car that had been there for so many days was pulling out.
I put down the window so I could talk to the cop. It was the same young man who’d been covering most of the day shifts here since the murders.
“All done?” I said.
“I don’t have to babysit the place anymore,” he said. “They’re done with it as a crime scene. It’s kind of wrapped up. What with there being an arrest and all.” He cast his eyes down so he wouldn’t have to look into mine.
“Okay then,” I said, and took my foot off the brake and continued down to our house.
I had to unlock the door to get in. Ellen was still on guard, as was I. She’d arrived a few minutes earlier with a pepperoni and double-cheese pizza, still hot in the box. I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, all the energy drained from me.
“You disappeared pretty fast after we left Derek,” she said.
I couldn’t tell her that I was about to fall apart and didn’t want her to see me when it happened. “I had to get back to Drew,” I said.
Ellen got out some plates. It didn’t matter how much of a shambles our lives had become these last few days, we weren’t going to eat pizza out of a box.
She said, “I heard you dropped by city hall today.”
I glanced up at her. “What’d you hear, exactly?”
“That you put a huge dent in our watering can.”
“I can bang it out.”
“Jim, honestly, doing that, trying to get even with Lance, that’s not going to help things.”
“That’s probably true,” I said. “But I felt better, briefly.”
“What if he decides to press charges?”
I shook my head. “He won’t. Not after what he did to me.” I swallowed. “But he might try getting back at me again.”
“Terrific,” Ellen said, picking at a stray piece of green pepper that had somehow gotten onto our pizza by mistake.
“What about you?” I asked. “What did you do, before we saw Derek?” I wanted to ask where she’d had lunch, whether she’d met with anyone.
“Mostly here and at the bank,” she said. “Then just a couple of errands after we saw Derek, and then grabbed the pizza on the way home. I couldn’t think about dinner.”
Besides, I thought, she’d had a good lunch, with Conrad. Most likely Conrad, anyway. Sometimes Illeana drove his Audi.
I decided, at least for now, to let it go. Maybe part of me didn’t want to know. I couldn’t deal with any more complications. She did, after all, still work for the man, and if she was entitled to meet with him at Thackeray, I supposed she had the right to meet with him at the Clover.
Ellen was ignoring her pizza. “It’s all I can do to eat,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about Donna Langley. I can’t believe what she did.”
And even though Donna had once, many years ago, tried to get me into bed, I too found what she had done with my son hard to comprehend.
“I feel. . I feel so angry with her,” Ellen said. “I wish I could go over there now, tell her what I think of her.”
“Whatever sins she may have committed,” I said, “she’s paid for all of them now.”
I sat down on the couch after dinner, turned on the news, and before I realized it, I was asleep. Out cold. Three nights with almost no sleep could do that to you.
I woke up around eight, Ellen sitting across from me. She smiled, first time I’d seen her do that in several days. “You’ve been snoring your head off,” she said.
Slowly, I worked myself off the couch. “Boy, I was out like a light.”
“I nodded off for a while, too. We should both go to bed, get a good night’s sleep.”
I agreed. “First, I’m going to go outside, check the shed, lock things up. We don’t have cops up the road anymore, you know.”
“We don’t?” Ellen sounded concerned.
“They’ve packed it in,” I said.
“The guy was there when I got home with the pizza,” Ellen said.
“He left just after. They’ve wrapped it all up, you see.”
“No,” Ellen said defiantly. “They haven’t.”
I gave her an upturned thumb and went outside by way of the kitchen, locking the door behind me so that Ellen would be safe. There wasn’t much spring in my step as I walked across the gravel to the shed. My feet were dragging. It was dusk, and would be dark in another half hour or so. There were things I could do, equipment to tend, bills to prepare, but all I had the strength for was to lock things up.
They got me as I came through the open garage door. Coming from my right, a shadow, then the blow.
Followed by darkness.
I couldn’t have been out that long, because when I woke up, there was still some light outside. The world beyond the shed was gray, verging on black. Maybe only a couple of minutes. But it had been long enough to secure me into an old wooden chair from the shed.
Even before I began to assess my situation, I was aware that the fingers of my right hand were very sore. Other parts of my body hurt, of course. My head was pounding. But the four fingers of my right hand felt pinched and uncomfortable.
I moved my head around, started to say something, and realized my mouth was secured with tape. I looked down at my body and saw duct tape wrapped around me just below my shoulders, more down around my waist. I couldn’t move my legs, and while I couldn’t see them below my knees, I assumed they’d been tied to the chair with more tape.
Tape held my left hand to one of the rungs of the seatback. I had to blink a couple of times, however, to comprehend what had been done to my right hand.
It wasn’t tied to the chair. It was taped to my hedge trimmer, which was sitting in my lap. I couldn’t see my fingers or hand at all, there was so much tape wrapped around them.
I understood now what had been done to me. And what I was facing.
My fingers had been jammed into the open slots of the trimmer, the ones the blades went through at lightning speed when the trigger on the handle was squeezed. Then my fingers had been wrapped with tape to keep them there. Squeezing the trigger, only for a fraction of a second, would cut all four fingers, probably down to about the first knuckles. The blades might not have been designed to go through bone, but I had little doubt they could do it. I’d cut plenty of bushes with this machine, hacking through small wooden branches under half an inch thick.
And these blades, they’d go through flesh like butter.
Once I’d figured out my situation, my eyes moved to the back of the trimmer, and the yellow extension cord attached to it. I followed the cord down to the floor, where it came up from a huge coil, like a snake before a charmer. From the bottom of the coil, a single line of cord emerged, leading toward the wall. I couldn’t see, from my position, whether it was plugged in or not.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty’s awake,” someone said.
“Oooh, goody,” said someone else.
The voices came from behind me, and I turned my head to one side, then the other, trying to get a look at them. But I needn’t have bothered. They both came around in front of me.
They were wearing stocking masks. My guess was they hadn’t been wearing them until they’d seen me stir, because they were both tugging them down around their necks. Their faces were mashed and distorted behind the hose, but I could tell that one man’s hair was dark, brown or black, while the other man had almost no hair at all.
“Fuck,” said the dark-haired one. “It’s too fucking hot for these.”
“Try to cope,” said the bald one. He looked at me. “So, how ya feeling, asshole? You weren’t asleep all that long.”
