“She is my kid. We came out here in the night. We came together, side by side. As brothers. That means she’s my kid. She doesn’t just belong to you.”
“You don’t have kids. You don’t know.”
“Oh, fuck that, Tom. You know, I’m tired of your sad-sack routine. The ‘Nobody loved me’ bullshit. I stood by you throughout our childhood. I was there for you. And now you throw it back at me and treat me this way. Fuck you, Tom.”
I took a short, futile swing at his face in the dark. I meant to hit him hard, to drive him back and hurt him. But he ducked away.
He reached back and pushed his door open. He didn’t say anything. He came around the front of the car, his body passing through the headlights, and then he stopped at my door, pulling it open.
I didn’t have time to react or think. He opened the door and reached in, taking me by the front of my shirt.
“What the fuck?” I said.
He kept pulling, the fabric of my shirt digging into the back of my neck, until I stopped resisting and allowed myself to be brought out into the night air. I tried to knock his grip free, but couldn’t. He held on; then something jolted the side of my face. It took a second for me to realize I’d been hit, that Buster had punched me in the left jaw. I fell back against the car, but he pulled me forward and hit me again, stunning me. My knee joints loosened and I started to crumple. As I went to the ground, he swung a last time, catching me in the back of the head and knocking me flat to the ground beside the car. The ground was cold. Dirt and gravel pressed against my face. I didn’t try to push myself up.
Buster’s shoes came into my line of sight. He was wearing work boots for some reason. I knew what might come next, and it did. He drew one of the boots back and kicked forward. I managed to curl up a little, and the boot struck me just below the rib cage on my left side.
“You’re lucky I don’t kill you,” he said.
The pain seared through me, radiating out like an electric charge, into my back and down my left leg. I couldn’t talk.
“I’m through with you,” he said, the words falling upon me like spittle.
I thought he’d kick again, but he didn’t. He shoved my door closed; then the shoes disappeared around the front of the car. I managed to roll away, putting a few feet between the car and me. He dropped it into gear and hit the gas hard, sending a spray of gravel into my face and over my body. And when he was gone, I just lay there on the side of the road, curled up in the dark like a broken and terrified child.
Chapter Forty-seven
Ilay on the side of the road for a long while, staring at the stars, waiting for the pain in my side to go away. The stars and winking satellites offered no comfort or conclusions, nothing I could orient myself by or make sense of.
When the pain eased, I pushed myself up. The landscape whirled and tilted before me, the lights on the nearby highway blurring together and swimming. I thought for a moment I was seriously hurt, concussed or wounded in such a way I’d need to call for help. But after a couple of minutes on my feet, as I gathered my senses and balance, the world steadied. My equilibrium returned, and only the pain in my side remained.
I didn’t have anyone to call. To wake up Abby would invite questions and examinations about how and why I’d ended up in that neighborhood in the middle of the night. To call anyone would invite such questions. And the only other person I could call had just left me here on the side of the road.
The walking did me good. Five miles to home, moving at a snail’s pace. I worked the painful muscles loose, the ones that were clenched and stretched while not just one but two different men assaulted me. I tried to understand how I’d come to be in the place I was. The wheel of fortune had spun, and the arrow had landed on me: I’d been the guy whose daughter was taken. And then the wheel spun again, an even more unusual and perhaps crueler fate: I’d also been the guy to get his daughter back. Was it a mark of my confusion that I still couldn’t decide which was the worse fate to suffer?
By the time I reached the house, the sky was turning gray with first light. My feet hurt, and all I wanted to do was fall asleep in my own bed. But the wheel of fortune would turn one more time.
I saw Ryan’s car out front. It was just six-thirty, way too early for him to be there unless something was going on.
I thought I knew. Buster. He’d called them and told all. The girl in the cemetery, the trip to Colter’s, my interest in dealing with the man who’d taken my daughter.
Having nowhere else to go and no energy with which to do it, I went up the steps to face the music.
Ryan and Abby were in the living room. Abby was dressed, but I could tell by her hair that she wasn’t showered. When I entered the room, their heads turned in unison, as though they were part of a well-rehearsed stage act.
“Where have you been, Tom?” Abby asked.
“I was out taking a walk.”
“You’ve been gone for hours.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Are you hurt, Tom?” Ryan asked, sizing me up.