herself into the chair in front of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. Her blush
deepened, and she put both hands over her face.
“Reg,” she said softly against the palms of her own hands, “you are the
biggest asshole in the world.” (One more item on the list for the next
confession, besides lying and deceiving and taking God’s name in vain:
the repeated use of a vulgarity.) “Shit, shit, shit!” (Going to be a
long confession.) 5
When Redlow regained consciousness, his assorted pains were so bad, they
took one hundred percent of his attention. He had a violent headache to
which he could have testified with such feeling in a television
commercial that they would have been forced to open new aspirin
factories to meet the consumer response. One eye was puffed half shut.
His lips were split and swollen; they were numb and felt huge. His neck
hurt, and his stomach was sore, and his testicles throbbed so fiercely
from the knee he had taken in the crotch that the idea of getting up and
walking sent a paroxysm of nausea through him.
Gradually he remembered what had happened to him, that the bastard had
taken him by surprise. Then he realized he was not lying on the motel
parking lot but sitting in a chair, and for the first time he was
afraid.
He was not merely sitting in the chair. He was tied in it. Ropes bound
him at chest and waist, and more ropes wound across his thighs, securing
him to the seat. His arms were fixed to the arms of the chair just
below his elbows and again at the wrists.
Pain had muddied his thought processes. Now fear clarified them.
Simultaneously squinting his good right eye and trying to widen his
swollen left eye, he studied the darkness. For a moment he assumed he
was in a room at the Blue Skies Motel, outside of which he had been
running a surveillance in hope of spotting the kid. Then he recognized
his own living room. He couldn’t see much. No lights were on. But
having lived in that house for eighteen years, he could identify the
patterns of ambient night-glow at the windows, the dim shapes of the
furniture, shadows among shadows of differing intensity, and the subtle
but singular smell of home, which was as special and instantly
identifiable to him as the odor of any particular lair to any particular
wolf in the wild.
He did not feel much like a wolf tonight. He felt like a rabbit,
shivering in recognition of its status as prey.
For a few seconds he thought he was alone, and he began to strain at the
ropes. Then a shadow rose from other shadows and approached him.
He could see nothing more of his adversary than a silhouette. Even that
seemed to melt into the silhouettes of inanimate objects, or to change
as if the kid were a polymorphous creature that could assume a variety
of forms. But he knew it was the kid because he sensed that difference,
that alienness he had perceived the first time he had laid eyes on the
bastard on Sunday, just four nights ago, at the Blue Skies.
“Comfortable, Mr. Redlow?”
Over the past three months, as he had searched for the creep, Redlow had
developed a deep curiosity about him, trying to puzzle out what he
wanted, what he needed, how he thought. After showing countless people
the various photographs of the kid, and after spending more than a
little of his own time in contemplation of them, he had been especially
curious about what the voice would be like that went with that
remarkably handsome yet forbidding face. It sounded nothing like he had
imagined it would be, neither cold and steely like the voice of a
machine designed to pass for human nor the guttural and savage snarling
of a beast. Rather, it was soothing, honey-toned, with an appealing
reverberant timbre.
“Mr. Redlow, sir, can you hear me?”
Nothing in the voice indicated that the kid was being snide or mocking.
He was just a boy who had been raised to address his elders with
consideration and respect, a habit he could not cast off even under