With that, Red Lips is gone. Pete doesn’t have time to tell him he has to go home, because he’ll need Tina’s wagon again to haul the cartons. He also needs to get his father’s key to the Rec. He returned it to the board in his father’s office, and he needs it to get in.
43
Morris slips Tina’s pink phone into his pocket and yanks a cord from her desktop computer. ‘Turn around. Hands behind you.’
‘Did you shoot her?’ Tears are running down Tina’s cheeks. ‘Was that the sound I heard? Did you shoot my moth—’
Morris slaps her, and hard. Blood flies from Tina’s nose and the corner of her mouth. Her eyes widen in shock.
‘You need to shut your quack and turn around. Hands behind you.’
Tina does it, sobbing. Morris ties her wrists together at the small of her back, cinching the knots viciously.
‘Ow! Ow, mister! That’s too tight!’
‘Deal with it.’ He wonders vaguely how many shots might be left in his old pal’s gun. Two will be enough; one for the thief and one for the thief’s sister. ‘Walk. Downstairs. Out the kitchen door. Let’s go. Hup-two-three-four.’
She looks back at him, her eyes huge and bloodshot and swimming with tears. ‘Are you going to rape me?’
‘No,’ Morris says, then adds something that is all the more terrifying because she doesn’t understand it: ‘I won’t make that mistake again.’
44
Linda comes to staring at the ceiling. She knows where she is, Tom’s office, but not what has happened to her. The right side of her head is on fire, and when she raises a hand to her face, it comes away wet with blood. The last thing she can remember is Peggy Moran telling her that Tina had gotten sick at school.
Go get her and take her home, Peggy had said. I’ll cover this.
No, she remembers something else. Something about the mystery money.
I was going to talk to Pete about it, she thinks. Get some answers. I was playing solitaire on Tom’s computer, just killing time while I waited for him to come home, and then—
Then, black.
Now, this terrible pain in her head, like a constantly slamming door. It’s even worse than the migraines she sometimes gets. Worse even than childbirth. She tries to raise her head and manages to do it, but the world starts going in and out with her heartbeat, first sucking, then blooming, each oscillation accompanied by such godawful agony …
She looks down and sees the front of her gray dress has changed to a muddy purple. She thinks, Oh God, that’s a lot of blood. Have I had a stroke? Some kind of brain hemorrhage?
Surely not, surely those only bleed on the inside, but whatever it is, she needs help. She needs an ambulance, but she can’t make her hand go to the phone. It lifts, trembles, and drops back to the floor.
She hears a yelp of pain from somewhere close, then crying she’d recognize anywhere, even while dying (which, she suspects, she may be). It’s Tina.
She manages to prop herself up on one bloody hand, enough to look out the window. She sees a man hustling Tina down the back steps into the yard. Tina’s hands are tied behind her.
Linda forgets about her pain, forgets about needing an ambulance. A man has broken in, and he’s now abducting her daughter. She needs to stop him. She needs the police. She tries to get into the swivel chair behind the desk, but at first she can only paw at the seat. She does a lunging sit-up and for a moment the pain is so intense the world turns white, but she holds onto consciousness and grabs the arms of the chair. When her vision clears, she sees the man opening the back gate and shoving Tina through. Herding her, like an animal on its way to the slaughterhouse.
Bring her back! Linda screams. Don’t you hurt my baby!
But only in her head. When she tries to get up, the chair turns and she loses her grip on the arms. The world darkens. She hears a terrible gagging sound before she blacks out, and has time to think, Can that be me?
45
Things are not golden after the rotary. Instead of open street, they see backed-up traffic and two orange signs. One says FLAGGER AHEAD. The other says ROAD CONSTRUCTION. There’s a line of cars waiting while the flagger lets downtown traffic go through. After three minutes of sitting, each one feeling an hour long, Hodges tells Jerome to use the side streets.
‘I wish I could, but we’re blocked in.’ He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, where the line of cars behind them is now backed up almost to the rotary.
Holly has been bent over her iPad, whacking away. Now she looks up. ‘Use the sidewalk,’ she says, then goes back to her magic tablet.
‘There are mailboxes, Hollyberry,’ Jerome says. ‘Also a chainlink fence up ahead. I don’t think there’s room.’
She takes another brief look. ‘Yeah, there is. You may scrape a little, but it won’t be the first time for this car. Go on.’
‘Who pays the fine if I get arrested on a charge of driving while black? You?’