He thinks she was.
I’m taking her to a safe place, Red Lips had said. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks.
Can it be?
Of course it can. If Red Lips grew up in Pete’s house, he would have spent time at the Rec. All the kids in the neighborhood spent time there, until it closed. And he must have known about the path, because the trunk was buried less than twenty paces from where it crossed the stream.
But he doesn’t know about the notebooks, Pete thinks. Not yet.
Unless he found out since the last call, that is. If so, he will have taken them already. He’ll be gone. That would be okay if he’s left Tina alive. And why wouldn’t he? What reason would he have to kill her once he has what he wants?
For revenge, Pete thinks coldly. To get back at me. I’m the thief who took the notebooks, I hit him with a bottle and got away at the bookstore, and I deserve to be punished.
He gets up and staggers as a wave of lightheadedness rushes through him. When it passes, he crosses the creek. On the other side, he begins to run again.
49
The front door of 23 Sycamore is standing open. Hodges is out of the Mercedes before Jerome has brought it fully to a stop. He runs inside, one hand in his pocket, gripping the Happy Slapper. He hears tinkly music he knows well from hours spent playing computer solitaire.
He follows the sound and finds a woman sitting—sprawling—beside a desk in an alcove that has been set up as an office. One side of her face is swollen and drenched in blood. She looks at him, trying to focus.
“Pete,” she says, and then, “He took Tina.”
Hodges kneels and carefully parts the woman’s hair. What he sees is bad, but nowhere near as bad as it could be; this woman has won the only lottery that really matters. The bullet put a groove six inches long in her scalp, has actually exposed her skull in one place, but a scalp wound isn’t going to kill her. She’s lost a lot of blood, though, and is suffering from both shock and concussion. This is no time to question her, but he has to. Morris Bellamy is laying down a trail of violence, and Hodges is still at the wrong end of it.
“Holly. Call an ambulance.”
“Pete . . . already did,” Linda says, and as if her weak voice has conjured it, they hear a siren. It’s still distant but approaching fast. “Before . . . he left.”
“Mrs. Saubers, did Pete take Tina? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. He. The man.”
“Did he have red lips, Mrs. Saubers?” Holly asks. “Did the man who took Tina have red lips?”
“Irish . . . lips,” she says. “But not . . . a redhead. White. He was old. Am I going to die?”
“No,” Hodges says. “Help is on the way. But you have to help us. Do you know where Peter went?”
“Out . . . back. Through the gate. Saw him.”
Jerome looks out the window and sees the gate standing ajar. “What’s back there?”
“A path,” she says wearily. “The kids used it . . . to go to the Rec. Before it closed. He took . . . I think he took the key.”
“Pete did?”
“Yes . . .” Her eyes move to a board with a great many keys hung on it. One hook is empty. The DymoTape beneath it reads BIRCH ST. REC.
Hodges comes to a decision. “Jerome, you’re with me. Holly, stay with Mrs. Saubers. Get a cold cloth to put on the side of her head.” He draws in breath. “But before you do that, call the police. Ask for my old partner. Huntley.”
He expects an argument, but Holly just nods and picks up the phone.
“He took his father’s lighter, too,” Linda says. She seems a little more with it now. “I don’t know why he would do that. And the can of Ronson’s.”
Jerome looks a question at Hodges, who says: “It’s lighter fluid.”
50
Pete keeps to the shade of the trees, just as Morris and Tina did, although the boys who were playing basketball have gone home to dinner and left the court deserted except for a few crows scavenging spilled potato chips. He sees a small car nestled in the loading dock. Hidden there, actually, and the vanity license plate is enough to cause any doubts Pete might have had to disappear. Red Lips is here, all right, and he can’t have taken Tina in by the front. That door faces the street, which is apt to be fairly busy at this time of day, and besides, he has no key.
Pete passes the car, and at the corner of the building, he drops to his knees and peers around. One of the basement windows is open. The grass and weeds that were growing in front of it have been beaten down. He hears a man’s voice. They’re down there, all right. So are the notebooks. The only question is whether or not Red Lips has found them yet.
Pete withdraws and leans against the sunwarmed brick, wondering what to do next. Think, he tells himself. You got Tina into this and you need to get her out of it, so think, goddam you!
Only he can’t. His mind is full of white noise.
In one of his few interviews, the ever-irritable John Rothstein expressed his disgust with the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. Story ideas came from nowhere, he proclaimed. They arrived without the polluting influence of the author’s intellect. The idea that comes to Pete now also seems to arrive from nowhere. It’s both horrible and horribly attractive. It won’t work if Red Lips has already discovered the notebooks, but if that is the case, nothing will work.
Pete gets up and circles the big brick cube the other way, once more passing the green car with its tattletale license plate. He stops at the front right corner of the abandoned brick box, looking at the going-home traffic on Birch Street. It’s like peering through a window and into a different world, one where things are normal. He takes a quick inventory: cell phone, cigarette lighter, can of lighter fluid. The can was in the bottom desk drawer with his father’s Zippo. The can is only half full, based on the slosh when he shakes it, but half full will be more than enough.
He goes around the corner, now in full view of Birch Street, trying to walk normally and hoping that no one—Mr. Evans, his old Little League coach, for instance—will hail him.
No one does. This time he knows which of the two keys to use, and this time it turns easily in the lock. He opens the door slowly, steps into the foyer, and eases the door closed. It’s musty and brutally hot in here. For Tina’s sake, he hopes it’s cooler in the basement. How scared she must be, he thinks.
If she’s still alive to feel anything, an evil voice whispers back. Red Lips could have been standing over her dead body and talking to himself. He’s crazy, and that’s what crazy people do.
On Pete’s left, a flight of stairs leads up to the second floor, which consists of a single large space running the length of the building. The official name was The North Side Community Room, but the kids had a different name for it, one Red Lips probably remembers.