He rocked the chair forward.
And then he jumped out of it and ran at me.
It’s possible that his long speech was entirely intended to get me to lower my defenses. It’s also possible that he thought a fourteen-year-old kid who was clearly only pretending to be brave might not be able to actually pull the trigger when the moment arrived. Or, hell, maybe he didn’t care if I shot him in the head or not. Better than prison. Worth the risk.
The speech did not get me to lower my defenses.
But when he lunged at me, arms outstretched, face full of terrifying rage, my instinct was not to squeeze the trigger. My instinct was to step back away from him. And by the time my brain screamed Shoot him! Shoot the son of a bitch! he’d knocked the gun out of my hand.
I’d choked. After all this, I’d fucking choked.
Yes, I was a frightened fourteen-year-old against a serial killer…but I’d had him at gunpoint. I’d won. I’d beaten the man who murdered my best friend, and now I was suddenly in danger of sharing Todd’s fate.
Mr. Martin punched me in the gut.
I dropped to my knees, gasping for breath.
He picked up the gun.
“Pathetic,” he muttered. “You should be more embarrassed than scared. Your friend was counting on you to avenge his death, and you let him down. No soul at rest for him. Absolutely pathetic.”
I wanted to say something, yet I couldn’t catch my breath and my mind couldn’t process exactly what I wanted to say.
“Don’t piss your pants,” he said. “I don’t mind cleaning up blood and gore, but piss is just plain gross.”
I tried to stand up, but instead tumbled forward, catching my fall with my hands. I continued violently coughing.
“Don’t puke either. Can I trust you not to go for the gun if I leave for a second, or do I need to stomp on your hands until every single bone is broken?”
I couldn’t answer.
Mr. Martin crouched down next to me. “Nah, I don’t think I can trust you. Feeling pretty bad about your recent choices, huh?”
“I—”
“You what?”
“I—”
“Spit it out. These are your last words, so try to make them count. Don’t waste them on begging and pleading and degrading yourself. Think of something brave. Something you’d want quoted in the history books. Something that would make President Carter proud. Not that anybody will ever know your last words. Nobody will ever find out what happened to you, not your parents or anybody else, but for your own personal satisfaction, why not try to make your last words count? Make you a deal. If your last words impress me, I’ll bury you next to your friend.”
“I left a note.”
“Okay. Tell me about this note.”
“It says where I am.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I nodded. I stayed on my knees but got back up from a crouched position. “If I’m not home when my parents get there, they’ll know exactly what happened to me.”
“Well then,” said Mr. Martin, “I guess we’ve got a problem to work out, don’t we?”
7
“My parents will be home any minute,” I said.
Mr. Martin shook his head. “I believe you when you said you left a note. You seem like a smart enough kid and it makes sense that you’d have a backup plan. I don’t believe that they’ll be home any minute. You wouldn’t want them to discover the note while you were still forcing a confession out of me at gunpoint. Honestly, I think that if I killed you right now, I’d have time to find out where you live, break into your house, find the note, and burn it.”
“You’ll never find it.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Lucky for you, I don’t feel like going through the trouble. I don’t want to kill you when there’s already heat on me. That would be fucking stupid. That’s what you’ve got going for you right now—killing you isn’t in my best interest.”
“I won’t say anything to anybody.”
“You promise?”
“I swear to God,” I said, even though I knew it wouldn’t be this simple.
“Uh-huh. Right. You’ll be tattling on me the second you feel safe. If this truce is going to work, we need to respect each other’s intelligence. Do we agree on that?”
“Yeah.” I was perspiring so heavily now that it was dripping into my eyes. The salty liquid burned.
“If we go our separate ways, we both need to keep each other honest. Lucky for you, I’ve met some pretty damn unsavory people in my life. For example, I have this one close friend who owes me a favor. He does terrible things for money. He’s not from around here, but he’s happy to travel if you cover his expenses. I’m going to make an arrangement with him that if I get arrested, or if I don’t call him at a certain time every day, he is to pay you a little visit.”
I vigorously nodded. “Okay, yes.” As soon as he’d knocked the gun out of my hand, I’d been one hundred percent convinced that I was going to die. Horribly. So barring a scenario where he gave me my freedom in exchange for luring new victims to his home, I was going to enthusiastically agree to anything he wanted.
“He won’t kill you,” Mr. Martin explained.
