“I buried it.”
“I know. You already told me that.”
“Did I really?”
“Yes. You said that if my last words impressed you, you’d bury me next to him.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do.”
“I won’t be able to find it again.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s out in the woods. There’s no way I’ll be able to take you to the exact spot.”
“I think you can. You’ll have the right motivation.”
“So, what, you’re going to kill me if I can’t find it?”
I shook my head. “Not finding it isn’t an option. I’m going to torture you until you do find it.”
“Like how?”
“It’ll be a surprise.”
“I buried him in the summer. It’s freezing out there now. We’d have to wade through a mile of snow—probably up to our waist. It’s pitch black out. It’ll never work.”
“You’ll make it work. What do you think I’ve been doing all this time?” I asked. “Take a guess. What do you think I’ve been doing since the day I saw you drive away with my best friend? Go on, answer the question.”
“No clue.”
“I’ve been fantasizing about torturing you. I’ve got months’ worth of dark shit in my head that I’m ready to let out if you don’t cooperate.”
Mr. Martin smiled. “You think I’m scared of you?”
“You should be.”
“Nah. That’s not the way this works. You way overestimate how worried I am about some lard-ass brat who can’t even hold a gun right.”
He took a step toward me.
“Don’t move,” I warned.
“Or what? You’ll drop the gun and run away? Kid, you’re a great big pain in the butt, but that’s as far as it goes. You’re not an actual threat to me. If you’re looking for somebody to be trembling in fear, you need to look someplace else.”
He took another step toward me, this one cartoonishly slow and exaggerated.
“I told you not to move.”
“And yet I keep moving.”
“Don’t make me shoot you.”
“Aw, you’re just adorable,” said Mr. Martin, as he walked toward me.
20
I wasn’t bluffing.
I aimed the pistol at his leg and squeezed the trigger. This whole process would be much more difficult if he was wounded, but I had no choice. Burt and Josh could drag him through the snow, if necessary.
The gun didn’t fire.
I squeezed the trigger again. Nothing.
Was the safety on? I flipped it off with my thumb and tried again. Now the trigger wouldn’t budge. The safety had been off before, and now I’d turned it on. I flipped the switch again and squeezed the trigger once more. Absolutely nothing happened.
The gun was definitely loaded. I obviously hadn’t had a chance to test it before I got here, but I was almost positive I’d loaded it correctly. What the hell was wrong with it? My dad never went hunting and rarely went out for target practice, so the gun hadn’t been fired in a long time, but still—
I swung the gun at Mr. Martin’s face. If I couldn’t shoot him, I could at least break his nose with it.
He blocked the swing. He dug his fingernails into my wrist. Construction workers in the late 1970’s did not tend to have long fingernails, so he didn’t draw blood, but it hurt enough to make me wince in pain.
He wrenched the gun out of my hand and pointed it at my face.
My hands immediately went up to cover my face, instinctively, as if that would help. “Good thing his hands were up there to deflect the bullet when he got shot in between the eyes. Otherwise it would’ve been messy!”
He squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He tried again with the same result.
Mr. Martin let out a snort of laughter. “What a piece of crap,” he said, tossing the gun away.
Then he punched me in the mouth.
I stumbled backwards, arms pinwheeling, desperately trying to keep my balance. But “maintaining balance” was not one of my strongest skill sets, and I fell on my ass. Blood dribbled down my chin from my newly split lip.
Though I’d envisioned many different scenarios for how this could play out, I hadn’t really thought about it becoming a fistfight. If that was the case, I was going to lose.
“Get up,” Mr. Martin told me.
I tried.
“Actually, no. Stay down.” He kicked me in the stomach. Had he not been wearing slippers, and I not been wearing a heavy jacket, that would’ve been the end of our battle. Still, he got me directly in the gut and it hurt. I clutched my stomach with one hand and gasped for breath, while I reached into my inside jacket pocket with my other hand.
“I have to kill you,” said Mr. Martin. “You know that, right? If you’d left well enough alone, we could’ve enjoyed our little truce, and I eventually would’ve moved away and been some other shithead kid’s problem. But now I can’t let you walk out of here. I have to kill you and get out of town. We both lose.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“I didn’t spend a lot of time with Todd, but he seemed kind of pathetic. His death was no big loss to the world. I’m sure you could’ve made new friends. Why squander everything for that ugly little fuck? The fact that I was able to fool him into getting in my car is proof enough that he didn’t deserve to live. I took him out of the gene pool.”
He was clearly trying to make me angry, but I wasn’t sure what strategy he was employing. I was lying on the floor, crumpled in pain. Did he think that by filling me with rage he’d trick me into making another mistake? Most likely, he was just drunk and not thinking about what he was saying.
“If I had a knife down here, I’d slit your throat,” he said. “Want to be a good boy and wait while I go upstairs and get one?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked, sneering as if he thought that I’d truly believed he was going to do that. “How about I
