Lewis reached into the backpack and brought out a roll of gray duct tape. He tossed it to Nicole. “Be my guest.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “It’s just like I said. We don’t know anything.”
Nicole tore off a six-inch strip and slapped it over my mouth.
“Don’t do that to me,” Thomas said as Nicole started tearing off another strip. “Don’t do that to me!”
He was in midscream as she applied the tape. His mouth was half open, and one side of the tape was caught on his lower teeth, allowing Thomas to keep moving his jaw.
“Shit,” she said, and tore off another strip to seal the bottom half of his mouth. “Okay, we’re good.”
Lewis zipped up the backpack, slipped the strap over one shoulder, then picked up the computer tower with two hands.
Just then, a very faint ringing.
“What’s that?” Nicole said. “That your cell?”
“No,” Lewis said. He was looking around the room and his eyes landed on the old landline phone on Thomas’s desk, still there from the days when he used dial-up for the Internet and had his own number.
It was flashing red with an incoming call. Thomas always kept the ring volume very low, and he hardly got any calls, anyway. I couldn’t think of anyone who might be calling him. It could only be one of two things. A wrong number, or a telemarketer.
But Nicole and Lewis wouldn’t know that.
“Answer it or not answer it?” Lewis asked Nicole.
She was thinking, watching the light flash. “If someone’s expecting him to be here, and he isn’t…”
Thomas’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head, looking at that flashing red light.
Lewis snatched up the receiver. The first thing he did was cough, then sniff. When he spoke, he adopted the tone of someone sick with a cold.
“Hello?”
After a short pause, he said, “It’s Thomas.” Another sniff. “I’m coming down with something. Who’s this?”
Half a beat went by. Then Lewis said, “Bill who?”
His eyebrows popped up momentarily, and then he smiled. “Yeah, well, I’d love to chat, Bill, but it’s my bowling night with Dubya.”
He hung up the phone. Nicole was looking at him, waiting for an explanation.
“Crank call,” he said. “Some asshole pretending to be Bill Clinton.”
I glanced at Thomas. I’m sure I looked more surprised than he did, because he didn’t look surprised at all. Annoyed, maybe, that he hadn’t been able to speak to the former president.
FIFTY-SEVEN
IF it hadn’t been for the tape, I probably would have said something along the lines of holy shit.
But neither Nicole nor Lewis had given the call another thought. They had other things on their minds. Like hitting the road, with Thomas and me as baggage.
Lewis headed out of the room first, the computer tower in his arms. Nicole motioned with her ice pick for us to follow. As we reached the top of the stairs I caught a glimpse of the front door swinging shut, Lewis already outside. My hands still bound behind me, I wondered whether there was anything I could do now that Nicole was, briefly, without her partner.
But what could I hope to accomplish? She had a weapon, and I had no free hand. I thought about something as simple as running. Bolting past Thomas, heading out the back door and into the night. Down the hill, through the creek, and once I was into the fields beyond, keeping low and out of sight until I got to some nearby house, where I could call the police.
It would mean leaving Thomas on his own, but abandoning him—briefly—might be my best chance of saving him.
These thoughts were running through my head—when it was Thomas who bolted.
He jumped down the last couple of steps. I expected him to do what I’d been thinking, and run to the back of the house, but he managed to wedge his foot into the front door before it closed all the way and kicked it open so he could run out onto the porch.
It wasn’t an escape attempt. Thomas was going after his computer tower.
“Lewis!” Nicole shouted from two steps above me. Before I could do anything, she reached down and grabbed my shirt collar. “Don’t even think it,” she said, and I felt the tip of the ice pick touch the soft skin just under my right ear.
Outside, I heard something crash, then some scuffling in the gravel.
We went down the rest of the stairs at a steady pace. By the time we got outside, Thomas was on his back, looking up at Lewis, his body arched awkwardly with his hands cuffed behind him. A couple of feet away, the computer tower was on its side by the back of a white, mostly windowless van.
Lewis dragged Thomas to his feet. Then he and Nicole corralled us at the rear doors of the van, which were still closed.