engine. He looked at Libby. She handed him the drill and the chisel, kept the Dremel and the hammer for herself.

“Ready?”

She unbuckled her seatbelt and nodded. Mike let himself out of his own harness and said, “We need to split up. You go in the back, I’ll take the front. If one of us runs into the asshole, at least the other will be able to get to Trevor.”

“And the other boy,” she said.

Mike nodded. “And him.”

They got out of the car, stood on either side of the rumbling engine. Mike motioned for her to follow the driveway to the back of the house and started for the front.

“Mike,” she said.

He turned to her.

“Good luck.”

He smiled. “You, too.”

They turned from each other then, clutching their poor excuses for weaponry, and went their separate ways.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The second trip across the ceiling was better than the first had been. Trevor knew which joists to avoid, which were extra bowed or twisted, and although he encountered just as much of the spider-webby yellow stuff, it seemed less itchy. Maybe he’d gotten used to it the way he got used to his bathwater when it was too hot, or maybe he was moving too fast for the stuff to catch him. He’d practically crept along the crawlspace his first time through. Now, he hustled.

The other side of the house seemed to come up awfully fast. Could the place have shrunk since the last time he’d been here? In the dark, it took him a minute to find the hole he’d kicked for himself earlier, but it was still there. Of course it was still there. Ceilings didn’t grow back like cut skin, silly.

Trevor lowered himself through the hole, hung from the same joist he had the last time and kicked out for the top of the fridge. His feet found the slick surface, and he dropped.

And dropped.

He landed not on the top of the fridge, but on the pile of ceiling on the floor six feet below, and not on his feet, but on his butt. Trevor’s bottom and back throbbed. He saw blurry red light and wondered if his brain was bleeding. The broken pieces of ceiling had softened his fall a little, but not enough to save him from the terrible pain sneaking up into his shoulders and neck. He felt like he’d just been spanked with a bulldozer.

He heard a squeak and a groan from somewhere close, maybe in the living room. The bad man, he was sure, but he wouldn’t wait to see. Trevor hopped to his feet and ran to the back door as fast as his aching heinie would allow. If he’d been the bad man, he’d have locked the back door just in case he, Trevor, got loose again, but the man must not have been worrying about that, because the door opened wide.

Trevor escaped the house for the second time that night. He was about to head for the trees again, a different section of woods than he’d gone into last time, when he ran into the woman hurrying around the corner of the house.

And not just any woman.

His mommy.

Hank woke to the sound of something exploding. Or so he thought. Maybe he’d been dreaming about war or mail bombs or the Fourth of July. There was no smell of smoke and no fire as far as he could tell, but the sound had come from nearby.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. They adjusted to the low light in their usual way, as if they’d been designed for nothing else.

The back door slammed, and he knew at once what had happened. The boy. Davy. He didn’t understand how the kid kept getting out of the room. It was goddamn locked. He was sure of it.

He stood up to go after the boy but then heard another sound, something softer and continuous, something coming from outside the house and sounding a little like a purring kitten.

Must not have used enough sunscreen, he thought and grinned.

Except it wasn’t a cat outside, it was something else: an engine.

He heard a creak on the front porch and stood very still, listening.

Another creak.

The boy could wait. Hank hurried out of the living room and down the hall. The thing he needed now was still in the bedroom, leaning against the bloody wall.

Mike crept to the front door and tried the knob.

Locked.

Cobwebs and dust filled the little stoop, as if no one had used the front entrance in years. In fact, the whole place looked abandoned, unoccupied for months, years. Rustic wasn’t the word for it, because rustic implied quaintness. This place was a shack.

He guessed he could turn around and search for an open window, but that might be fruitless. For all he knew, the kidnapper had the whole place boarded shut from the inside like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Mike thought about trying to pry open the door with the chisel. He’d never used the tool in such a way, had never broken into a house at all, for that matter, but he guessed it might work. The chisel was really more of a pry bar anyway. He knelt down to examine the knob.

It was a cheap thing, hardly more secure looking than a closet doorknob. Mike thought he just about could have ripped it loose with his bare hands. He brought the chisel up to the plate between the door and the jamb, wiggling it in until it would go no farther and then shoving on it.

The door flew open, and for a second he thought he must have had some magic breaking-and-entering ability, but then a man came rushing through the opening. The kidnapper. He was carrying a sword, and he was screaming.

“Mommy!” Trevor ran to her and wrapped himself around her neck so tight he might as well have been a scarf.

Libby swept him into her arms, careful not to gouge him with the tools in her hands, and slathered his face with her tears and her kisses.

From the other side of the house, Libby heard a pair of screams. She put Trevor down and said, “The other boy, is he inside?”

Trevor nodded. “And the doggy, too. We have to save them. Where’s Daddy?”

Without answering, Libby took Trevor’s hand and led him back into the house, still sniffling. “Where are they?”

Trevor stepped ahead of her and said, “I’ll show you.”

It was a dark night, and although Libby had managed to make her way around the house without falling flat on her face, she was totally blind inside. Trevor seemed to know where to go, but he moved very slowly, maybe with his free hand out in front of him like a blind man, obviously not familiar enough with the layout of the house to navigate sightlessly.

She heard a clang from the front yard and tried to hurry Trevor along. She banged her hip into a wall and heard Trevor bump into another wall beside her. She let go of his hand and felt around the area long enough to realize they’d reached the head of a hallway.

“Look for a light switch,” she told Trevor. “Feel along the walls.”

As it turned out, she found the switch herself. The light in the hallway was a single bare bulb overhead, not much brighter than a flickering candle but enough to see by.