“Your size?”

  Rowe hesitated. “Maybe not as tall, but close.”

  “Long hair or short?”

  “Short.”

  “Brown hair or blond?”

  “I don’t know. Brown. No, maybe blond. I don’t know.”

  “That’s ok.” It sounded like Kazen Bates. “What was his voice like?”

  “Mad. Like he was really mad.”

  “Ok. Now you’ve got to tell me what happened.”

  Rowe twisted the shirt until his knuckles were white. His breathing shortened.

  “Hey, I saw H put you on your ass,” I said. “And you saw me with my shorts around my knees while Dawson tried to get me to swing on his dick. We’re officially friends, unless you hate the Dodgers, and then I’ll have to kill you.” He didn’t smile, but some of the blankness in his eyes went away. “A lot of people don’t know what to do when shit happens. Even if they’ve had training. Even if they’re strong and smart and kickass. It’s ok.”

  “He walked into my room. Just walked in. And I lay on the fucking bed and stared at him. I—I froze.” A single, disbelieving bark of laughter escaped Rowe. “By the time I sat up, he had already crossed the room. He flipped me, and he had something—tape, I guess—and he wrapped my wrists. And my brain was telling me to scream or shout, but I couldn’t do anything, and then he put tape over my mouth.” Rowe was crying again, but he didn’t seem to realize it. “He hit me like you said, where my shirt would cover it. My stomach. My chest. My sides. With his fucking belt. I thought he was going to kill me, and I didn’t know why, and I couldn’t breathe cause of the tape, just through my nose, and I was crying so then my nose was all snotty, and I thought that’s how I was going to die, because I couldn’t get any air while he beat the shit out of me. When he finally stopped, he told me he was going to take the tape off, but if I tried to scream, he’d put it back on and we’d keep going. So, he took it off, and I didn’t scream. I just wanted to breathe. I just wanted him to stop.”

  “Rowe, it’s ok. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I did.” The words were caught in a sob. “I really, really fucking did, Jack. And then you came here, and you were so fucking dope, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  He stared down as he wrung the t-shirt between his hands again.

  “Rowe! What did you do?”

  “He wanted to know where a boy named Jack Moreno lived.” He gulped, and I could hear the snot in his throat. “Jack, I am so sorry.”

  Chapter 19

  Overthinking It

  I ran across campus. No mop. No bucket. No disappearing janitor. Just me, and the razor wind off of Timp, and my Stan Smiths carrying me toward the cottage. My mind was playing a million nightmares, like cutting-room snippets from a horror fest: Dad shot; Dad stabbed; Dad with tape over his mouth, struggling to breathe, as Kazen Bates circled him, Kazen with a belt, hurting him in all the places we’d worked so hard to make better after the accident.

  When I crossed the Toqueah, though I stopped. My breathing was tattered, exploding in huge white clouds, and my hands were shaking. I had to think. I couldn’t run straight back there. I had to do this smart, the way Holmes would.

  As the first surge of terror ebbed, the world began to come back into focus, and my thoughts with it. The creek babbled as it passed through the culvert beneath me. A bird—a falcon of some kind—was an ink stamp in the sky. The next breath of frozen air stung my throat and lungs. Ok, I thought. First things first.

  I texted Holmes: I need you.

  I didn’t wait for a reply; either Holmes would come, or he wouldn’t. Instead, I considered my options. Option one was to run straight back to the cottage. If Kazen were torturing Dad, or if he’d hurt Dad and then left, then time was the most important factor.

  But, the other part of my brain said, if it’s a trap, if he’s waiting for you, then running straight home is exactly what he wants you to do.

  And since both options were fucking terrible, I had no idea what to do.

  I tried for a compromise. I scrambled down the slope to the bank of the Toqueah, and then I went north, up the canyon, slipping on wet stone and scraping my hands on the bark of cottonwoods. The Toqueah ran straight up through campus, which meant it was a way to move around without being seen. I’d used it before—once, memorably, the night Sarah Watson had been killed.

  When I got close to the staff housing, I worked my way up the bank and stopped at the tree line. The staff housing was screened off from the rest of campus by a line of scrub oak and aspen and pine—when the trees were bare, you could make out the cottages, but most of the year, they were safely invisible. You know, so the students wouldn’t be troubled by the existence of lesser folk.

  By coming up the Toqueah, I gave myself a view of the staff housing without coming down the side street and making myself visible to anyone who’d been waiting. So, I took advantage of the opportunity to study the street. No black truck, like the one Kazen had brought up to Walker last time. No red sports car, like the one Holmes and I had seen at his house. My breathing eased, and mixed with the smell of the water came the scent of broken pine duff. I pressed my hands against my thighs, aware now that I couldn’t feel my fingertips because of the cold.

  After a few more minutes, I left the trees and jogged toward our cottage. The windows were dark. The doors were shut. That didn’t mean anything; we never locked the doors, a policy I was starting to seriously reconsider. Dad might still be working. But he might be home, waiting for me. To talk.

  For the first time since he’d texted me at breakfast, I wanted to know: talk about what?

  The porch boards creaked when I crossed them, and the front door opened easily. The familiar warmth and sounds of home greeted me, and then a sour-body smell that made me stop in the doorway.

  In the living room, with only the afternoon light slanting through the windows, he was an outline with a few highlights: the pink flush of his cheeks, a glint of cropped brown hair, the black bulk of the pistol in his hand.

  I opened my mouth.

  “Dad’s sleeping,” he said, and his voice wasn’t what I expected—so soft that it approached a lisp. But mean, too. That’s what Rowe had said, and I could hear the coiled-snake meanness in those two words.

  I stood with my hand on the door. Sweat needled me under the arms, across my chest, down my belly.

  Kazen stood. “We’re going for a ride.”

  I still hadn’t moved. The edges of the doorknob cut into my palm.

  “You’re overthinking it,” Kazen said. “We walk down the street. We get in my truck. If you run, I’m not going to chase you. I’m going to walk down the hall, and I’m going to wake up Dad. If you shout, you’re going to wake him up, and that’s the same thing.” His index finger slid from the barrel of the gun to the trigger guard. “You still overthinking it?”

  My throat was too dry, so I shook my head.

  “Ok,” he said. “Here we go.”

  Chapter 20

  The Thing about Duct Tape

  He’d parked at the entrance to campus, so we walked together. I saw one person I knew, Mr. Thompson, who waved, and I nodded and hoped he wouldn’t notice how jerky the motion was. Kazen held the gun low at his thigh. He’d shot at five teenagers in public, in the middle of the day. I didn’t think he’d slow down for Mr. Thompson.

  When we got in the truck, he taped my hands together.

  “Behind your back, bitch,” he said with a kind of weary disinterest.

  Then he made me get down in the footwell. It would have been cramped under any condition, but with my arms bound behind me, I was wedged in. There was no way I could get myself out—let alone do it quickly—and I figured that was the point: I was trapped (and seriously uncomfortable) until he decided to get me out. As he started the truck and we rolled down the canyon, I tried to think about options. Even at a stoplight, I wouldn’t have a chance of jumping out of the truck and getting away. Zero possibility of surprising him with an attack. And nobody would see me. He’d look like a regular guy driving by himself, so if—at some future point, after somebody discovered my corpse—the police tried to figure out how I’d disappeared from campus, everyone who saw the truck, anyone who might remember it, would remember Kazen driving alone. Maybe Mr. Thompson would remember, but by the time he realized he needed to tell somebody, it would be too late.

  That left option number whatever-the-hell.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  The engine rumbled.

  More loudly, I said it again: “You don’t have to do this.”

  We hit a rough patch in the pavement. The truck didn’t bounce as badly as the Geo did, but it still clicked my teeth together, and a jolt ran from my bound arms to my shoulders.

  “I know you think you’re in a bad spot,” I said. I tried to make the words sound calm, compassionate. I wanted to make a connection. Currently, though, the only thing I was making a connection with was the glove box. “I know you think you have to do this. You’re trying to protect yourself. You think this is the only way.”

  His voice was almost as low as the sound of the engine; he still sounded tired. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know you’re in an awful situation.” I twisted, trying to get him in my line of sight, but all I did was jank up my shoulder. “I know what it’s like. A little. I mean, my dad—I didn’t think he cared, but now that I think about it, we never really talked about it. He never said that, you know? That he didn’t care. I guess I was wrong.” My head bounced as we went over a pothole. I closed my eyes. “It’s not like he’ll disown me. I mean, I don’t think he will—”

  “Shut up.”

  “If I tell him I’m bi, he’ll probably just—I don’t know. Hug me or something. But now I know it’s going to be weird. Now I know it’s going to be…bad. If I come home with a guy.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I’m saying I understand it’s hard when what you feel and what your family wants—”

  Over the sounds of the truck, I didn’t hear him move, so I wasn’t prepared when he grabbed my hair. He yanked, and I had to arch my back, my head moving with his hand, so that he didn’t scalp me. A startled cry escaped me, and then, when he kept pulling, a second one, full of pain.

  “I’m not like that.”

  “Ok!”

  “What you’re talking about, that’s not me.”

  “Ok, ok, ok!”

  “I told you to shut your fucking mouth!”

  “Oh my God, I’ll stop, I’ll stop! Please, I’ll stop!”

  He pulled harder, and I felt some of the hair pull out, and this time I screamed. For one terrible moment, I couldn’t move any farther, and he kept pulling, and I was sure he was going to rip more hair out of my head. Then he released me, turning the movement into a shove. My head bounced off the dash hard enough to make my eyes water, but the relief in my scalp was so great that I barely noticed. I slipped down into the footwell again, trying not to break out into tears as my brain started to catch up with my body and all the different agonies pressed to the front of my awareness.

  The walls of the canyon were peeling back, more light filtering into the cab of the truck, when Kazen said, “You’re going to help me get that Holmes boy. Do what I tell you, and nothing bad’s going to happen to you.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  When we got to Kazen’s house, the garage door rolled up to the soft hum of the motor, and we pulled inside. The garage door went down, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim yellow light from the single bulb, Kazen got out of the truck and went around. He opened my door. My shoulders and back, arms and legs—they were all cramping, and the pain took all my attention. I barely noticed when he grabbed my arm and, with his other hand, my hair. He looked at me until I nodded that I understood. Then he applied pressure to my arm, helping me up from the footwell.

  The freedom to move sent blood rushing to every inch of my aching body, along with a fresh wave of hurt. Kazen didn’t give me a chance to slow down, though. He pulled me out of the truck, and it was either stumble along or get my hair ripped out. My legs felt soft, and as he marched me toward the door, my knees kept folding when I didn’t want them to. I caught a whiff of his sweat and the smell of last year’s grass clippings, a hint of gasoline, and then we were inside.

  We crossed his kitchen to the basement stairs.

  “You can go down yourself,” Kazen said. “Or, if you try something funny, I’ll throw you down.”

  I tried to nod, which was hard with him holding my head like that.

  He released me, and because my arms were still bound, I crabbed sideways down the steps to keep my balance. He came with me, always one step behind, obviously still thinking I was going to try something. A hysterical giggle lodged in my throat. He and Rivera should be buddies. They could share conspiracy theories about what kind of shit Jack Moreno was capable of.

  I only had a moment at the bottom of the stairs to take in shadowed outlines of the steel shelves. The now-familiar smell of lubricant and solvent and metal—gun smells, my brain said—met me, and then Kazen caught my hair and my arm again and marched me forward. At one of the doors that Holmes had inspected, he stopped and fished out his keys. He unlocked the door and gave me a two-step bum rush. When he released me, I pitched forward, landed on my knees, and rolled. The room was dark, and I had only an impression of space as I tumbled across the floor. My brain showed me another pressure plate, like the one I’d stepped on before. Only this time, there was no Holmes to disarm it, and I was moving too quickly to stop myself—

  But then I smashed into the wall. I lay there for a moment. Dazed, I was dimly aware of the fact that I’d stopped moving and, somehow, hadn’t exploded. Something moved above me, and Kazen’s outline materialized in the dark. He crouched, patted me down, and took my phone and keys. He rolled me over, found my wallet, and looked through it. After tossing it aside, he got to his feet. He put one foot on my belly and pressed down hard.

  “Don’t give me a reason,” he said.

  The pressure eased, and the outline above me dissolved. Then the door shut, and the lock clicked, and after a while, Kazen’s steps moved away.

  Maybe it was minutes. Maybe it was a lot of minutes. I lay there, staring up at the dark, breathing. The pain in my scalp had faded to discomfort, and now that I wasn’t human origami, the cramps had eased in my legs and back. But my arms and shoulders were killing me. I flopped onto my side and lay there for a while longer. Breathing. In the dark.

  In the past, Holmes had always come for me—a few months before, when Shivers had hunted me down; then again with Dawson; and, of course, with Paxton. He had an uncanny ability to know when I needed him and, against all odds, to show up and kick ass. But hoping that Holmes would miraculously appear and save me wasn’t what our guidance counselor would have called a self-actuating goal, which meant it was the equivalent of sitting on my ass. So, I sat up, wincing as fresh aches hit me.

  First thing, I kicked off the Stan Smiths. Then, although it took some contortionist-level wriggling around, I brought my arms down and under my feet. With my arms in front of me, my shoulders could relax a little. I leaned against the wall to let the burn in my muscles die down. Then I went back to work.

  The thing about duct tape is that everyone thinks it’s amazing for everything—and to be fair, actually, it kind of is. But it’s not perfect for absolutely everything, and if you do enough maintenance work, you start to figure out when duct tape is good and when you’d be better off with something else. Sometimes painter’s tape. Sometimes electrical tape. Sometimes (shocking) no tape at all—my least favorite option.

  And the other thing about spending all that time doing maintenance jobs? You find yourself doing a lot of jobs that require you to hold something in place with one hand while you try to get a strip of tape with your other. And that means using your teeth to tear the tape.

  Saying I chewed through the tape is undignified and inaccurate. I nibbled. I did some light biting. I savaged the tape with my teeth sounds appropriately butch. And once I got a tear going, I could twist my hands back and forth to spread the tear, and after enough of that, my hands were free.

  Downsides: you lose some skin off your lips, and your mouth tastes like adhesive-slash-ass.

  Other downsides? Ripping the tape off my arms meant losing some more skin and accompanying arm-hairs.

  The important part was that I was free. My pulse was pounding, body felt warm and charged, and I was ready to kick some ass. Or at least get out of here and successfully run away.

  I took a moment to examine the room. Like the one where Holmes and I had entered, the window was a horizontal slider that led to a window well. It was still afternoon, but the angle of the house meant that little sunlight reached the basement window, leaving the room only dimly lit. No pressure plate marked the floor, but I inched over to the window anyway, testing each step.

  When I got to the window, I let out a breath. A wire ran across the bottom of the window. Another wire was connected to the latch. They both ran to a small gray block of what looked like (but most definitely was not) plastic.

  Great. Another booby trap. Why couldn’t he have used a pressure plate? Why did he have to change it up? But maybe this was like home decorating for prepper extremists. Showcase your arts and crafts for visitors by including a variety of deadly explosives.

  The window was out—for now—so I collected my wallet and moved to the door. This was more in my wheelhouse. I’d had to fix my share of doors at Walker—when a kid busted the hinges, or when time had made them stick in the jamb, or when some asshole put his foot through a hollow-core. They weren’t all that complicated.

  Someone—most likely Kazen—had switched the door; normally, interior doors, especially in a home, opened inward. That meant the hinges were on the inside. Pop the hinges, and you could remove the whole door. This door, however, was hung to open out, with the hinges on the other side. I guessed that was an after-market change. It told me that, in addition to the fact that Kazen was crazy, he had planned on the possibility, at least, of holding someone captive. On the other hand, he hadn’t planned enough to install a deadbolt, so I decided he was crazy with a dash of stupid.

 

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