The intruder—in the doorway of her husband’s study instead of in her son’s mind—glances out the window, and Linda has to suppress an urge to say Don’t look at her.
“Is that your daughter?” Morris asks. “Hey, she’s pretty. I always liked a girl in yellow.”
“What do you want?” Linda asks.
“What’s mine,” Morris says, and shoots her in the head. Blood flies up and spatters red droplets against the glass. It sounds like rain.
41
Tina hears an alarming bang from the house and runs for the kitchen door. It’s the pressure cooker, she thinks. Mom forgot the damn pressure cooker again. This has happened once before, while her mother was making preserves. It’s an old cooker, the kind that sits on the stove, and Pete spent most of one Saturday afternoon on a stepladder, scraping dried strawberry goo off the ceiling. Mom was vacuuming the living room when it happened, which was lucky. Tina hopes to God she wasn’t in the kitchen this time, either.
“Mom?” She runs inside. There’s nothing on the stove. “Mo—”
An arm grabs her around the middle, hard. Tina loses her breath in an explosive whoosh. Her feet rise from the floor, kicking. She can feel whiskers against her cheek. She can smell sweat, sour and hot.
“Don’t scream and I won’t have to hurt you,” the man says into her ear, making her skin prickle. “Do you understand?”
Tina manages to nod, but her heart is hammering and the world is going dark. “Let me—breathe,” she gasps, and the hold loosens. Her feet go back to the floor. She turns and sees a man with a pale face and red lips. There’s a cut on his chin, it looks like a bad one. The skin around it is swollen and blue-black.
“Don’t scream,” he repeats, and raises an admonitory finger. “Do not do that.” He smiles, and if it’s supposed to make her feel better, it doesn’t work. His teeth are yellow. They look more like fangs than teeth.
“What did you do to my mother?”
“She’s fine,” the man with the red lips says. “Where’s your cell phone? A pretty little girl like you must have a cell phone. Lots of friends to chatter and text with. Is it in your pocket?”
“N-N-No. Upstairs. In my room.”
“Let’s go get it,” Morris says. “You’re going to make a call.”
42
Pete’s stop is Elm Street, two blocks over from the house, and the bus is almost there. He’s making his way to the front when his cell buzzes. His relief at seeing his sister’s smiling face in the little window is so great that his knees loosen and he has to grab one of the straphandles.
“Tina! I’ll be there in a—”
“There’s a man here!” Tina is crying so hard he can barely understand her. “He was in the house! He—”
Then she’s gone, and he knows the voice that replaces hers. He wishes to God he didn’t.
“Hello, Peter,” Red Lips says. “Are you on your way?”
He can’t say anything. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. The bus pulls over at the corner of Elm and Breckenridge Terrace, his stop, but Pete only stands there.
“Don’t bother answering that, and don’t bother coming home, because no one will be here if you do.”
“He’s lying!” Tina yells. “Mom is—”
Then she howls.
“Don’t you hurt her,” Pete says. The few other riders don’t look around from their papers or handhelds, because he can’t speak above a whisper. “Don’t you hurt my sister.”
“I won’t if she shuts up. She needs to be quiet. You need to be quiet, too, and listen to me. But first you need to answer two questions. Have you called the police?”
“No.”
“Have you called anyone?”
“No.” Pete lies without hesitation.
“Good. Excellent. Now comes the listening part. Are you listening?”
A large lady with a shopping bag is clambering onto the bus, wheezing. Pete gets off as soon as she’s out of the way, walking like a boy in a dream, the phone plastered to his ear.
“I’m taking your sister with me to a safe place. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks.”
Pete starts to tell him they don’t have to do it that way, he’ll just tell Red Lips where the notebooks are, then realizes doing that would be a huge mistake. Once Red Lips knows they’re in the basement at the Rec, he’ll have no reason to keep Tina alive.
“Are you there, Peter?”
“Y-Yes.”
“You better be. You just better be. Get the notebooks. When you have them—and not before—call your sister’s cell again. If you call for any other reason, I’ll hurt her.”
“Is my mother all right?”
“She’s fine, just tied up. Don’t worry about her, and don’t bother going home. Just get the notebooks and call me.”
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 . . .