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It seemed to work. We were only on the third repetition of
“London Bridge” when he came stumbling out of his house with a look of wide-eyed panic. He stood there for a moment, gaping around, his receding reddish hair looking like it had gone through a storm and his pale belly hanging slightly over the waist of his dingy pajama bottoms. He did not look terribly dangerous to me, but of course I was not a five-year-old boy.
After a moment, in which he stood with his mouth open, and scratched himself, and looked like he was modeling for a statue of the Greek god of Stupidity, MacGregor located the source of the sound—“Jingle Bells” again by now. He stepped over and bent slightly to touch the little plastic keyboard and did not even have the time to be surprised before I had a noose of fifty-pound-test fishing line pulled tight around his throat. He straightened and thought he might struggle for a moment. I pulled tighter and he changed his mind.
“Stop fighting,” we said in our cold and commanding Passenger voice. “You’ll live longer.” And he heard his future in the words and thought he might change it, so I pulled hard on his leash and held it like that until his face turned dark and he dropped to his knees.
Just before he passed out completely I eased the pressure.
“Now do as you’re told,” we said. He didn’t say anything; he just choked in a few large and painful breaths, so I tweaked the line a touch. “Understand?” we said, and he nodded so I let him breathe.
He did not try to fight anymore as I frog-marched him into the house for his car keys and then back out into his big SUV.
I climbed into the seat behind him, holding the leash in a very D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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tight grip and allowing him only enough breath to stay alive, for now.
“Start the car,” we told him, and he paused.
“What do you want?” he said in a voice that was rough with new-made gravel.
“Everything,” we said. “Start the car.”
“I have money,” he said.
I pulled hard on his cord. “Buy me a little boy,” we said. I held it tight for a few seconds, too tight for him to breathe and just long enough to let him know that we were in charge, we knew what he had done, and we would let him breathe only at our pleasure from now on, and when I loosened the line again he had nothing to say.
He drove as we told him to, back up S.W. 80th Street to Old Cutler Road and then south. There was almost no traffic this far out, not at this time of night, and we turned into a new development that had been going up on the far side of Snapper Creek. Construction had halted due to the owner’s conviction for money laundering, and we would not be disturbed. We guided MacGregor through a half-built guard booth, around a small traffic circle, east toward the water, and to a halt beside a s
mall trailer, the temporary office of the site, now left to teen thrill seekers and others, like me, who only wanted a little privacy.
We sat for just a moment, enjoying the view—moon over the water, with pedophile in noose in the foreground, very beautiful.
I got out and pulled MacGregor out after me, pulled him hard so that he fell to his knees and clawed at the line around his neck. For a moment I watched him choking and drooling 2 2
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in the dirt, his face turning dark again and his eyes going red.
Then I pulled him to his feet and pushed him up the three wooden steps and into the trailer. By the time he had recovered enough to know what was going on, I had him tied to the top of a desk, hands and feet secured with duct tape.
MacGregor tried to speak and just coughed instead. I waited; now there was plenty of time. “Please,” he said finally, in a voice like sand on glass, “I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“Yes, you will,” we said, and saw the sound of it cut into him, and even though he couldn’t see it through my white silk mask we smiled. I took out the photos I had taken from his boat and showed them to him.
He stopped moving completely and his mouth hung open.
“Where did you get those?” he said, sounding rather petulant for someone who was about to be cut into small pieces.
“Tell me who took these pictures.”
“Why should I?” he said.
I used a pair of tin snips and cut off the first two fingers of his left hand. He thrashed and screamed and the blood came, which always makes me angry, so I shoved a tennis ball into his mouth and cut off the first two fingers of his right hand.