Chapter 27
Eddie shoved the barrel of the shotgun into Nicholas’s shoulder, pushed him in the direction of the garage, and then he let the man get a good eyeful of the huge dark hole at the end of the barrel of the 12-gauge. “You’re going to take me to Paige,” he said, letting his triumph become evident in his tone. “Get up.”
Nicholas struggled to his feet. His leather boots thudded against the hardwood floor.
The smug grin Nicholas had worn was gone now, beat from him, but Eddie kept his guard up even though the man looked defeated.
“If you even flinch without asking for permission,” Eddie said. “I’ll take a leg off.”
Nicholas grunted, rubbed his injured arm.
“Into the kitchen,” Eddie said, keeping enough space between the two of them to give him time to react if Nicholas made a move.
Nicholas limped into the kitchen. Eddie followed. Nicholas leaned against the kitchen table taking weight off his injured leg.
Eddie sidestepped to the kitchen sink. He cradled the shotgun on his forearm, the stock under his armpit, the barrel pointed in Nicholas’s direction. He picked up a towel. His mouth tasted of pennies, and his nose throbbed. He brought the towel up to his nose and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. The shotgun nearly slipped out of the crook of his arm, but he caught it. Nicholas made no move toward him.
For just over a minute Eddie kept the towel shoved against his nose while Nicholas stood there, looking at him with about the same amount of interest as the average twenty-something watching an Olympic Curling competition. Nicholas was being awfully quiet, but Eddie figured losing did that to a man like Nicholas.
Eddie tossed the towel in the sink. There was a good bit of blood on it, but he’d stemmed the tide. He motioned Nicholas toward the laundry room and the door to the garage.
“Open the door and step inside the garage. But stay where I can see you.”
Nicholas opened the door, reached inside, and snapped on the light. He then looked back at Eddie with a “What now?” expression.
“We’ll take my car,” Eddie said.
Nicholas looked at the Honda then looked back at Eddie.
“Your car? You sure you wouldn’t rather take mine?”
Eddie fished his keys out of his pocket and tossed them to him. “I’m sure.”
Nicholas snatched the keys out of the air.
Eddie thrust the barrel of the shotgun in the direction of the driver’s door of the Honda. “You drive.”
"You know I drove a Jaguar?” Nicholas asked. “It’s right around the corner.”
“I know where your car is, and I don’t care what you drive. We’re taking my car. Now shut up and get in.”
Nicholas shrugged and limped to the car. He opened the door, reached down, and slid the driver’s seat all the way back before dropping down into it.
Eddie tapped a switch on the wall opening the garage door, walked to the passenger side. He slid down onto the rear seat. He laid the stock of the shotgun across his lap, shoved the barrel between the front seats aiming it at Nicholas’s ribs.
The 12-gauge pump was a Remington police issue riot gun he’d bought for home protection. The barrel was barely long enough to be legal, but even so, it was going to be a pain to maneuver in the small car. He wished he had a pistol to carry instead of the shotgun. The pistol would have left him with a free hand and more maneuverability. But at least he had no doubt about whether the shotgun would work. The last time he’d used it he’d only cleaned the barrel. There had been no disassembly.
He dug the barrel into Nicholas’s ribs to let him know he was still in charge.
Nicholas swiveled his head around and looked down at the barrel of the gun.
“What makes you think I'll take you to Paige?”
“Because you want to take me to her. Now turn around and drive.”
Nicholas winked at Eddie then turned around and started up the car. It took him a moment to find the headlight switch and twist it on. Then he backed the Honda out of the garage. The streetlight flickered. The wind howled. The small car vibrated as they accelerated down the gravel driveway.
Eddie wiggled his cell phone back out of his pocket and glanced at the display. There was no signal, which didn’t make any sense. He punched 911 and hit send anyway. The cell phone let out a series of alternating high to low notes. A red stop sign symbol with the words ERROR IN CONNECTION filled the display again.
Had the phone been damaged during his struggle with Nicholas? Maybe when he fell? Or maybe the tower covering the area was malfunctioning. Eddie put the cell phone away. He’d try it again later, once they were a little closer to the city where the tower signal would be stronger.
He thought of the photo of Paige. He hoped she was okay, that he would be able to get to her in time. Just hang on. I’m coming.
“What’s up with the smell?” Nicholas asked.
Eddie had no idea what the man was talking about. There wasn’t any smell. “Just shut up and drive.”
“Ever heard of an air freshener? Really. I mean I can understand someone enjoying the smell of lemons, but sometimes moderation really is the best policy. You know it’s still not too late to take my car.”
“Do you always talk this much?”
There wasn’t any smell of lemon in the car that Eddie could detect. The Honda smelled like it always did, a little musky with maybe some remnant of drive-thru cheeseburger. There definitely wasn’t a lemon odor.
Nicholas flipped on a turn signal, pulled out of the driveway and onto the two-lane blacktop. He drove south. A white box truck with BLUE & GOLD SAUSAGE painted on the side passed them in the oncoming lane.
Usually a county sheriff cruiser could be found roaming up and down these back roads looking for speeding strangers. Almost every day Eddie saw one of their black cruisers, pulled off the road, partially hidden in the trees, radaring cars as they topped the hill. Eddie watched for one.
If he spotted one, how would he get the cop’s attention or force Nicholas to pull the car over? Eddie didn’t want to risk losing Paige by killing Nicholas and he hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot him to get him to stop, but he was willing to do it if it came to that. Paige was hurt, bleeding, and he didn’t know how badly.
Nicholas peered at him in the rearview mirror.
“What’s your plan, Eddie?”
“Isn’t it pretty obvious? Save Paige.”
Eddie tried to sound confident, like he had it all worked out, but he didn’t. His best option was to make Nicholas drive him to Paige. The man clearly wanted to take him there. But then what?
“What makes you think she wants to be saved?” Nicholas asked.
Eddie huffed. What a stupid question.
“You don’t understand what’s happening here, Eddie. She’s becoming what she was meant to be. Long after you’re forgotten, she will live on, immortal.”
“What have you done to her?”
“There’s a side to her you’ll never understand. A side that craves darkness, that finds release and meaning in what you call pain. She needs an ordered world with structure and discipline. You can’t provide that.”
“Saying something like that just proves that you know nothing about her.”
Nicholas reached down into the dashboard pocket beneath the radio and pulled out a cassette tape. With a frown, he looked at both sides of the tape. Heavy use had worn the ink off the plastic case.
“You really need to get a new car,” he said. “Or at least a CD player. Cassette tapes are so passé.”
Eddie jammed the shotgun into Nicholas’s ribs. “Leave that alone. Tell me what you’ve done to her.
Nicholas ignored the barrel in his side, slapped the tape into the player. Journey’s “Separate Ways” blared out the speakers.
“Whoa,” Nicholas said, turning down the music. “What the hell was that?”
“Shut up. T
urn it off. Tell me what you’ve done to Paige.”
“Oh, now. Don’t be that way. The music isn’t that bad. Really. It’s not.”
Eddie met Nicholas’s eyes in the rearview mirror. A this-is-way-worse-than-bad look stared back at him.
Eddie lifted the shotgun and popped Nicholas on the side of the mouth with the barrel. Nicholas’s head snapped to the side from the force of the blow.
“What have you done to Paige, smart ass?”
Nicholas brought his eyes right back to the rearview mirror. They were slits. He raised his hand to his mouth. When he pulled his fingers away from his lips blood flecked them. Reaching down, he ejected the tape.
“I think you loosened a tooth,” he said.
“Good.”
“Journey, Chicago, Foreigner, The Eagles. You have shitty taste in music.”
Eddie wondered at how he knew what kind of music he listened to.
“Like I care what you think.”
It was clear Nicholas wasn’t going to answer his questions.
He relaxed his grip on the shotgun, flexed his fingers. He’d been holding it so tightly his fingers were starting to go numb.
The headlights of the car lit up a yellow dog limping down the road. Nicholas looked in the direction of the dog, and Eddie knew it was the same dog he’d hit, knew what Nicholas was going to do before he did it. There wasn’t enough time for Eddie to stop him.
He swerved, never touched the break pedal. The Honda struck the dog and pieces of the front bumper flew over the windshield. A glob of blood the size of a baseball splattered onto the glass. There was a double thud from beneath the car as the wheels went over the fallen dog. The glob crawled down the windshield like a giant slug. Nicholas pulled the lever to the wipers spraying washer fluid up onto the glass. The wipers smeared the blood back and forth, back and forth across the glass until it was clear.
Eddie whipped around in the backseat to look out the rear window. The dog’s balled up body tumbled in the road. Eddie couldn’t actually see bloody tire tracks running from the dog’s body in the red tint of the taillights, but his mind supplied them. He turned back to Nicholas.
“You bastard. Why’d you do that?”
“You know cigarettes kill people,” Nicholas said. “But people smoke them anyway. What do you think that says, Eddie? I think it says some people like pain, want to die. Otherwise, they wouldn’t work so hard at killing themselves.”
“You just killed that dog for the hell of it.”
“You’re not paying attention, Eddie. We’re talking about smoking, about people having a death wish and about people who enjoy pain in the same way you enjoy laughter.”
Eddie felt the urge to pull the trigger and blow Nicholas in half. But he couldn’t do it. Not with Paige out there, somewhere. He forced himself to take long deep breaths. A murderous rage had built up inside him he hadn’t believed he was capable of. He swallowed it back down, bottled it up.
“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” Eddie said.
“You say that, but we both know it isn’t true. If you really loved her, you would want this for her. You would understand how much she needs this. The truth is, you’re a selfish little man. You know she doesn’t love you anymore and you know you don’t love her like you should.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“It’s true,” Nicholas said. “I know it’s hard to accept. But think about it. She isn’t the kind of girl that goes out and finds someone like me for the fun of it.”
“Shut up. Shut up.” Eddie shouldered the shotgun pointing it at the back of Nicholas’s head. He put his finger on the trigger. He wanted to squeeze. Oh, how he wanted to squeeze. “What is wrong with you? Can’t you just shut up?”
Nicholas brought the car to a slow stop in the middle of the road. Turning, he looked back, into the barrel. Then he looked Eddie in the eyes.
“You aren’t being very polite,” he said. “We’ve already covered shooting me. Remember? Shoot me and the next time you see Paige she’ll be ready for a wood box.”
Somewhere he’d heard that counting to ten would calm you down, but he was so angry he couldn’t even force himself to think of numbers. Whoever had thought that idea up hadn’t ever been in a situation like this. Eddie still wanted to pull the trigger. Only his thoughts of Paige chained to the tree, dying, kept him from squeezing. He took his finger off the trigger, lowered the shotgun.
“You listen and listen up good, you snake. You’re going to shut up and take me to Paige or so help me God I’m going to shoot you. And I promise you, there are a lot of places I can shoot you that won’t kill you.”