A Face at the Window (27 page)

A
t the Jiminy Point house, Jake sat waiting in the
living room under the newly repaired lamp. Outside, it was beginning to get light; Lee lay peacefully in her arms, asleep.

A squall swept over the bay, rain hitting the windows in fat spatters and slashes. It paused, then poured straight down for a while before ceasing altogether.

The men were out in the kitchen, Marky in charge of
whatever they were doing together there, his voice hectoring, criticizing and complaining. She wondered how Anthony stood it, especially when the sound of a slap rang out and no protest followed.

"Do you hafta question every little thing?" Marky demanded. "For freak's sake, I don't
know
why we gotta do it this way. We just do, that's all. Maybe," he concluded, " ‘cause by now all the roads are full of cops.
You
ever think a’ that?"

Her leg was asleep. She tried moving Lee, but at the tiniest change in position the little girl's eyelids flickered warningly And under the circumstances, Lee asleep was best; for the moment, anyway, and the present moment seemed all that Jake could manage.

"Why do I have to do all the thinkin’ around here?" Marky demanded.

Jake wondered again what they were doing, decided it didn't matter as much as finding a way to escape them. The deck outside the sliding glass doors, she'd already discovered, was twenty feet off the ground; even alone, she wouldn't have tried jumping. But with Lee in her arms there'd be no sense to it at all; from that height, it was a cinch neither one of them was exactly going to hit the ground running.

And running was what she needed. Now that she had Lee, there was no point to seeing Campbell. Getting away was her best chance to save Jody Pierce, too—if he was still alive—and to find Helen Nevelson. But the men out in the kitchen had a clear view of the only other exit whose location she knew.

"Get up, we're going," said Anthony, coming into the living room. Pain and fatigue marred his face, while in the hall, Marky hauled something heavy.

"Where?" she asked. Lee turned in her arms, whimpering.

"Never mind. We're going, that's all. You want to make him
mad?" He raised his bloody arm toward Marky's complaining voice.

"He's pretty hard on you," she ventured. And when that got no reaction: "Look, before we go you might just want to let me do something about that bandage. It's—"

"Shut up." He didn't look at her. "You'd better be on your feet when he gets in here."

Then Lee woke, whining uncomfortably. "Hey, baby," Jake crooned, smiling down into the child's flushed face. Then with a spike of alarm she took in the perspiration beading the little girl's hairline.

"What did you give her?" she demanded of Anthony, suspicion piercing her suddenly.

Anthony looked away again. "Nothing," he mumbled. But even allowing for her exhaustion, Lee had fallen asleep too easily and deeply, as if she'd been…

"Tincture of opium," Anthony admitted, his guard dropping briefly. Astonishing, she thought; he wants to be
liked.
"It's okay, though, Marky got it from a pharmacist he knows back in—"

But then he crumpled with a cry. Behind him stood Marky, who'd slugged him in the kidney. Anthony straightened, gri macing.

"I got a freakin’ schedule to keep," said Marky. "Starting now, anyone who gets in the way of it gets a bullet." He punched Anthony again, this time in the shoulder of his bloody arm. "You got that, you worthless little sack of—"

He kicked Anthony. "Answer me, you freakin’ idiot, you're so friendly, gettin’ ready to tell Little Miss Moron here all about where we're from and what we're all about. Do. You. Got. That?"

He delivered another kick, harder. "Yeah," Anthony gasped. "I got it, Marky."

"Good." He pulled his gun from his jacket. "Now let's just cut the crap and get out of here."

"Where?" Jake repeated. Lee had fallen asleep again. Or lost consciousness. Marky regarded her coldly.

"You'll find out when we get there," he said.

Anthony hoped his
kidney wasn't ruptured. Maybe it was only bruised. Either way, too bad; now Marky wanted him to haul the little outboard engine from where they'd found it in the utility room, so Anthony went outside.

The rain had stopped, and the outboard sat on the steps where Marky had dragged it. But when Anthony tried to lift it his wounded arm screamed in protest, warm blood coursing down it.

He flipped a switch by the garage door. As he'd hoped, light flooded the driveway; at the edge of it he spied a large garden cart someone had left tipped up against a pile of dirt. Ignoring the man's body still lying there motionless where it had fallen earlier, Anthony dragged the cart to the house, manhandled the engine into it despite shrieks of agony from his arm, and began muscling the loaded cart clumsily downhill toward the water.

The pistol he'd taken from the guy in the driveway was in his waistband, tucked in against the small of his back. Marky didn't even know it existed because Anthony had gotten to the guy after Marky shot him, and snatched it before Marky noticed.

Lucky, he thought; and lucky, too, that its hiding place had escaped Marky's kicking foot. But that was all the good fortune Anthony expected. The rest he would have to arrange for himself.

At the foot of the hill a short, sharp drop led down to some flat boulders. He got in front of the cart, holding it back with his
weight, and held the engine steady while the cart bumped down hard. Finally he was on the beach, his bleeding arm pulsing like a gangbanger's boom box, thumping with pain.

The gun bit into his back as he worked to get the cart over the stony beach to where the boat lay rocking in the small waves. Marky wanted him to put the engine on the boat, too.

Sure, Anthony thought bitterly, even though he'd never done it and wasn't sure he could figure out how. But try telling that to Marky, right? Talking sense to that guy was like talking to a wall, with the added attraction that when you were done, the wall would drop a few of its bricks on you.

To hurt you, because it could. Because it liked to. That, he realized as he pondered the problem of getting the outboard onto the boat, was the good part of all this for Marky. Not the money, although of course Marky wanted some of that, too.

But hurting people and making them take it was what Marky got off on. And probably just some of the money wasn't what he was after, either. In fact, it was dawning on Anthony that no matter what happened, he probably wouldn't be riding back to New Jersey with Marky in the Monte.

That instead, Anthony and the fishes swimming around out there in the water would be getting acquainted. Thinking this, he finished hauling the cart, then examined the engine once more. He guessed the propeller must hang out over the outside of the boat—
Wow,
he heard Marky commenting sarcastically in his head,
what an Einstein—
and there were a pair of C-clamps he imagined must get tightened at the back, there, to clamp the engine on.

A cord with a handle on it hung off the engine, which he knew must be to start the thing. There was a choke lever, too, and a throttle on the handle.

In the gathering gray light he could make out white notched
lines on the handle, for speed, forward, and reverse. Drop it to idle, probably, to shift gears. Ignoring the pain it cost him, he muscled the engine around, set the clamps properly—he hoped— and began tightening the screws down.

But in the midst of this he stopped, something about his surroundings making the outboard engine seem wrong, maybe even dangerous. Calm, silent, the sky now very slowly changing from slate gray to a rich, dark blue, the heavily saturated color of brand-new blue jeans…

He'd washed new jeans with his underwear at the laundromat, once, and gotten a load of blue skivvies as a result. But this mistake, whatever it was, was going to be a lot worse if he didn't figure out what the hell was bothering him so much—and then suddenly he had it:

The silence. It was morning now, so early that even the people around here weren't up yet, most of them. The ones who were, though, would know as naturally as breathing what went on, out on this water. The daily routine: who went where, who they went with, what they were doing and why.

Like cops, knowing the usual on their beat. And the outboard engine in the silence … it was going to be loud.

Across the water, a few more lights had gone on even as he stood there, like eyes opening one by one in the dark. Probably they couldn't see him yet, but they would soon, if he gave them any reason to look.

But if he told Marky so, Marky would reject the idea just because it was Anthony's. Then Anthony would be screwed.

Which he was anyway; as far as he could see now, the only way to not get killed by Marky was to kill Marky first. And out on the water was the place to do it, definitely. Hit him in the head, dump him over the side.

The water was calmer than it had been the last time Anthony was down here, but he could see from the small moving ripples on top that it still ran fast, speeding one way hours earlier when the tide was coming in, the other way now, when it was going out.

Which meant Marky's body would float away somewhere, carried by the current. Too bad about the money, of course; if he got rid of Marky, Anthony would never get any of that. But just like with the girl in the woods, earlier, he had no choice.

What he would do about the woman and kid, he wasn't sure. But right now, the swift current was giving him yet another idea: that the outboard shouldn't start until Anthony wanted it to, a situation he thought he could arrange without much trouble.

Because air-conditioner repair wasn't the only trade they'd tried teaching him, back in the juvie home. They'd thought he might be good at lawn care, too: cutting grass, blowing leaves, crap jobs like that. So he'd worked a summer edging sidewalks in the public parks in Parsippany, which was how he'd learned in the ninety-degree heat while running a gas-powered trimmer that spewed foul smoke and stalled every five minutes that he'd rather earn his pay biting the heads off live chickens.

And how he'd happened to learn about spark plugs.

Choking, Helen Nevelson
lurched up. Her head hit something above her that rang with a dull clang. Spewing water from her nose and mouth, she realized she was lying in it, and that she was in a tunnel. A metal tunnel…

Confused, she scrabbled painfully on hands and knees until she spotted the culvert opening, a round hole of not-quite-pitch-black. Then she remembered; she'd fallen, and crawled in here
to hide. But from what? The opening she could see was far away, and there wasn't room enough inside the culvert to turn around so she backed out, trying to keep her head down.

She smacked it again, anyway, but the pain hardly penetrated through the other pains now awakening, too, her jaw throbbing massively like a sledgehammer with a spotlight attached, thudding and flaring with her pulse. She'd turned her ankle, and the gash in her arm from the glass at that awful guy's camp-She froze at the thought. Then the rest of it came back in a rush: the men, the kidnapping, thinking that one guy was going to shoot her, finding the cabin, then jumping out of the truck…

And Lee. She turned her head suddenly to the side, vomited. Lee was with the men, and only Helen knew where they were going: to the cliffs. And why would terrible men take a little girl like Lee to the cliffs, unless…

She pushed herself up as another eighteen-wheeler roared by, its running lights turning the gathering dawn fiery orange and its tires spewing water that flew sideways, drenching her again. But she was up now, and she mustn't go back down.

Slowly, gripping one handful of grass after another, Helen hauled herself up the embankment toward the edge of the pavement. When she got there, she stood swaying, thinking about something Jody had told her.

She remembered it well; they'd been setting out on the first truly long paddle she'd ever taken, right after he'd made her capsize in the kayak so she'd be safe. She'd been wearing a ball cap, sunglasses, a life jacket, a long-sleeved cotton shirt over her swimming suit, and flip-flops.

Also, she'd been coated with enough suntan lotion and bug repellent to choke a moose; the combined stink, like cheap perfume mixed with weed killer, made her feel sick to her stomach. And on top of it all, she didn't want to go.

It was just too much. He was always doing things like this, making her try things that got her scared, and even when she got through them she always ended up with sore muscles and blisters, when she could've been doing things with her own friends or even just doing nothing. And even if nothing terrible happened on its own, he'd make something happen, set some obstacle up she would have to overcome, just so she could learn some new stupid lesson. So she'd begun to cry, sitting there in the kayak looking across at the far side of the lake, several miles distant.

"It's too far," she'd complained, sobbing. "Don't you get it yet? I hate this," she'd screamed at him, not caring who else was on the lake, listening. She hurled the kayak paddle at him.