The Odds (11 page)

He put the things back in and said quietly to Carl, “Just tell.”

“Up the stairs,” the man said. “Show us this beautiful place.”

Carl said, “Honest to God, I don’t have anything.”

But somehow they moved up the steps, gun still at the boy’s head. When they got the kid up against the wall near where the closet had been, the man moved away. He reached into his pocket and took out a knife. He threw it to the floor in front of Nick. “Pick it up.”

Nick moved toward it, thinking he must find some way not to pick it up, but he got there and he did it, because he didn’t know what else to do and he thought if only he could get the man calmed down, they could work it out. He held the knife loosely away from his body. He said, “Give the kid a break. Just talk it out.”

The man hissed, “What’s the matter with you, pussy motherfucker? Do what I tell you.”

Nick went toward Carl. He had the knife held out, but he knew what he was going to do with it. Where there’d been a closet, it was just a hole in the wall now. He said in a low voice, almost not moving his lips, “When I move, run.” He pretended to move toward Carl; he dropped the knife in the hole. Carl ran for the steps as Nick ran at the man with the gun. The gun went off. The bullet hit the floor. He felt Carl stop. He said, “Run. Go.” The gun went off again.

The second shot shattered his leg. The third was aimed at his heart, but he was a madman by then, twisting it away from him and, in the end, he had switched it around to the heart of the man with the drippy sideburns.

He could remember that part clearly. He’d watched the man die. He even laid him down as it happened. The gun fell out of the man’s hand as he cursed and groped and gave up. Nick’s leg gave way and he passed out.

He tried to move again now, but the pain zinged the whole way up to his ears. He lay down, trying to stay awake, but he couldn’t. In his dream he began running in place, but running nonetheless, and whoever was chasing him just kept coming. He couldn’t tell who it was, then something slid into place and he was awake, but the dream continued. It was real. Someone was coming up the stairs.

Something in the rhythm of the sound of the voices told him it was not the police.

It didn’t sound like the boy and girl either.

Two boys he had never seen before stood at the top of the stairs, squinting, muttering, “Holy shit.” He didn’t know where the gun was.

One had bleached blond hair, short and tight to his head, an earring, and a black plastic jacket. The other was taller, had dark hair, buzz cut, and a denim jacket. “Holy shit,” the tall one said again.

Nick tried to find the gun. His brain was mush. He wondered if these two had a car and if they could carry him down the steps, then drive him someplace.

“Who sent you?” he asked.

“Nobody. We were just coming to mess around.” The blond was the one who spoke. The two looked more closely at the other body, and the taller boy looked terrified, but the other did not. He looked excited.

Nick wasn’t sure what to ask them for. “Gun,” the taller one said. “He has a gun.”

Their hands went up.

The blond one spoke again. “Mister. We aren’t going to tell anyone anything. We were never up here. You hear? What you did, we don’t care about that.”

“Who are you?”

They didn’t answer. Their eyes shifted from the other man to his gun to him.

The blond one said, “Run.”

And in an instant, they were backing down the steps.

His hands shook as he held the gun on them. “I need help,” he said.

Did they hear? They must have understood he wouldn’t shoot, because they turned from him and ran. He could hear them hurrying to get out. His ear was sharp. They left the plank off the door.

His heart pounded. These two would talk to somebody, sometime, soon, and he had to get out before they did.10.5.1.48

   JOEL RAN DOWN TO THE BASEMENT to clean up the two branches. “Hurry,” Meg said.

Laurie had left a note that she had managed to get Saturday work after all and was off babysitting for the Coles. She would come home with maybe six bucks for watching three little kids for two hours. It was something, Meg thought, not much, but something. Susannah was sitting alone in her bedroom, drawing.

Meg said, “Sweetie, you know that bag where Laurie keeps clean rags in the basement? See if there are any in there.”

Susannah said, “Where were you?”

“We won’t leave anymore, well, just one more time. I’ll make it up to you, honestly I will.”

Susannah nodded and went.

Meg searched through the medicine cabinet and, shaking, saw it behind the aspirin. The bottle was empty. Twenty-four capsules on the refill were allowed. Not the strongest stuff. Alison had needed it for all her dental work. Twenty-four was better than nothing.

Meg looked up the Coles’ number and dialed it. One of the Cole babies answered and eventually, after a lot of talk, put Laurie on the phone. Meg told Laurie to look in the medicine cabinet for prescription medicines with an
illin
or an
icin
on the end and if she didn’t find any, to bring whatever else she could grab, even if the bottle was empty.

“You mean,
take
it?”

“Have to. I’ll explain. We’ll put it back. Also, anything that says, “ ‘For pain.’ Anything.”

“Is Joel sick?”

“I can’t explain now,” she told Laurie. “I know it’s wrong. Don’t get caught.”

The little house they lived in didn’t harbor a lot of useless junk because Alison had moved them with only the basics, never really making a home. She’d even sold some things off. Meg was in a fury to find
things
—spare things, good old junk—she could use to help the man with the raspy voice and the startling eyes.

   THE NEXT TIME HE WOKE UP, he thought it was the two boys again. He tried to reach for the gun. He was aware of the play of a flashlight in the dark. “It’s us,” a light voice said. “Put the gun down.” Then they stood before him, the boy and the girl. She handed him a small bottle of water and some pills in an envelope. “Here,” she said. “Take these.” She used a flashlight to show him.

“It smells bad up here,” the boy said to her.

She nodded.

First she spread a bedsheet on the floor and instructed him to use his upper body to climb onto it while she and her brother held it straight. He tried not to scream, but he had to scream once as he did what she said. Then they trained two flashlights on his leg, and the two of them began. They put something funny looking, looked like a crutch but it wasn’t, under his right arm and something else, looked like a little crutch, right in his balls. The girl had strips of rags she kept wrapping around him, even his chest. She told him to drink the rest of the whiskey while Joel rolled up the left leg of the jeans and she cut into the blood-stiffened right leg of the jeans with a scissors, snipping slowly and with difficulty until most of his leg was exposed. The boy studied both legs for a while, then murmured, “We have to get that part to line up with— It’s going to hurt,” he told Nick.

Nick screamed three times as the boy moved his leg around. The girl held a cloth to his forehead. She said, “I know what we’re doing is tearing some tissue, but we have to try.” After a while, something seemed right, to her, to her brother. They nodded to each other and held the tree branches steady—he saw that’s what they were, tree branches that had forks in them—while she wrapped the branches to his legs with old cloths and tied one piece of cloth after another.

“How’d you know to do this?”

“It’s pretty primitive, but you weren’t doing any better by yourself. And it’s the only way to get you out of here.” She sounded smart, word-smart. The boy put a crosspiece between the two branches under his foot and lashed it to the side pieces. All the while, the girl focused on keeping the branches straight. Her brother seemed to have patience and a certain amount of physical strength, too. “That’s good,” the boy said from time to time. “It’s good. It’s working.” After a while, the girl cut strips of some kind of tape—mailing tape, maybe—to hold a few things in place. Nick was so scared he couldn’t talk, but his question must have hung in the air because she continued to answer it. “My brother saw this on a program. Some soldiers from World War One.”

Nick watched the girl’s hair fall toward her face as she worked. She blew a strand away, bothered by it.

“Some campers know about how to do this kind of splint, too,” Joel added. “That’s what they said on the program.”

“I’m going to be able to walk?”

“Not yet. I mean, try not to. We have to lift the sheet. If we can support you, we will. If you can use your arms and your upper body going down the steps … try. We might make it.”

He didn’t understand at first.

They lifted and his leg didn’t feel worse to him than before, but they put him down. “We can’t do it,” she said. “He’s too heavy.”

The boy said, “Switch sides. Let me take the front.” By that the boy meant the legs.

“Be careful. He can’t be jostled.”

Jostled, Nick thought dreamily. It was a word he didn’t use.

Together the two dragged him to the stairs and started descending. He put his arms down step by step, like a crab. He weighed 175 and they were kids, but they kept going, lifted and relaxed, lifted and relaxed.

“Now we have to get you out,” she said.

“Where to?”

“You told us it’s dangerous here.”

He nodded.

“Then … we scouted a place a couple of doors away. You’d be outside till dark. It’s not raining.”

“My car. If I could get to it. I … I still have the key. You know someone who can drive?”

“We’ll have to find someone.”

He told them, “A Pontiac silver Sunbird. Black seats. It’s old, ’94. License is DCG 2465.” He tried to reach for his pockets, but he needed help because the tree limb was in his way.

The boy and girl looked at each other. “Get the key out,” he told them. He was lying on the ground just inside the doorway. They were getting ready to carry him out.

The boy reached into his pocket and got the key. He put it in his own pocket.

Nick thought, They aren’t going to pull it off. They have to tell someone about the car, that person will balk, call the police. If they try to drive it—he almost laughed to think of them being pulled over, trying to explain. They didn’t look like the typical car thieves.

The boy went back up the stairs for the sack of things he’d brought, and when he got down, he put the sack right on top of Nick’s belly. Before Nick knew what was happening, they were lifting him and carrying him out the door, through the weeds, across the alley, down two houses, to a garage. He thought their arms wouldn’t hold out. He thought he heard voices, music. The garage they approached looked boarded up. Even so, he imagined they were planning to put him
inside
it, and that felt safe. He was wrong.

“There’s no way in,” the girl said, reading his thought.

They took him around to the back of the garage, away from the sight lines of the alley, and they put the sheet with him in it, down on the ground.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s the best we can do.”

“The gun. I need it.”

The kid hesitated. He took the sack off Nick’s belly. He reached in and brought out a bottle of water, a bottle of juice. These he put on the ground near Nick. Next came the envelope with the pills. “Keep these. In case we don’t get back in time. You have a watch. Take the rest at ten o’clock, midnight the latest.” Then the boy reached for the gun and handed it over by the butt, careful to point it away.

“Midnight,” Nick said. He didn’t tell them he could never wait that long. He’d be hobbling along somewhere on his own by then.

“We need dark for the next part,” the girl said.

   THE PONTIAC WASN’T THERE. Meg and her brother walked up and down the street; they tried a street over, then a street over in the other direction. Then they went back to the street Nick told them to search and looked harder, studying every license plate, since he might have got part of it wrong. There was no Pontiac of any kind on Sherman and nothing with a license plate remotely similar to what he’d told them.

“Can’t do anything until dark,” Meg said. “So we might as well …”

“What?”

“Figure out the next step. No car. We have to put him somewhere. He needs more pills. He needs …”

“I have to set the leg more firmly. Disinfect.”

They let a silence go by, understanding what they were saying to each other.

“We need more information. Patrice’s mother has a computer. Maybe I could go over there.”

“Russell has one. He’s on the Internet all the time.”

“Russell then. You go there. I need you to look up the prescriptions Laurie found. I know. I’ll go to the emergency room and see if I can get anybody to talk to me.”

“How?” Joel looked incredulous.

She shrugged an answer. Trying. Trying anything. They had at least five hours until it was dark enough to move him.

   RUSSELL’S MOTHER SAYS, “He’s in his room, doing something or other.”

Russell is sitting at his computer, playing golf and eating a large candy bar. When Joel comes in, he jumps to hide the candy before he sees who it is and takes it back out of the drawer he dumped it in. “My mom gets mad,” he says. “I got another one. You want it?” The invitation is grudging, but Joel says yes anyway. Russell’s room is comfortable, with a desk-and-bureau combination, posters of Tiger Woods and Randle El up on his walls. An athlete is what Russell would like to be, but he’s not going to make it; he doesn’t like to move fast, and he is already overweight by twenty-five pounds. But here in this room, it all seems fine; he’s loved, cared for. The bedspread is puffy, quilted, a medium brown color. At the foot of the bed is a Steelers quilt. “I can’t go out. We got my aunt coming to dinner in half an hour. You want to stay if my mom says okay? She might say no. She gets mad sometimes if I ask.”

Joel manages to say no. He smells something good. Roast beef or something like that.