Vicious

this stretch of the road. I didn’t want to leave you stranded.” He laughed and then shrugged again. “Then again, you could have been sitting in there lighting up a joint for all I knew. I just—I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I passed you by.”

“That’s extremely nice of you,” the man said, with a skeptical sidelong glance.

Jordan took a deep breath and then stepped over to the car. “So—do you live here in Cullen, or are you visiting?”

“Visiting,” the man answered, still guarded.

Jordan nodded a few more times than necessary. “Well, my family—we live in Everett, but we spend a lot of weekends here. We own a cabin down the road a bit.” He feigned interest in the flat tire. “Wow, that’s shot to shit, isn’t it?” Rolling up his sleeves, he picked up the tire wrench. Jordan hoped the man didn’t notice his hand trembling. “I bet the two of us can get this tire changed in less than five minutes.”

The man didn’t respond. He seemed to be watching Jordan’s every move.

With one end of the wrench, Jordan pried the hubcap off the flat tire. His palms were sweating, but he kept a firm grip of the wrench as he started to loosen the lug nuts. “Damn,” he grunted. “These suckers are on here tight—tighter than a bull’s ass in a snowstorm, as my dad likes to say.” He forced a laugh. “Hey, um, you know, you never told me your name—or where you’re visiting from.”

Bent over the flat tire, Jordan wasn’t looking at the man. He just had to go by the tone of his voice. The guy waited a few beats before answering. “My name’s Allen Meeker. I’m here for the weekend with my fiancee and her little boy. We drove up from Seattle yesterday.”

“Oh, really? So—how old is the boy?” Jordan asked.

“He’s four. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” Jordan replied. He knew the man was lying. He’d taken a long look at this BMW, and if the guy had driven up here with a child under five, there would have been some kind of child safety seat in the back.

“Are you camping, or did you guys rent a cabin?” Jordan asked, keeping his eyes on his work.

“We’ve rented a very nice house on the bay.”

Jordan hesitated. He remembered the woman and the little boy he’d met yesterday afternoon outside Rosie’s. “Is—um—the house about two miles farther down this road?”

Standing over him, the man nodded. “How did you—”

“Twenty-two Birch?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

Jordan felt a bit sick again. He tried to keep his voice steady as he answered: “It’s the only rental house on the water on this side of the bay.” He glanced up at the man again.

Allen Meeker put on his jacket—and his sunglasses. It struck Jordan as odd, because he didn’t need the jacket. Despite a slight autumn chill in the air, the sun was strong and warm. There were even beads of sweat on his forehead. He’d been feeling around for something inside that jacket earlier. Jordan figured he had a gun, a switchblade, or something in there. Right now, he kept his hands in his jacket pockets— and he kept sweating.

Jordan loosened the last of the lug nuts. “Is this your first visit to Cullen?” he asked—as casually as he could.

“I—um, yeah, this is my first visit,” the man answered with hesitation.

He was lying again. Jordan knew.

“So—Allen,” he said. “If you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty, could you roll that spare over here and hand me the jack?”

He laughed. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you do all the work. Listen—um, Brad, thank you very much. You really deserve a Good Samaritan award.” He took his hands out of his pockets and retrieved the jack. He set it by Jordan, and then went to fetch the spare tire.

Jordan wedged the jack beneath the car and started cranking it up.

The man rolled the spare tire over to him. “I think you were right,” he said. “You’ll have this done in five minutes.” While Jordan worked the jack, Allen unscrewed the loose lug nuts by hand. They made a hollow clanking noise every time he dropped one of them inside the upturned hubcap. They were both squatting down by the car’s rear passenger side. Allen stopped to glance at him. He took off his sunglasses and put them in his shirt pocket. “Say, your color looks better now—at least, better than it did in the store earlier. I thought you were going to be sick back there.”

“So did I,” Jordan calmly admitted. “But it’s all under control now.”

The man’s eyes narrowed at him. “The clerk in the store seemed pretty concerned. She knew you….”

Jordan just nodded. He slowly reached for the lug wrench.

“She called you something back there, it wasn’t Brad. It was— Jordy….”

“That’s right.” He had the lug wrench in his grasp now. “My name is Jordan—Jordan Prewitt, and you killed my mother, you slimy fuck.”

Wide-eyed, the man stared at him and started to reach into his jacket pocket again. “No, wait—wait!” he cried.

Jordan hauled back the wrench and brought it crashing down on his scalp. Allen Meeker flopped forward, his face hitting the gravel.

A gun fell out of his jacket pocket.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Bang, bang!” Mattie said.

Susan stared at him, a hand over her heart.

Her little boy wore an orange life vest over his grey sweatshirt from Disney World—with Mickey, Donald, Pluto, and Goofy on it. He stood near the storage locker in the cabin of the boat Allen had rented for them. He had a flare gun in his hands—and Susan had no idea whether or not it was loaded. She didn’t even know where he’d found the thing. Mattie pointed the gun directly at her. “Bang, bang! You’re dead, Mommy!”

“Mattie—honey, that’s not a toy,” she said, as calmly as she could. Susan wasn’t even thinking of herself; it just panicked her to see her four-and-a-half-year-old handling a gun—no matter what direction it was pointed. Nevertheless, the bulky yellow life vest she had on couldn’t deflect or diminish the deadly impact of a flare— especially one shot at such close range. She was in the cabin’s small galley, by the stepladder-stairs to the deck.

The boat was tied to the dock in back of the house. She’d just put some food and cans of soda pop in the mini refrigerator, and then she’d turned to see Mattie with the flare gun in his little hand.

Susan remained perfectly still. “Put the gun down on the table,” she said. “Right now, sweetie, I mean it. That’s not a toy, Mattie. It’s very dangerous.”

“Bang, bang!” he repeated. Now he gripped the gun with both hands. His finger wiggled near the trigger.

Slowly, she took a step toward him. “Did you hear me, Mattie? Put that down this instant. It’s not yours.” She pointed to the heavily varnished, narrow table in front of the settee. “Put it down on the table—right now….”

He stared at her for a moment, the gun still pointed at her. His tongue poked out past the corner of his mouth. The boat swayed a bit from side to side. Susan could hear water lapping along the sides of the vessel and against the dock pilings.

Susan reached out to him. “Okay, then, just hand it to me, sweetie. That’s a good boy.”

Smiling, he plopped it in her outstretched palm.

Susan let out a long sigh. The gun felt heavy. It was probably loaded. “Thank you,” she muttered, working up a smile. “That’s my guy. Where did you—um, find this, sweetheart?”

“There,” he pointed to a half-open drawer by the storage closet. Susan noticed two big flashlights and about ten flare cartridges in there. She gingerly set the flare gun in the drawer. Closing it, she noticed the lock.

Allen had given her the keys to the boat earlier. Susan dug into the pocket of her jeans and pulled them out.