As Pete sits on the stairs to take off his shoes (he can’t be heard clacking and echoing across the floor), he thinks again, I got her into this, it’s my job to get her out. Nobody else’s.
He calls his sister’s cell. From below him, muffled but unmistakable, he hears Tina’s Snow Patrol ringtone.
Red Lips answers immediately. “Hello, Peter.” He sounds calmer now. In control. That could be good or bad for his plan. Pete can’t tell which. “Have you got the notebooks?”
“Yes. Is my sister okay?”
“She’s fine. Where are you?”
“That’s pretty funny,” Pete says . . . and when you think about it, it actually is. “Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet.”
“I’m in no mood for cryptic humor. Let us do our business and be done with each other, shall we? Where are you?”
“Do you remember the Saturday Movie Palace?”
“What are you—”
Red Lips stops. Thinks.
“Are you talking about the Community Room, where they used to show all those corny . . .” He pauses again as the penny drops. “You’re here?”
“Yes. And you’re in the basement. I saw the car out back. You were maybe ninety feet from the notebooks all along.” Even closer than that, Pete thinks. “Come and get them.”
He ends the call before Red Lips can try to set the terms more to his liking. Pete runs for the kitchen on tiptoe, shoes in hand. He has to get out of sight before Red Lips can climb the stairs from the basement. If he does that, all may be well. If he doesn’t, he and his sister will probably die together.
From downstairs, louder than her ringtone—much louder—he hears Tina cry out in pain.
Still alive, Pete thinks, and then, The bastard hurt her. Only that’s not the truth.
I did it. This is all my fault. Mine, mine, mine.
51
Morris, sitting on a box marked KITCHEN SUPPLIES, closes Tina’s phone and at first only looks at it. There’s but one question on the floor, really; just one that needs to be answered. Is the boy telling the truth, or is he lying?
Morris thinks he’s telling the truth. They both grew up on Sycamore Street, after all, and they both attended Saturday movie-shows upstairs, sitting on folding chairs and eating popcorn sold by the local Girl Scout troop. It’s logical to think they would both choose this nearby abandoned building as a place to hide, one close to both the house they had shared and the buried trunk. The clincher is the sign Morris saw out front, on his first reconnaissance: CALL THOMAS SAUBERS REAL ESTATE. If Peter’s father is the selling agent, the boy could easily have filched a key.
He seizes Tina by the arm and drags her across to the furnace, a huge and dusty relic crouched in the corner. She lets out another of those annoying cries as she tries to put weight on her swollen ankle and it buckles under her. He slaps her again.
“Shut up,” he says. “Stop being such a whiny bitch.”
There isn’t enough computer cord to make sure she stays in one place, but there’s a cage-light hanging on the wall with several yards of orange electrical cord looped around it. Morris doesn’t need the light, but the cord is a gift from God. He didn’t think he could be any angrier with the thief, but he was wrong. Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet, the thief had said, and what right did he have to reference John Rothstein’s work? Rothstein’s work was his.
“Turn around.”
Tina doesn’t move quickly enough to suit Morris, who is still furious with her brother. He grabs her shoulders and whirls her. Tina doesn’t cry out this time, but a groan escapes her tightly compressed lips. Her beloved yellow blouse is now smeared with basement dirt.
He secures the orange electrical cord to the computer cord binding her wrists, then throws the cage-light over one of the furnace pipes. He pulls the cord taut, eliciting another groan from the girl as her bound hands are jerked up almost to her shoulder blades.
Morris ties off the new cord with a double knot, thinking, They were here all along, and he thinks that’s funny? If he wants funny, I’ll give him all the funny he can stand. He can die laughing.
He bends down, hands on knees, so he’s eye to eye with the thief’s sister. “I’m going upstairs to get my property, girlfriend. Also to kill your pain-in-the-ass brother. Then I’m going to come back down and kill you.” He kisses the tip of her nose. “Your life is over. I want you to think about that while I’m gone.”
He trots toward the stairs.
52
Pete is in the pantry. The door is only open a crack, but that’s enough to see Red Lips as he goes hustling by, the little red and black gun in one hand, Tina’s phone in the other. Pete listens to the echo of his footfalls as they cross the empty downstairs rooms, and as soon as they become the thud-thud-thud of feet climbing the stairs to what was once known as the Saturday Movie Palace, he pelts for the stairs to the basement. He drops his shoes on the way. He wants his hands free. He also wants Red Lips to know exactly where he went. Maybe it will slow him down.
Tina’s eyes widen when she sees him. “Pete! Get me out of here!”
He goes to her and looks at the tangle of knots—white cord, orange cord—that binds her hands behind her and also to the furnace. The knots are tight, and he feels a wave of despair as he looks at them. He loosens one of the orange knots, allowing her hands to drop a little and taking some of the pressure off her shoulders. As he starts work on the second, his cell phone vibrates. The wolf has found nothing upstairs and is calling back. Instead of answering, Pete hurries to the box below the window. His printing is on the side: KITCHEN SUPPLIES. He can see footprints on top, and knows to whom they belong.
“What are you doing?” Tina says. “Untie me!”
But getting her free is only part of the problem. Getting her out is the rest of it, and Pete doesn’t think there’s enough time to do both before Red Lips comes back. He has seen his sister’s ankle, now so swollen it hardly looks like an ankle at all.
Red Lips is no longer bothering with Tina’s phone. He yells from upstairs. Screams from upstairs. “Where are you, you fucking son of a whore?”
Two little piggies in the basement and the big bad wolf upstairs, Pete thinks. And us without a house made of straw, let alone one made of bricks.
He carries the carton Red Lips used as a step to the middle of the room and pulls the folded flaps apart as footfalls race across the kitchen floor above them, pounding hard enough to make the old strips of insulation hanging between the beams sway a little. Tina’s face is a mask of horror. Pete upends the carton, pouring out a flood of Moleskine notebooks.
“Pete! What are you doing? He’s coming!”
Don’t I know it, Pete thinks, and opens the second carton. As he adds the rest of the notebooks to the pile on the basement floor, the footfalls above stop. He’s seen the shoes. Red Lips opens the door to the basement. Being cautious now. Trying to think it through.
“Peter? Are you visiting with your sister?”
“Yes,” Peter calls back. “I’m visiting her with a gun in my hand.”