‘What girl?’ Dylan asked.
‘Becky. Lives down the street.’
‘Little girl?’
‘No, seventeen.’
The chain that wrapped the boy’s ankles and bound them together had been secured with a padlock. The links between the two bracelets of his handcuffs had been passed behind one of the vertical rails on the brass headboard, tethering him to the bed.
‘Keys?’ Dylan asked.
‘Kenny’s got ’em.’ At last the boy’s gaze shifted from the open door, and he met Dylan’s eyes. ‘I’m stuck here.’
Lives were in the balance now. Although bringing in the cops would almost certainly draw the black-Suburban crowd, as well, with mortal consequences for Dylan and Shep and Jilly, he was morally compelled to call 911.
‘Phone?’ he whispered.
‘Kitchen,’ breathed the boy. ‘And one in Grandma’s room.’
Intuition told Dylan that he didn’t have time to go to the kitchen to make the call. Besides, he didn’t want to leave the boy up here alone. As far as he knew, premonition was not a part of his psychic gift, but the air cloyed about him, thickening with the expectation of violence; he would have wagered his soul that if the killing had not already begun, it would start before he reached the bottom of the rose-festooned stairs.
Grandma’s room had a phone, but evidently it also had Kenny. When Dylan went in there, he would need more than a steady finger for the touch-tone keypad.
Once more the blades on the walls drew his attention, but he was repulsed by the prospect of slashing anyone with sword or machete. He didn’t have the stomach for such wet work.
Aware of Dylan’s renewed interest in the knives, and evidently sensing his disinclination to use one, the boy said, ‘There. By the bookcase.’
A baseball bat. One of the old-fashioned hardwood kind. Dylan had swung a lot of them in his childhood, although never at a human being.
Any soldier or cop, or any man of action, might have disagreed with him, but Dylan preferred the baseball bat to a bayonet. It felt good in his hands.
‘Full-on psycho,’ the boy reminded him, as if to say that the bat should be swung first, with no resort to reason or persuasion.
To the threshold. The hall. Across the hall to the only second-floor room that he’d not yet investigated.
This final door, closed tight, wasn’t outlined by even a thin filament of light.
A hush fell over the house. Ear to the jamb, Dylan listened for a telltale sound from six-way-wired Kenny.
* * *
Some performers eventually confused make-believe with truth, and to a degree grew into their invented personas, swaggering through the real world as though they were always on a stage. Over the past few years, Jilly had half convinced herself that she was the ass-kicking Southwest Amazon whom she claimed to be when she appeared before an audience.
Returning to the kitchen, she discovered much to her dismay that in a crunch, image and reality were not, in her case, the same thing. As she searched quickly for a weapon, drawer to drawer, cupboard to cupboard, the bones in her legs jellified, while her heart hardened into a sledge that hammered against her ribs.
By any standard of law or combat, a butcher knife qualified as a weapon. But the nearly arthritic stiffness with which her right hand closed on the handle convinced her that she’d never be comfortable wielding it on anything more responsive than a chuck roast.
Besides, to use a knife, you had to get in close to your enemy. Assuming that she might have to thump Kenny enough to stop him, if not actually waste him, Jilly preferred to thump him from as great a distance as possible, preferably with a high-powered rifle from a neighboring rooftop.
The pantry was just a pantry, not also an armory. The heaviest weaponry on its shelves were cans of cling peaches in heavy syrup.
Then Jilly noticed that Marj apparently had been plagued by an ant problem, and with a flash of inspiration, she said, ‘Ah.’
* * *
Neither the baseball bat nor his righteous anger made Dylan sufficiently brave or sufficiently foolish to crash into a dark room in search of a dope-crazed, hormone-crazed, just-plain-crazed teenager with more types of edge weapons than Death himself could name. After easing the door open – and feeling the tingle of psychic spoor – he waited in the hallway, his back to the wall, listening.