بخش 03 - فصل 52

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.’

‘You know what?’ the wolf says. ‘I don’t believe that.’

Pete unscrews the cap on the can of lighter fluid and upends it over the notebooks, dousing the jackstraw heap of stories, poems, and angry, half-drunk rants that often end in mid-thought. Also the two novels that complete the story of a fucked-up American named Jimmy Gold, stumbling through the sixties and looking for some kind of redemption. Looking for – in his own words – some kind of shit that means shit. Pete fumbles for the lighter, and at first it slips through his fingers. God, he can see the man’s shadow up there now. Also the shadow of the gun.

Tina is saucer-eyed with terror, hogtied with her nose and lips slathered in blood. The bastard beat her, Pete thinks. Why did he do that? She’s only a little kid.

But he knows. The sister was a semi-acceptable substitute for the one Red Lips really wants to beat.

‘You better believe it,’ Pete says. ‘It’s a forty-five, lots bigger than yours. It was in my father’s desk. You better just go away. That would be the smart thing.’

Please, God, please.

But Pete’s voice wavers on the last words, rising to the uncertain treble of the thirteen-year-old boy who found these notebooks in the first place. Red Lips hears it, laughs, and starts down the stairs. Pete grabs the lighter again – tight, this time – and thumbs up the top as Red Lips comes fully into view. Pete flicks the spark wheel, realizing that he never checked to see if the lighter had fuel, an oversight that could end his life and that of his sister in the next ten seconds. But the spark produces a robust yellow flame.

Peter holds the lighter a foot above the pile of notebooks. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘No gun. But I did find this in his desk.’