The man with the baseball bat stood motionless. Five seconds passed. Finally he took a step and a half backward, then turned, retreated inside, pulled shut the door. The other man slid inside the car again and softly closed his door.
Thomas Huston could not breathe. He could hear the sound of breathing coming from his mouth, one quick gasp after another, but he could get no air into his lungs. There was only blackness now, no oxygen, everything extinguished by the face of the man with the baseball bat, the voice of the man in the car. He had recognized both of them. And now, everything else except that knowledge was suffocated, stabbed out. Huston stumbled backward, back through the trees, falling against one and then another until he finally wheeled around, gasping for air, sucking in the blackness, plunging blindly through the branches. He could not breathe, could not think, could do nothing but plunge deeper and deeper into the woods while his chest ached as if stabbed again and again and again by the knife of recognition.
Forty-Two
With his car radio turned low, DeMarco could occasionally hear a particularly loud blast of rock music from inside Whispers, and it never failed to set his teeth on edge. More often, he felt the noise as a thrum of vibration on his skin, a recurring itch. He had the radio tuned to Erie’s NPR station in hopes that the soft-voiced host and the strains of Coltrane and Monk would lessen the unquiet he felt, the jitteriness that resulted from having to sit too long with empty hands and a sober mind. He had been watching the parking lot for nearly eighty minutes now, only a few minutes longer than Morgan and Carmichael had been inside, dressed like golfers fresh from nineteen holes. During that time, each trooper had made a visit to the men’s room to make a cell phone call to DeMarco. Bonnie remained at her station behind the bar, they reported, and displayed no signs of nervousness, no particular interest in anybody there. None of the customers bore any resemblance to Thomas Huston.
DeMarco could not have explained, had he been asked to do so, why he expected Huston to show up there tonight. Yet he felt certain of it. Somehow, this place or Huston’s relationship with Bonnie was integral to the slaughter at the Huston home. DeMarco knew it, Huston knew it, Bonnie knew it. And Huston was a creature of routine, a man who, like many, employed routine as a palliative, a damp blanket laid over the fires within. He had spent several Thursday nights in a row in the same place Bonnie had, even the one Thursday night neither had shown up at Whispers—this, DeMarco knew in his gut. Then Claire, Tommy, Alyssa, and Ryan had been murdered, and Huston had been spotted wandering through the dawn in a daze. Now it was Thursday night again. Where else would Huston go, distraught as he surely was, consumed by either guilt or rage?
DeMarco checked his wristwatch again: 10:07. “Where the fuck are you?” he said.
Finally he had to admit to himself that he had been wrong. Huston was not coming. DeMarco sent a text message to both troopers: Send her out. With luck, one of them would feel the vibration through the booming rattle of Def Leppard.
A quarter of an hour later, the door at the rear of the building swung open. A woman stood there in the yellow light, peering out, slowly scanning the row of vehicles. DeMarco could not see her face because she was backlit, but she was wearing loose slacks and a short-sleeved, collared shirt—not a dancer’s outfit. DeMarco opened his car door, leaned out, and said, “Over here,” blinked his flashlight once, then pulled his door shut.
Now Bonnie came toward him without hesitation, long, angry strides. Whispers’s door banged closed behind her, and in the sudden darkness, he lost her for half a minute, then found her again as she neared the front of his car. He leaned across the seat and popped open the passenger door.
She put both hands on the roof, bent down to look in at him. “All right, so what’s this about?”
“We’re having a conversation,” he told her. “Get in.”
She blinked twice, and now he saw the anger in her eyes for what it was, a mask for something else. When she spoke, there was no heat in her voice, only the chill of fear. “I have a business to run, you know.”
“Not if you don’t get in,” he said.
She drew back then, straightened up, looked toward Whispers. “This is bullshit,” she said. DeMarco said nothing. He was feeling better now, less jittery.
She climbed in and slammed the door and sat there glaring at him. He shut off the radio. Then he turned to her and smiled.
“This is harassment,” she said.
His smile did not waver. “Where were you two Thursday nights ago?” he asked.
He felt the flinch more than saw it, knew that even with the dome light on, he would not have seen it on her face but he had felt the negative energy of it, sudden and brief and then gone. “Where do you think I was?” she said. “Same place I always am. I was here. Working. Tending to my business.”
“If you’re going to start this conversation with a lie, Bonnie, we can have this conversation somewhere else. Someplace where the seats aren’t as comfortable.”