I raised my head to look into their shrouded eyes. I wondered if they could see the fear in mine.
But then, as if he were able to translate my darting eyes into words, the bald one said, “Your wifey is just fine, Cutter. She’s in the house, tied up like you, except she doesn’t have her hand attached to a hedge trimmer.”
“Woulda been easier, though,” said the dark-haired one. “Her fingers’d be smaller, easier to jam in.”
The bald one shrugged. “Not to worry. We should be able to get what we need from this one.”
They must have taken my keys off me, or somehow tricked Ellen to come to the door. I tried to place the voices, wondered if I had ever heard them before, didn’t think I recognized them. They were both in pretty good shape. Lean, close to six feet, dressed casually but not cheaply. Expensive-looking jeans, the bald one had on a Lacoste T-shirt, the little green alligator emblem on his left chest. The other guy had on a simple black T, cut high enough on the arms to reveal well-toned biceps and part of a tattoo on his right arm, what looked like the end of a knife blade.
I tried to recall whether I’d ever seen Lance without a shirt on-it seemed unlikely-and if I had, whether he’d had a tattoo like that. Surely, if I’d ever seen it, I’d have remembered. This guy was about the same height and build as Lance, and if his face was damaged from a run-in with a watering can, I couldn’t tell through the dark stocking. The few words he’d uttered didn’t put me immediately in mind of the mayor’s driver, but for obvious reasons, I had him on my mind.
“You’ve noticed that we have you at our advantage,” the bald one said. He reached down and picked up the hedge trimmer, which dragged my hand up with it. I started to pull my arm back, but all that did was take the trimmer with it. “Tut-tut, you better behave,” he said.
He grabbed hold of the handle, floated his finger just beyond the trigger.
“So you see what’s happening here,” he said. “I touch this button, just even for like a fucking fraction of a second, and all the tips of your fingers are going to come off.”
I could feel droplets of sweat rolling down my forehead. One of them found its way into my right eye, and the saltiness of it stung like hell. I blinked several times.
“It’s going to be messy as hell,” he said. “And I have to be honest with you. I don’t really like the sight of blood. The good thing is, there’s so much tape wrapped around your hand here, I won’t have to see it squirting around all over the place.”
“Jesus,” said the dark-haired one, who’d been looking at my hand but then looked away. “That’s going to fucking hurt.” He reached under the nylon and scratched his neck. “Man, this is so goddamn hot. Couldn’t we just tape his eyes so we wouldn’t have to wear these things?”
“I think we’ll have an easier time persuading Mr. Cutter here to help us out if he can see what it is we plan to do with him.”
I made some noises behind the tape.
“Say what?” said the bald one. “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask you yet, and already you’re ready to talk?”
I slowly nodded my head. The bald one took his hand off the hedge trimmer handle and ripped the tape off my mouth. It hurt like all get-out but I held back a scream through gritted teeth.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If you’ve hurt my wife, I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you.”
The bald one’s misshapen mouth appeared to turn into a grin. “Uh, hello? Do you understand your situation at the moment? Do you think you’re in any position to be making threats? Maybe I need to make that clear to you right this fucking minute.”
And he gripped the handle again, held his finger over the trigger, and squeezed.
“Shit, Mortie!” said the dark-haired one with the knife tattoo.
“No!” I shouted. This time, I couldn’t hold back the scream.
I reflexively tried to jerk my hand away, but that only dragged the hedge trimmer closer to me. The bald one still had a firm hold of the machine, his finger still gripped about the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The trimmer made no noise. My fingers, beyond the pain they were already in by being jammed into the teeth of the machine, felt nothing.
The bald one dropped the trimmer into my lap and began to laugh. “Oh fuck!” he said, taking a step back, bending over, putting his hands atop his knees, laughing the entire time. “That was priceless! You should have seen the expression on your face!”
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me, too!” his partner said.
The bald one managed to pull himself together, let out a couple of enthusiastic hoots, then walked over to the wall, where the yellow extension cord disappeared behind some cardboard boxes. He kicked them aside, exposing the wall outlet, and I could see that the cord had not been plugged in.
He knelt down, grabbed the end of the cord, and shoved it firmly into the receptacle.
He walked back over to me, rubbing his hands together, still smiling inside his mask. He grabbed the trimmer, lifted it, and my hand, up to the level of his waist, and said, “The next time, it’ll be the real deal.”
TWENTY-SIX
'Now, to get to the business at hand, so to speak,” said the bald one, the one I knew went by the name Mortie, if his associate was to be believed. “There’s some things I’d like to ask you.”
“What?” I said. My fingers, still held in the teeth of the hedge trimmer, were sweating inside the tape.
“You have a copy of a certain book,” he said. “On a disc? Am I right?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t know if you’ve got a printout of it, too, or it’s just on a disc, or two discs, or what the fuck, but we want it.”
“Okay,” I said, my mind racing. “You can have it. But I want to see that my wife is okay. I’m not telling you where it is until I see that my wife is unharmed.”
Mortie laughed. “I don’t think so, pal, because-”
I cut him off mid-sentence. “I want. To see. My wife.”
“What I was trying to tell you, asshole,” he said, moving around the hedge trimmer, “is that you’re not in a position to negotiate.”
I mustered as much courage as I could, given my circumstances. “I don’t care if you cut off all my fingers and all my toes. You can cut off my dick and suck on it if you want, but I’m not telling you anything until I see that my wife is okay.”
Mortie thought, weighed his options, then glanced over at the dark-haired one with the tattoo. “Go get his fucking wife.”
“I gotta take this thing off my head,” he said. “Just for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll go get her.”
As he left the shed and my field of vision, he was peeling the stocking off his head. “Jesus,” I heard him say. It didn’t sound like Lance to me. And besides, why would Lance want that disc?
“You must be getting a bit warm, too,” I said to Mortie.
“The heat doesn’t bother me,” he said.
“So Conrad sent you,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I’d never have thought that a college president would know where to find people who do your kind of work.”
“I said shut the fuck up. You want me to squeeze this?” He waved his index finger playfully about the trigger of the hedge trimmer. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “You want me to put all your fingertips in a sandwich bag or something, you can take them to the hospital later?”
I had nothing to say. And for the better part of a couple of minutes, we said nothing to each other. Finally,
