On the long drive from Boulder, she’d hated the quiet stretches between songs, because that’s when her mind went into overdrive. Remembering things she’d called her mother. New pains. New regrets. And now she rethought Ed’s answer to her question, when she’d asked how serious Jay’s four missed injections were. He hadn’t mouthed later.
No, she realized with a sinking heart. He’d said something different.
He’d said fatal.
Jay would die if she remained under the care of Ashley and Lars tonight. Even if they hadn’t planned to murder her, they were still clueless about how to handle her adrenal condition. And her time was running out.
But really, it made perfect sense that the Garver brothers would turn out to be tragically inept kidnappers. Ashley may have had a cruel streak a mile wide, but he clearly wasn’t methodical enough to quarterback a ransom operation. He improvised too much, and he toyed with his victims. And Lars? Just a whiskered man-child, a soft and undeveloped psyche Ashley had molded into his own morbid image. These two overgrown kids were unprepared for the complexity and scale of what they were attempting. They weren’t remotely qualified for it. They were something far worse.
In a dark Walmart parking lot a few years back, watching a crackhead with a buzz-cut break into their Subaru from the safe lights of the Home and Garden section, she remembered her mother holding her shoulder and telling her: Don’t fear the pros, Darby. The pros know what they’re doing, and do it cleanly.
Fear the amateurs.
“They’re . . .” Sandi cupped her hands against the window. “Okay. Ashley just carried something out of his van. An . . . orange box.”
Ed knelt to Jay. “When they come, you’re going to get behind the counter. You’ll close your eyes. And whatever happens, you won’t come out. Understand?”
The girl nodded. “Okay.”
Over Jay’s head, Darby mouthed to Ed: How do we treat her?
“We . . . we get her to a hospital. That’s all we can do,” he whispered, leaning close. “I’ve only dealt with it in dogs, and even then I’ve only seen it a few times. I just know she’s in a shock period right now. Her body isn’t creating adrenaline — it’s called an Addisonian crisis — so if things get scary or intense, her body could trigger a seizure, or coma, or worse. We need to control her stress level. And keep her environment as calm and peaceful as possible—”
Sandi gasped from the window. “Ashley’s got a . . . oh God, is that a nail gun?”
“Yeah,” Darby said, turning back to Ed. “Not happening.”
*
Ashley clicked a battery into his Paslode IMCT cordless nailer and waited for the little green light to blink.
Back in his father’s days (the golden years of Fox Contracting), to get any sort of power behind a fired nail, you needed an air compressor and several yards of rubber hose. Now it was all batteries and fuel cells — stuff you can carry in your pocket.
Ashley’s model was bright, Sesame Street-orange. Sixteen pounds. The Paslode decal worn away. Nails fed from a cylindrical magazine, which had always reminded Ashley of the drum on John Dillinger’s tommy gun. The nails’ lengths are measured in pennies, for some ass-backwards medieval reason, and these ones were 16-pennies, or roughly three-and-a-half inches. Designed to spear into 2x4 lumber. They can penetrate human flesh up to ten feet away, and at distances beyond that, they’re still twirling shards of vicious metal, screaming through the air at nine hundred feet per second.
Cool, right?
Ashley may have spectacularly failed at the day-to-day management of Fox Contracting, but boy-howdy, he sure loved the toys that came with it. Fortunately his father was now too busy forgetting his own name and shitting in a bag to see what had become of the family legacy under Ashley’s leadership. Both specialists unceremoniously laid off, the web domain expired, the phone still ringing sporadically but going to voicemail. Sometimes driving the Fox Contracting van with that peeling cartoon character felt like piloting a big corpse; a dried-out husk of his father’s dreams and hard work.
See, when Wall Street failed, the feds stepped in and bailed them out with other people’s money. When your little Mom-and-Pop outfit fails, well, you have to take the bailout into your own hands. It’s the American way.
Ashley hefted the Paslode nailer and palmed the muzzle with his left hand, defeating the nose-safety with an effortless push. Then a squeeze of the trigger . . .
THWUMP.
A 16-penny pierced the front tire of Darby’s Honda. The black rubber deflated with a hiss.
Lars watched.
Ashley kicked the tire, feeling it soften. Then he leaned and fired another — THWUMP — into the Honda’s rear tire.
“Don’t be nervous, baby brother. We’ll sort this out.” Ashley circled the car and pierced the other tires as he spoke — THWUMP, THWUMP. “Just some dirty work tonight, and then we’ll go see Uncle Kenny. Okay?”
“Okay.”
His voice lowered, like he was sharing a dangerous secret: “And something else I forgot to mention. Remember his Xbox One?”
“Yeah?”
“He has the newest Gears of War.”
“Okay.” Lars’s smile solidified, and Ashley felt a pang of sympathy for his dear baby brother. He wasn’t cut out for this, but that wasn’t his fault. How could it be? He’d had no control over whether his mother chugged two vineyards a day while she’d carried him. Poor Lars had been genetically kneecapped before he even drew his first breath. The shittiest of shitty deals.
Quickly, he double-checked the light on his Paslode — still green. Cold weather was notoriously hard on their batteries, and he only had two. The last thing he’d need would be for his nailer to go powerless when he had it pressed to Darby’s temple. How embarrassing would that be.
In terms of raw firepower, Lars’s .45-caliber Beretta Cougar was the obvious winner — you don’t enter a gunfight with a cordless nailer and expect to win. And it would take quite a few three-and-a-half-inchers to reliably put a human down. Worse, the projectiles themselves rarely penetrate anything beyond ten feet. But Ashley Garver loved the nailer, he supposed, for all the things that made it a deeply impractical man-killing weapon. He loved it because it was heavy, cumbersome, inaccurate, scary, and gruesome.
All artists express themselves through their instruments, right?
This was Ashley’s.
“Come on, baby brother.” He pointed with his nailer. “Get your war face on.”
The Paslode’s cylinder magazine held thirty-five 16-penny nails, fed in little five-nail racks. He’d fired four. He still had more than enough to turn a human into a screaming porcupine. Walking beside him, Lars racked the slide on the Beretta the way he’d been taught, dutifully checking to ensure there was a chambered round.
“Gears of War 4, right?” he asked as they walked. “Not last year’s?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t you dare shoot Darby,” Ashley reminded him. “She’s mine.”
*
“They’re coming.”
“I know.”
“Now they have a nail gun—”
“I know, Sandi.”
Jay clasped her temples like she was warding off a headache, rocking against the flipped table legs. “Please, please, don’t argue—”
“Ed, they’re going to kill us—”