Mountain Madness (22 page)

If the new Davy was hiding inside, he’d hear them out here, would probably be scared, but that was okay. By the end of the night, little Davy would be safer than he’d been in a long, long time.

Georgie led him past two small windows, both covered from the inside. They circled around the back of the garage and found the regular-sized door on the other side. Dave eased Georgie aside and tried the knob. Locked. Without stopping to think, he swiveled and kicked the door just beside the knob. The wood cracked, but nothing else broke. Dave kicked again, and this time two cracks followed: first the door exploding inward and then it rebounding off a desk or shelf halfway through its swing. Dave could have seen the splintered doorjamb by only the light of the moon, but with the added illumination from the porch, it might as well have been the main attraction in a jeweler’s display case. He grinned at it and walked by.

Georgie didn’t follow him, which was good. In his state of confusion, the boy might have thought about grabbing something and using it against him. Dave didn’t want to consider what he might do if that happened. Anyway, the boy wasn’t exactly a cheetah; if he ran, Dave would hear him in plenty of time to catch up.

He smelled cut cedar and pine, the thicker scents of paint, glue, and machine grease, but saw none of it. Not yet. He didn’t know where the light switch was, or if there was a switch at all. For all he knew, you controlled the lights in here with a pull chain or a breaker on a panel board. He’d watched the main house plenty, had entered it several times when the Pullmans were away, but he hadn’t bothered investigating the workshop. He’d peeked in one time, just a perfunctory look through the only bit of unblocked window he’d found, took in enough to realize it was a workshop and not a garage, seen the tools and the wood and the half-formed furniture. But he hadn’t studied it, hadn’t thought he needed to. Now, despite all the planning he’d done, he wished he’d done a little more.

Still, his eyes adjusted abnormally fast, and it didn’t take long for him to spot the tips of two sneakers trembling in the sawdust beneath a table to his right.

“Hey,” he said and bumped purposefully into the corner of the table, feigning blindness. “You okay in here?”

The shoes stopped trembling and became very still.

“It’s okay to be scared,” he said. “I would have been.” He took a step forward. “Which means it would be wrong if you
weren’t
.”

The shoes pulled back and disappeared from Dave’s sight, but he didn’t worry. Where could the boy go?

Nowhere, of course. Pullman would have been better off if he
had
sent him to the neighbors. 

Dave stooped, then knelt, bending until he could peek beneath the table’s surface and into Davy’s hiding spot. He imagined the boy triggering a drill and jamming it into his eye, or coming at his throat with a pair of utility knives, but no attack came. The boy sat hugging his legs, wide eyed, looking as if he’d planned only on staying hidden forever and ever. Dave thought that was probably the smartest thing he could have done.

Dave had expected violence today—had, to some extent, been looking forward to it—but now he’d had enough. He’d been punched, kicked, scratched, stabbed, had rocks thrown at his head and a dog’s teeth inches away from the softest parts of his neck. He deserved a break.

He was half tempted to knock the kid out, not give him a chance to fight back, but he knew he couldn’t bring himself to do that. The kid was him, after all, or soon would be.

Instead of grabbing for the child, Dave dropped into a sitting position and folded his hands in his lap. “You like dogs?” he asked. He didn’t need to ask, because he
knew
he liked dogs, remembered liking them despite the way their breath sometimes stunk when they licked your face.

Davy looked out at him, looked right into his eyes, as if he had Dave’s own superb night vision. “Where’s my daddy?”

Dave had answers all ready for these types of questions, though he had hoped the mention of Manny would divert the boy’s attention. “I’m going to take you to him,” he said, which was true in some ways and only a slight stretch of the truth in others. “He’s hurt.” This was a fact no matter how you looked at it.

“You hurt him.” It wasn’t a question, but neither was it an accusation.

“Not exactly,” Dave said, “but I
am
going to fix m…your daddy all up. Promise.”

Davy didn’t move, smile, or blink. Dave heard rustling from outside, but not running, and wondered what Georgie was up to.

“What do you say?” He focused on the boy beneath the table and smiled, not knowing if Davy could make out the change in his facial features or not. “Georgie and Manny are waiting. We’ll all go find your daddy together. Don’t you want to be with your daddy?”

“Yes,” Davy said, though he still appeared uncertain. “He’s not…dead?”

“Heaven forbid,” said Dave. “Now come on out of there.”

And after only a few more seconds of leg-hugging and frowning, Davy did. He got onto his hands and knees, paying extra close attention to the tabletop above him, and crawled out across the sawdust. Dave didn’t try to help him because he knew doing so would only scare Davy. Young children were sometimes that way, like wild animals. If you stood still, didn’t give them any reason to fear you, they’d eventually relax, but the second you inched in their direction, they were a mile away before you knew they were gone.

Dave waited for Davy to get to his feet, brush the dust off his shorts, knees, and palms, and move between Dave and the door. Only then did he stand. The boy walked toward the broken door, and Dave watched him closely, especially his hands, still expecting him to pick up a screwdriver or a hammer or a saw. When the boy ran instead, Dave sighed and shook his head.

Why me?

—:—:—:—

This was his fault. All of it. Zach sat against the outside of the garage, so chilly now his teeth actually chattered.

Obviously, his crappy line in the dirt hadn’t been enough. He’d gotten another kid kidnapped and the kid’s dad maybe killed because he hadn’t been clever enough to think of some other way to warn them. Whatever happened to the two of them, and whatever happened to Zach himself, would be as much his own fault as the psycho’s.

He pulled at a tuft of weeds growing along the garage’s foundation; something pricked his finger, a thorn or some sort of insect, he assumed. Did bees come out at night? He didn’t know. He looked at his finger, saw a droplet of blood, and sucked it clean before he pawed through the area again, more carefully this time.

If he’d caught a thorn or a rock, it probably wouldn’t matter, but the prick could also have been a spider’s bite. Those things could be dangerous, deadly. Not that he guessed he could do much about it anyway. It wasn’t like Crazy Dave would bring him to the hospital. But maybe, if it had been a spider, he could at least try to suck out the poison. Could you do that with spiders, or was it only snakes?

He pushed aside the weeds he’d picked at. Beneath them, a long, sharp piece of metal pointed up at the sky. A nail. He tugged at it and ended up with a two-foot chunk of wood. Someone had pounded the nail through the wood at an angle, and the wood itself was a weird size, maybe excess cut from the rafters when the garage was built and lost here among the grass and weeds ever since. Who knew?

Zach swung the piece of scrap material through the air. It whizzed, and though it seemed a little flimsy, he thought it would last for at least one good, solid swing. Maybe that was all he’d need.

He heard movement inside and hurried to his feet. He was a natural righty, but he couldn’t swing right handed without moving across the open doorway, which might ruin whatever chance he had. Scrambling, he got into position on his side of the door and raised the club over his shoulder. Never in his life could he have hit a baseball like this, but tonight’s baseball would be six feet tall with a head almost the size of home plate, and if he couldn’t manage that, he might as well take the kidnapper’s knife and kill himself. He tensed his arms. When the guy came running through the doorway, he swung his hardest, swung so hard it tingled all the way to his shoulders.

Except it wasn’t the guy.

The other boy stumbled forward and came to rest on his back in the grass, the stripe across his forehead bright red and already bubbling blood. The stick in Zach’s hands had broken clean in half.

—:—:—:—

Dave saw what happened but thought for a second the kid must have hit his head on the doorjamb, that maybe he hadn’t seen where he was going and walked face first into the splinters of ruined wood Dave had left when kicking his way in.

He followed Davy out of the garage and saw Georgie standing there with the broken piece of wood in his hand; he didn’t know whether to clout the boy or shake his hand. He settled on neither.

The mark on Davy’s head was so well defined that Dave could almost see the wood grain stamped into his skin. It bled, but a little pressure would stop it up easily. He yanked at the sleeve of his shirt three times before it ripped free, then pulled it down over his hand and folded it into a small rectangle.

“Georgie.”

The boy stared, mouth opened so wide Dave thought he could have stuck both fists inside.

Dave pressed the pad to Davy’s head and waited for a response. None came, and he picked up the smaller boy and cradled him to his chest. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said. “Go get the dog from wherever you tied him. We’re going home.”

Georgie didn’t move until Dave took a step toward him; then he turned and ran through the grass, pine needles, and fallen leaves.

Clap clap clap
.

Dave held the boy to him with his still-sleeved arm and kept the compress tight against his head with the other.

Davy, his Davy.

And only then did Dave realize what had happened. He’d gotten Davy, he’d replaced himself. His name had been Davy, and then Dave, but now it was neither. He was Hank Abbott. And he was Daddy.

—:—:—:—

Fifteen minutes after the intruder absconded with his son, Mike Pullman jerked on the bedroom floor and opened his eyes.

The lower portion of his face felt raw and broken, like he’d tried to eat a land mine. He reached for it, his finger pulling back once before he’d made contact and then a second time after a poke so gentle he wouldn’t normally have felt it at all.

Tonight, the soft touch was like a full-body tackle without pads or a helmet. He winced, and the movement of his head hurt him that much more.

In addition to the pain in his face, his hip throbbed where the lunatic had stuck him. 

He tried to scream his son’s name despite the agony in his jaw and cheeks but couldn’t get past the first syllable. He flipped onto his hands and knees and finally wobbled to his feet.

He didn’t normally keep a phone in the bedroom, but he’d brought the cordless in from the living room the previous night while making pick-up plans with Libby; it was still here, lying on the bedside table and blinking red.

Low battery.

He tried walking to it, ended up going about forty-five degrees in the wrong direction, and stopped. On the second try, he made it to the phone.

He pressed the talk button with one hand and grabbed his hip with the other. He brought the phone close enough to hear the dial tone but not close enough that it made contact with his face.

Had to hurry before the battery went out on him. He dialed 9-1-1, a service they’d only recently gotten out here in the boonies, which was good because he had no idea what the local number for the sheriff’s department might be and didn’t want to have to bother with the operator. He waited for someone to pick up. Waited. And waited.

He collapsed on the bed before the woman’s voice came onto the line and dropped the phone on the bedspread beside him.

“—emergency—”

It was the only word he heard. “Hemp,” he said and then tried again: “Heelmp ee. Help—”

Beep. Beeb beeb.

The phone had gone dead. Mike thought he might as well have joined it.

PART III

RESCUE

TWENTY-THREE

LIBBY HAD SCRUBBED
her face, ears, and hands three times before stripping, draining an inch or two of water, and lowering herself into the tub. She could have cleaned herself in the bathwater just as easily as in the sink, but she hadn’t wanted to soil it. Washing off the creep’s saliva and then lounging in the water with it floating all around her naked body would have been like taking a bath in a giant, unflushed toilet. Maybe worse.

The water hadn’t yet cooled, which seemed wrong, impossible. In all that time downstairs, her search for the coffee filters, her struggle with Marshall, her frenzied door and window-locking session, the water hadn’t cooled a bit. Not that she minded; the bath-salted water was heaven in a tub.

She lit one of her candles, left the others with the book and the matches on the wide ledge between her head and the bucket of beer, and lolled in the water for a long time with her eyes closed, half asleep and savoring the warmth in her back and legs. Almost half an hour passed before she opened her first beer.

From the bedroom, Paul sang on. The CD had started over at least once and maybe twice since she’d put it on. She hadn’t heard the album enough times to memorize the track listing, didn’t know where in the mix she was, but she knew for sure she’d heard this particular song once already.

For her first beer, she didn’t bother with the lime. She wasn’t going to savor it, though she probably should have. No, this first one was for chugging. If she got one drink in her system fast, she might relax enough to really enjoy the rest.

Images of Marshall pushed their way into her forethoughts, and despite all her mental attempts, she couldn’t shove them all back down into her subconscious. She saw brief glimpses of his shattered glasses and the red mark across his broken nose. She saw the paperbacks fluttering out of his hand like clumsy birds and landing wounded on the countertop and in the sink. She saw the bulge in his pants, which had been surprisingly large, saw the way it throbbed and shifted when he got his hands around her waist, like it was alive down there, trying to chew its way through his trousers.