‘You bore me, Sheridan,’ Mr. Reggie said.
‘I — ‘
‘Shut up. If I give you a week, don’t you think I know what you’ll do? You’ll tap a friend for a couple of hundred if you’ve got a friend left to tap. If you can’t find a friend, you’ll hit a liquor store . . . if you’ve got the guts. I doubt if you do, but anything is possible.’ Mr. Reggie leaned forward, propped his chin on his hands, and smiled. He smelled of Ted Lapidus cologne. ‘ And if you do come up with two hundred dollars, what will you do with it?”
‘Give it to you,’ Sheridan had babbled. By then he was very close to tears. ‘I’ll give it to you, right away!’
‘No you won’t,’ Mr. Reggie said. ‘You’ll take it to the track and try to make it grow. What you’ll give me is a bunch of shitty excuses. You’re in over your head this time, my friend. Way over your head.’
Sheridan could hold back the tears no longer; he began to blubber.
‘These guys could put you in the hospital for a long time,’ Mr. Reggie said reflectively. ‘You would have a tube in each arm and another one coming out of your nose.’
Sheridan began to blubber louder.
‘I’ll give you this much,’ Mr. Reggie said, and pushed a folded sheet of paper across his desk to Sheridan. ‘You might get along with this guy. He calls himself Mr. Wizard, but he’s a shitbag just like you. Now get out of here. I’m gonna have you back in here in a week, though, and I’ll have your markers on this desk. You either buy them back or Pm going to have my friends tool up on you. And like Booker T. says, once they start, they do it until they’re satisfied.’
The Turk’s real name was written on the folded sheet of paper. Sheridan went to see him, and heard about the kids and the botrahds. Mr. Wizard also named a figure, which was a fairish bit larger than the markers Mr. Reggie was holding. That was when Sheridan started cruising the malls.
He pulled out of the Cousintown Mall’s main parking lot, looked for traffic, then drove across the access road and into the McDonald’s in-lane. The kid was sitting all the way forward on the passenger seat, hands on the knees of his Tuffskins, eyes agonizingly alert. Sheridan drove toward the building, swung wide to avoid the drive-thru lane, and kept on going.
‘Why are you going around the back?’ the kid asked.
‘You have to go around to the other doors,’ Sheridan said. ‘Keep your shirt on, kid. I think I saw him in there.’
‘You did? You really did?’
‘I’m pretty sure, yeah.’
Sublime relief washed over the kid’s face, and for a moment Sheridan felt sorry for him —
hell, he wasn’t a monster or a maniac, for Christ’s sake. But his markers had gotten a little deeper each time, and that bastard Mr. Reggie had no compunctions at all about letting him hang himself. It wasn’t seventeen thousand this time, or twenty thousand, or even twenty-five thousand. This time it was thirty-five grand, a whole damn marching battalion of iron men, if he didn’t want a few new sets of elbows by next Saturday.
He stopped in the back by the trash-compactor. Nobody was parked back here. Good. There was an elasticized pouch on the side of the door for maps and things. Sheridan reached into it with his left hand and brought out a pair of blued-steel Kreig handcuffs. The loop-jaws were open.
‘Why are we stopping here, mister?’ the kid asked. The fear was back in his voice, but the quality of it had changed; he had suddenly realized that maybe getting separated from good old Popsy in the busy mall wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to him, after all.
‘We’re not, not really,’ Sheridan said easily. He had learned the second time he’d done this that you didn’t want to underestimate even a six-year-old once he had his wind up. The second kid had kicked him in the balls and had damn near gotten away. ‘I just remembered I forgot to put my glasses on when I started driving. I could lose my license. They’re in that glasses-case on the floor there. They slid over to your side. Hand em to me, would you?’
The kid bent over to get the glasses-case, which was empty. Sheridan leaned over and snapped one of the cuffs on the kid’s reaching hand as neat as you please. And then the trouble started.
Hadn’t he just been thinking it was a bad mistake to underestimate even a six-year-old? The brat fought like a timberwolf pup, twisting with a powerful muscularity Sheridan would not have credited had he not been experiencing it. He bucked and fought and lunged for the door, panting and uttering weird birdlike cries. He got the handle. The door swung open, but no domelight came on — Sheridan had broken it after that second outing.
Sheridan got the kid by the round collar of his Penguins tee-shirt and hauled him back in. He tried to clamp the other cuff on the special strut beside the passenger seat and missed. The kid bit his hand twice, bringing blood. God, his teeth were like razors. The pain went deep and sent a steely ache all the way up his arm. He punched the kid in the mouth. The kid fell back into the seat, dazed, Sheridan’s blood on his lips and chin and dripping onto the ribbed neck of the tee-shirt. Sheridan locked the other cuff onto the strut and then fell back into his own seat, sucking the back of his right hand.
The pain was really bad. He pulled his hand away from his mouth and looked at it in the weak glow of the dashlights. Two shallow, ragged tears, each maybe two inches long, ran up toward his wrist from just above the knuckles. Blood pulsed in weak little rills. Still, he felt no urge to pop the kid again, and that had nothing to do with damaging the Turk’s merchandise, in spite of
the almost fussy way the Turk had warned him against that — demmege the goots end you demmege the velue, the Turk had said in his greasy accent.
No, he didn’t blame the kid for fighting — he would have done the same. He would have to disinfect the wound as soon as he could, though, might even have to have a shot; he had read somewhere that human bites were the worst kind. Still, he couldn’t help but admire the kid’s guts.
He dropped the transmission into drive and pulled around the hamburger stand, past the drive-thru window, and back onto the access road. He turned left. The Turk had a big ranch-style house in Taluda Heights, on the edge of the city. Sheridan would go there by secondary roads, just to be safe. Thirty miles. Maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.
He passed a sign which read THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING THE BEAUTIFUL COUSINTOWN MALL, turned left, and let the van creep up to a perfectly legal forty miles an hour. He fished a handkerchief out of his back pocket, folded it over the back of his right hand, and concentrated on following his headlights to the forty grand the Turk had promised for a boy-child.
‘You’ll be sorry,’ the kid said.
Sheridan looked impatiently around at him, pulled from a dream in which he had just won twenty straight hands and had Mr. Reggie groveling at his feet for a change, sweating bullets and begging him to stop, what did he want to do, break him?
The kid was crying again, and his tears still had that odd pinkish cast, even though they were now well away from the bright lights of the mall. Sheridan wondered for the first time if the kid might have some sort of communicable disease. He supposed it was a little late to start worrying about such things, so he put it out of his mind.
‘When my Popsy finds you you’ll be sorry,’ the kid elaborated.
‘Yeah,’ Sheridan said, and lit a cigarette. He turned off State Road 28 and onto an unmarked stretch of two-lane blacktop. There was a long marshy area on the left, unbroken woods on the right.
The kid pulled at the handcuffs and made a sobbing noise.
‘Quit it. Won’t do you any good.’
Nevertheless, the kid pulled again. And this time there was a groaning, protesting sound Sheridan didn’t like at all. He looked around and was amazed to see that the metal strut on the side of the seat — a strut he had welded in place himself — was twisted out of shape. Shit! he thought. He’s got teeth like razors and now I find out he’s also strong as a fucking ox. If this is what he’s like when he’s sick, God forbid I should have grabbed him on a day ‘when he was feeling well.