“I’m gonna do the broad. You want, you can have seconds. But this is her last night on earth. Now give it a rest and fix some sandwiches.”
“I’m getting thin. I need something.”
“Check in her medicine cabinet. Maybe she’s got some diet pills.”
“You said it’d be clean, in and out. Just straightening out some punks, you said. She’s a cop. We’re gonna do her old man, too, a guy in a wheelchair? You know what’ll happen if they get their hands on us?”
“Shut up.”
The kitchen window was open and I could hear them pulling open drawers, rattling silverware, cracking the cap on a bottle of beer.
Get to a phone, I thought.
No, she could be dead before I got back.
I stepped off the porch, easing the screen shut behind me, and went through the shadows of the pecan tree into her father’s old welding shed. On top of a workbench was a thick-handled, grease-stained ball peen hammer, with a head the size of a half-brick.
I went back down the driveway, crouching under the windows, and pulled open the storm doors on the cellar’s entrance. The steps were cement and caked with a film of dried mud and blackened leaves. Through a broken pane in the main door I could see a lightbulb burning on the far side of a furnace and the silhouette of a figure whose mouth was taped and whose wrists were tied around a thick drainpipe that ran the length of the ceiling.
I stared impotently through the vectored glass at Temple’s back, the exposed baby fat on her hips, the glow of her chestnut hair against the dinginess of the cellar. Only the balls of her bare feet touched the floor, so that her arms were pulled tight in the sockets and her shoulders were squeezed into her neck.
I opened my pocketknife and wedged it into the doorjamb, under the lock’s tongue, and began to prise it back into the spring.
A shadow fell across the cellar’s inside stairs, then Johnny Krause walked down the steps into the light, his brilliantined hair pulled behind his head in a matador’s knot, a five-day line of blond whiskers along his jawbones. He drank from a long-necked bottle of beer and pressed the coldness of the bottle against the side of his face. He wore a short-sleeve Texas A&M workout shirt that molded against the contours of his torso.
“I’m not gonna let them two guys upstairs touch you. But you and me got a date,” he said.
Two? Did he say two?
Johnny Krause set the beer bottle down on a chair and grinned and slipped his comb out of his back pocket. He placed the teeth of the comb under T
emple’s throat and drew them up to her chin. Then he touched her hair with his fingers and leaned close to her and kissed the corner of one eye.
His back was to me now, and I could see a small automatic, probably a .25, stuck down in his belt.
“You want the tape off? Just blink your eyes,” he said. “No? I’d like to kiss you on the mouth, hon. Get you off your feet. Come on, think about it.”
He placed his hands on his hips.
“This is gonna be quite a rodeo,” he said.
“Johnny! Tillman’s got the kids on the phone! Get the fuck up here!” a third man hissed down the staircase.
Johnny Krause mounted the steps three at a time. I prised the tongue of the lock back against the spring and scraped the door back on the cement and stepped inside the cellar.
Temple twisted her head and stared at me. Upstairs I could hear Krause talking into a phone.
“That’s right. Captain McDonough’s the name … No, Ms. Carrol will probably be all right, but somebody has to watch her father. Bring Ms. Ramirez with you. I need to ask her about this car of hers that’s out back,” he said.
I set down the ball peen hammer on the chair and began sawing through the electrical cord that was wrapped around Temple’s wrists. Above me the heavy shoes of the intruders creaked on the planks in the floor. Temple’s eyes were inches from mine, bulging in the sockets, charged with alarm, then I realized she was not looking at me but at something over my shoulder.
A behemoth of a man in dark blue overalls stood at the head of the landing, his back to us, his huge buttocks stretching across the doorway. Then he turned to go down the stairs.
I picked up the hammer from the chair and stepped behind the furnace. The insulation on the cord around Temple’s wrists was frayed, the bronze wire exposed.
Each plank in the stairs groaned under the massive weight of the man in overalls. His head was auraed with a wild mane of black hair, his neck festooned with gold chains. He was eating a cheese sandwich and his thick fingers sank deeply into the bread and left black marks on it.
He stood in front of Temple, chewing, his eyes roving over her face.