He heard Inman stand, but the man did not rush toward him. Calmly, Inman said, “Seems to me like you’re the one with nowhere to go.”
So no gun, DeMarco thought, or he would have shot me already. A knife is more fun. He wants to play awhile.
DeMarco climbed to his feet and faced him. He held the beer bottle behind his leg. “Anybody ever tell you that you stink?” he asked. “Literally. You smell like a fucking ashtray.”
Inman grunted again and strode around the back of the recliner.
DeMarco swung at the hips, brought the bottle up in a wide arc toward the side of Inman’s head. But Inman leaned back from the waist and the momentum of DeMarco’s swing pulled him off balance and he fell into the recliner again, his back against one armrest, legs one atop the other. Inman moved quickly then, stabbed a hand around DeMarco’s throat, yanked him forward off the front of the recliner, hammered his head onto the carpeted floor.
DeMarco raised his arm so as to smash the bottle against Inman’s body, but every movement felt glacial, heavy and drugged and slow, and before the bottle could make contact, DeMarco’s arm was pushed to the floor and pinned under Inman’s knee. DeMarco tried to drive his free hand upward through the heavy air, push his fingers through the heavy darkness and into Inman’s eyes, but Inman blocked it with his elbow, then yanked DeMarco up off the floor and smashed his head down again, and for just a moment, the room flared red, then blinked into darkness and sucked DeMarco all the way down to the black basement far below the sweet nothing.
Fifty-Eight
A distant sound of breaking glass. No, not glass, too sustained. More like bells, jingle bells. Christmas? The ice cream man?
Whatever the sound it was getting closer, louder, or else DeMarco was getting closer to it, coming up out of the blackness, the hole that had sucked him down. He tried to move, lift his head, open his eyes, but his brain throbbed with every pulsebeat now, felt too big for his skull, Christ the pain of it. And that jingling sound only made it worse, so fucking loud now. And there was something wrong with his arms, his body—he couldn’t even get his mouth to open. What the fuck is the matter? Why can’t I move?
Second by second, the darkness grew thinner, and DeMarco pushed up through it toward a diffuse glow that he thought might be the sun. He thought he might be underwater and pushing toward the surface, but he realized then that he was breathing through his nose, that the air was warm. The light was not the sun. He was sitting—no, lying on his back. The jingling sound near his head now, metallic. Something cold touched his ear and he jerked away from it. The weight of the darkness was evaporating, and he could open his eyes now, saw nothing but light and smelled the stink of cigarette smoke in his face and realized then that he had been unconscious, and now he knew where he was and he knew that he was fucked.
He was lying beneath the floor lamp in the corner of the room. Inman leaning close, smiling, jingling a key ring against DeMarco’s ear. DeMarco leaned away from him. Looked down the length of his body. Wrists bound with duct tape, arms bound tightly to his sides. Ankles bound too. A strip of tape pulling hard and tight across his mouth.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Inman said.
DeMarco looked across the room. The blue digital readout said 3:42. Only a few minutes, DeMarco thought. Long enough to be thoroughly screwed.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Inman said. “You following this?”
DeMarco turned his head. Inman on his knees, face too close, stink all through him. Inman dragging on a cigarette. Smoke stinging DeMarco’s bad eye, fouling up the house.
“I got your keys here,” Inman told him, and jingled the key ring in his face. “Thanks for leaving them on the counter. So I thought maybe you and me could take us a ride in that sorry-ass car you got parked out back. Go up to Niagara Falls maybe? Scoot into Canada for a while? I saw you got a police radio in your car, so we’ll have some entertainment along the way. What do you think? You up for a road trip?”
DeMarco’s heart and brain hammered in syncopation. Both eyes stung from the smoke, the left eye watered. He was breathing hard, quick rasps of air through his nose. His answer was a furious, inarticulate mumble behind the tape. “I’ll fucking kill you, you worthless fucking piece of shit.”
“Excellent,” Inman said. He stood, held the cigarette in his mouth, leaned down, and seized DeMarco under both arms and yanked him to his feet. They stood face to face. Inman took the cigarette from between his lips, blew out the smoke. With his free hand, he drew a long, heavy-handled knife from the leather sheath strapped to his belt, and he laid the side of the blade against DeMarco’s cheek, the point near the corner of his good eye.
Inman said, “There’s a couple places up along the border where I’m pretty sure we can slip through. We do, I just might let you go. We don’t…” He grinned and took another drag from the cigarette. Then, “We clear on this?”