being brutalized in every way imaginable.
The men he had killed would have used the mother only briefly, would
have raped and tortured and broken her only as an example to the child.
Then they would have cut her throat or blown her brains out on some
desolate dirt road out in the desert, leaving her body for the
delectation of lizards and ants and vultures. It was the child they
really wanted, and for whom they would have made the next few months or
years a living hell.
His anger metastasized into something beyond mere rage, far beyond
wrath. A terrible darkness rose inside of him like black crude oil
gushing up from a wellhead.
He was furious that the child had seen those photographs, had been
forced to lie in those stained and foul-smelling bedclothes with
unspeakable obscenity on every side of her. He had the crazy urge to
pick up the shotgun and empty a few more rounds into each of the dead
men.
They had not touched her. Thank God for that. They hadn’t had time to
touch her.
But the room. Oh, Jesus, she had suffered an assault just by being in
that room.
He was shaking.
He saw that the mother was shaking, too.
After a moment he realized that her tremors were not of rage, like his
but of fear. Fear of him. She was terrified of him, more so now than
when he had come into the room.
He was glad there was no mirror. He would not have wanted to see his
own face. Right now there must be some kind of madness in it.
He had to get a grip on himself “It’s all right,” he assured her again.
“I came to help you.”
Eager to free them, anxious to quiet their terror, he dropped to his
knees beside the bed and cut the tape that was wound around the woman’s
ankles, tore it away. He snipped the tape around her wrists, as well,
then left her to finish freeing herself When he cut the bindings from
Susie’s wrists, she hugged herself defensively. When he freed her
ankles, she kicked at him and squirmed away across the gray and mottled
sheets. He didn’t reach for her, but backed instead.
Lisa peeled the tape off her lips and pulled a rag out of her mouth
choking and gagging. She spoke in a raspy voice that was somehow
simultaneously frantic and resigned: “My husband, back at the car, my
his band!”
Jim looked at her and said nothing, unable to put such bleak news in
words in front of the child.
The woman saw the truth in his eyes, and for a moment her lovely face
was wrenched into a mask of grief and agony. But for the sake of her
daughter, she fought down the sob, swallowed it along with her anguish;
She said only, “Oh, my God,” and each word reverberated with her loss
“Can you carry Susie?”
Her mind was on her dead husband.
He said, “Can you carry Susie?”
She blinked in confusion. “How do you know her name?”
“Your husband told me.”
“But”
“Before,” he said sharply, meaning before he died, not wanting to raise
false hope. “Can you carry her out of here?”
“Yeah, I think so, maybe.”
He could have carried the girl himself, but he didn’t believe that he
should touch her. Though it was irrational and emotional, he felt that
what those two men had done to her-and what they would have done her,
given a chance-was somehow the responsibility of all men, and that at
least a small stain of guilt was his as well.
Right now, the only man in the world who should touch that child was her
father. And he was dead.
Jim rose from his knees and edged away from the bed. He backed into a
narrow closet door that sprang open as he stepped aside of it.
On the bed, the weeping girl squirmed away from her mother, so
traumatized that she did not at first recognize the benign intention of
even those familiar loving hands. Then abruptly she shattered the
chains of terror and flew into her mother’s arms. Lisa spoke softly and