NINE
The boys said they wanted to see what he had in the trunk, like they were cops. He opened the case and pointed to each of the seven knives. The skinning knife, the work knife, the Tanto knife . . . They were each five inches long with wooden handles that gleamed.
“Know anything about knives?” Victor asked.
The boys stood on either side of him. They made stupid noises and laughed like they were retarded. They weren’t, though, they were just kids. Smelled like fire and bourbon.
Victor pointed to one of the knives. “See that? It’s the gut hook. Jam the knife in and drag that hook across. Spill the insides. Yank them out if needed.”
“That’s fucked,” one of them said. He was slightly taller than his buddy but just as skinny.
Victor removed a felt case from his bag. He unfurled it in his hand. The eight-inch knife sloped to a curved point. That made it easier for skinning an animal without hacking up the meat. The straight side was serrated. That was for splitting through ribcages. Just above the handle, VD had been carved into the metal.
“You’re like some sicko who lives in the woods?” one kid asked.
Victor covered the knife, placed it back in the bag. In there was also the small curved axe and the bone saw.
“You think it’s smart to talk to strangers like that?” Victor asked. “Especially one with so many knives?”
“Can I touch them?” the kid asked and his buddy laughed.
“No.”
“Why not?” The kids stepped closer.
“No one touches them.”
“Uh, okay,” the second kid said in a stupid voice.
“What you got in that bag?” the taller one asked. “Drugs and shit?”
“I don’t do drugs.”
The boys laughed. “Yeah, right.”
The kid stepped closer and reached toward the bag. The other kid was almost at Victor’s back. Victor brought his fist up out of the bag and cracked the bottom of the kid’s jaw. His head snapped back, his eyes rolled lazily, and he collapsed to his knees. He fell forward onto the pavement with a splat. Victor turned to the other kid. Blood dripped from the stainless steel points of the brass knuckles.
The kid stepped back several feet and was running away before Victor could say something really clever and witty. Not that he had anything in mind.
The kid on the ground moaned. His feet rocked side to side on the toes of his sneakers.
Victor grabbed one of the many towels in his trunk and cleaned the blood from the black brass knuckles.
TEN
Mercy had never seen a fight before. This didn’t qualify as much of a fight but it was the closest physical violence she’d ever experienced. When the kid hit the ground, she thought he was being stupid or something but then the trunk lid swung down and the man from the bookstore stood there massaging his right hand. The kid was on on the ground and her first thought was that he was dead.
“Daddy . . .”
But the kid’s feet were moving, not much, but enough.
“What?”
“That guy . . .”
But he was staring at her. Standing at the back of his car, some kid on the ground at his feet, the man smiled. It should have been repulsive. She should have started yelling that there was a crazy guy outside who’d just pummeled some kid, should have dialed 9-1-1.
He raised his hand in a half-wave and she returned it. His smile was big. Then he was in his car and pulling out of the parking lot, headed down the road toward Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
“What, baby,” her father was saying. “What is it?”
When had he last called her baby? Had she been ten? Younger? Right around the last time she’d called him daddy.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a guy I recognized from the bookstore.”
“Oh, really?”
She blushed. She couldn’t help it. “I don’t even know his name.”
“Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s been following you around.”
That creeped her out some but it also intrigued her. Maybe the guy wasn’t as weird as he seemed. Perhaps he was shy and scared to make the first move. She could appreciate that. A little healthy stalking wasn’t the worst thing for a girl, was it?
The violence, however, helped her keep the warm flooding sensation from fully seizing her. The man obviously had problems, an anger issue, at least. The poor kid was still on the ground. His legs and arms flopped around like the last throes of a fish out of water. The guy had done some damage. And with only his fist, just one punch.
The kid had been an asshole. He’d deserved it.
When she was heading to the bathroom and spotted the man, had something passed between them, something she hadn’t fully realized at that moment? The man sensed how upset she was and, knowing where she was seated, assumed it was because of those stupid boys. It had been, too, at least partly.
So, this weird guy who watched her from around the corner of bookshelves had punished the kids, redeemed her honor.
That was stupid and yet, she kind of liked the idea. What girl wouldn’t? It was like the set up for some romance novel. The next time he came into Rune Books, she would casually go up to him, ask how his hand was and see what happened from there.
“You okay?” Dad asked.
“Yes.” For the first time in a long time she meant it too.
ELEVEN
Victor drove to the spot near the abandoned garbage trucks. The place had once been the home for a full- service garbage company called Murray Waste Co., but it had closed down a long time ago. Victor had been coming here for fifteen years. Since the day he’d killed the family cat and his mother threatened to send him to a Special Facility.
The cat’s neck had snapped like breaking a popsicle stick.
He ran to this place and stayed for six hours. His mother did not report him.
He had been inside the abandoned building several times but there wasn’t anything in there except for rickety office furniture, moldy folders with faded papers in them, and lots of cockroaches. Especially in the basement.
Teenagers frequented this place as well because the building sat almost on top of Route 51 and the lot opened up behind it. Two rusted heaps that had once been garbage trucks sat at the far corner by a warped mesh fence like long-forgotten sentries. There was enough room for a little league field. Occasionally, kids had drinking parties back here. Victor sometimes watched them from the woods behind the fence. One night, a girl had danced in the crisscrossing beams of the car lights and removed layer after layer of clothes. She’d been drinking Wild Turkey from the bottle.
Kids had busted most of the windows in the building and the structure had even started sinking like it was slowly lowering into its own grave. A large red sign on the front read CONDEMNED KEEP OUT. In the back, multi- colored graffiti crisscrossed over the peeling siding like convoluted spiderwebs. Across the back door that had once been used as an Employees Only entrance, the words FAGGATS EAT SHIT lived forever in gradually fading red paint. Someone had smeared his hand through the word SHIT, so the letters slipped down the wall beneath cartoon-sized fingers.
Victor ate his tuna fish sandwich and drank from his travel jug of water. The water was from a stream not
