Dismember

Weathered or not, the wooden rungs nailed to the tree’s trunk had held for the kid when he scurried up them and onto the main platform, which had itself now withstood almost twenty minutes of jumps, half-hearted karate moves, and the various re-positionings of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy who didn’t seem to know whether he wanted to sit, lie, or stand. The old platform hadn’t so much as creaked.

Dave grinned. Over the last six months he’d visited a lot of houses, and he’d watched a lot of boys, but he always came back here. The boy’s real name, he knew, was Zachary, but he never thought of him that way. Usually it was just the boy or the kid; occasionally, it was Georgie.

Now the boy moved again. Dave left the weapons in his pockets but removed his hands. He needed to focus on the kid.

From his place behind the thick tree trunk deeper in the woods, Dave watched the child back off the platform on his stomach and kick blindly for a rung nailed to the trunk about two feet down.

It wasn’t just the kid’s looks. Even his movements reminded Dave of Georgie. And on several occasions, Dave had noticed the double knots on the laces of the kid’s sneakers. Georgie (the original Georgie) had known how to tie a pair of sneaks so well you could only get them off with a pair of scissors.

The boy descended the irregularly spaced rungs with almost superhuman agility and pushed away from the trunk still five feet shy of the ground. When he landed, his knees bent and his arms flung out to his sides in a way that made him look like an alighting bird. He straightened himself up and headed back to the house.

Dave smiled and walked around his hiding tree. Today wasn’t just another day. It was time to stop watching. He moved, and the knives slapped against his thighs.

THREE

The pickup moved around the mountain roads like a sickly horse out for one last lap around the racetrack. It leaned around the corners, shuddered more than once to an almost complete standstill, jerked, bounced, and wobbled its way forward.

Mike Pullman rode it out of the Rockies the best he could, relying heavily on the brakes, cursing himself for continuing to put his life in the hands (or wheels) of such an untrustworthy hunk of junk. He’d realized only recently that the truck was on its last metaphorical leg, and he’d soon have to trade it in for something a little more surefooted, an SUV or a jeep. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. He’d paid the truck off several years ago but hadn’t yet figured out how to bend his budget around the purchase of a new (or even a reliable used) vehicle.

Still, he had to get one, one way or another. A good set of snow tires and extremely careful driving had gotten him through one winter in the mountains, but they would never get him through another, assuming the truck somehow survived to see it.

The pickup’s front tires rolled onto a long stretch of flat road, and Mike eyed the interstate ahead. He let out a single short sound, a cross between a sigh of relief and a whoop of joy. The truck groaned as he accelerated, and one short-lived squeal came from a belt somewhere inside the engine compartment, but Mike was soon cruising. The mountains fell away behind him.

He’d driven the back roads in his usual silence, afraid that the distraction of the radio might make him miss a turn and slide into a ditch or, worse, off the unguardrailed edge of a cliff. But now that he’d reached relatively safe ground, he punched the power button on the dash and flipped through the radio’s presets until he found an oldies station playing some classic Rolling Stones.

He merged onto I-25, beating his hand against the steering wheel in rhythm with the tune, and reminded himself of a more important reason to get rid of this old clunker: Trevor. The choice to upgrade to a better vehicle wasn’t just the smart one or the practical one—it was the fatherly one. After all, any time he loaded Trevor in the truck, Mike was putting more than just his own life in danger; his son deserved better than to hurtle all around Colorado in a veritable deathtrap.

Before the breakup, Libby had sometimes hinted that they ought to get rid of the truck—leaving classifieds open on the coffee table, mentioning the great deals their friends had gotten on their used cars, that sort of thing—but back then the pickup had still been a dependable means of transportation, and she’d never gotten confrontational about it. He’d taken the truck with him when he left, and she’d kept the newer Honda. Since the divorce, she hadn’t said a word about the truck, but he knew she probably dreaded Trevor climbing into its cab the same way she would have dreaded him strapping himself into an electric chair or stepping inside a smoking gas chamber. Mike guessed she stayed quiet about it now only because, as divorces, they sometimes had to choose their battles; for whatever reason, she’d let the issue of the truck slide.

Part of him, a very petty and illogical part, wanted to drive the pickup until it disintegrated, just to spite her. Fortunately, it was also a small, easy-to-ignore part.

He eased the truck up to sixty miles an hour and punched at the radio’s presets again when the Stones dissolved into a series of mind-numbing commercials.

Cars and trucks, motorcycles and eighteen-wheelers zipped by him on the left, the big rigs sometimes leaving his small truck shaking in their wake, but Mike hardly noticed. Since moving to the mountains, he’d traveled this stretch of road dozens, and possibly going on hundreds of times, and at this point he figured just about everyone in the state had passed him at least once. No big deal; he wasn’t usually in a rush, and he’d never been one to indulge in road rage. Let someone else lose control and wrap his skull around a mile marker—Mike would take his sweet time. Of course, the truck maxed out at about sixty-five, which meant his choice to drive slowly wasn’t really much of a choice at all.

In the back of the truck, an unsecured tool chest slid against the wheel well and made a disturbing clunking sound. Mike peeked back there to make sure the hasp hadn’t come undone and returned his eyes to the road at once after verifying it was okay. Like his ex-wife, Mike worked out of his home, but unlike hers, his work had little to do with any technological mumbo jumbo. He worked with his hands, made high-quality rustic furniture that he sold mostly in town at craft festivals and in furniture stores throughout most of the surrounding counties. He did, however, still sell many items through the website Libby had set up for him early in their marriage, and even a few on auction sites like eBay. Actually, in the last few years his online transactions had become an increasingly larger percentage of his overall annual sales, though he hadn’t admitted this to Libby and didn’t really want to admit it to himself. No matter how much of his furniture sold online, it wasn’t made there, and he was proud of that, as happy about the clunking tools in the bed of his truck as he was about the blisters on his fingers or the sawdust in his hair.

He’d tuned the radio to a station playing a contemporary song he hadn’t yet heard but that seemed to have an acceptable amount of electric guitar. The band transitioned from a distortion-heavy guitar solo to the chorus, and Mike glanced down at the dashboard clock. If he kept driving at this speed, he would just barely make it to the Mountain View on time. He applied a little more pressure to the gas pedal, meaning to bring his speed that much closer to the limit, but the truck bucked and shook, and he let up. Although punctual by nature, Mike recognized that sometimes it was better to be a little late than a lot dead. Especially when the kind of death you were talking about would more likely than not involve being twisted around the axles of a Mack diesel.

He drove toward Foothill, the traffic still flowing around him like river water around a slow-floating log; he thought of his son, and the part of him that was Mike faded away. Trevor was waiting for his daddy, and Daddy was almost there.

FOUR

Once, maybe a year ago, she’d lost sight of him in the supermarket. He’d strayed down the cereal aisle to get a closer look at a box with a swooping Batman or Spiderman while she searched for an undented can of green beans. It took only three or four seconds for her to look up, realize he was missing, and whip around the corner to find him all but salivating over the combination of sugar and superheroes. But in those few ticks of the clock, her heart must have beat about a thousand times.