A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,133
And we looked, don’t you know we looked. He either fed her to that thing or killed her himself. If he’d sold her to some other clan, I woulda heard. She woulda got free, reached out.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” I said. “But I can promise you it wasn’t him.”
He slapped me again, on the other cheek this time, and the room blurred and my ear started to ring. When my vision cleared, he was staring out the window at a gray afternoon.
“That’s just one of about ten kidnappings we can pin on him. Ten kids who were taken and never seen again. Blood on his hands. But he’s dead, you say. So I say that’s blood on your hands.”
He went over to a cart stocked with bottles and poured himself a shot of brown liquor. Downed it in one swallow.
“Now, where is this associate you say is still alive?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I decided to come clean about H; I had let the cat out of the bag already, and it’s not as if I had information that would lead them to him. I didn’t even know where he lived.
Leo’s goon had me by the neck, and I felt his grip tighten.
“You know. You were taking the girl to him!”
“No, to a loop. Not to him.”
“What loop?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “He hadn’t told me yet.”
Bill cracked his knuckles. “He’s playing dumb, Leo. He thinks you’re a sucker.”
“It’s fine,” said Leo. “We’ll find him. Nobody hides from me in my city. What I really want to know is, what do you do with them? Your victims?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We don’t have victims.”
He grabbed the file off the table where he dropped it, flipped the page, and shoved it in my face. “Here’s one of the kids your grandpa saved. We found him two weeks later. Does he look saved to you? Huh?”
It was a photo of a dead person. A little boy. Maimed. Horrible.
He punched me in the stomach. I doubled over, groaning.
“Is it some kind of sick family business? Is that it?”
He kicked me and I fell to the floor.
“Where is she? Where’s Agatha?”
I was saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” or trying to, while he kicked me twice more, until I could hardly breathe, and my nose was leaking blood all over the floor.
“Get him up,” Leo said, disgusted. “Goddamn it, now I gotta get the carpet steamed again.”
I was hauled up by my arms, but my legs wouldn’t take my weight, so I knelt.
“I was gonna kill Gandy,” said Leo. “I was gonna kill that sick son of a bitch with my own hands.”
“Gandy’s dead, Leo,” said Bill.
“Gandy’s dead,” Leo repeated. “Then I guess you’ll have to do, junior. What time is it?”
“Almost six,” said Bill.
“We’ll kill him in the morning. Make a thing of it. Invite the troops.”
“You’re wrong,” I whispered, voice trembling. “You’re wrong about him.”
“How do you want it, kid? Drowning or shooting?”
“I can prove it.”
“How about both?” said Bill.
“Nice idea, Bill. One time for him, one time for dear old Grandpop. Now get him out of here.”
* * *
• • •
That night they turned off the light in my cell for the first time. I lay aching in the thin dark, wishing my body would disappear, wrestling with my thoughts. I worried for my friends. Were they being beaten, tortured, threatened? I worried for Noor, and what they were planning to do with her. Would she have been better off if I hadn’t tried to help her at all? If I had listened to H and aborted the mission when he told me to?
Yes. Almost certainly yes.
I admit, I worried for myself, too. Leo’s goons had been threatening me since I arrived, but for the first time their promise to kill me felt genuine. Leo didn’t need anything from me anymore. He wasn’t trying to get information out of me. He seemed only to want to watch me die.
And what was all this madness about my grandfather? I didn’t think for a second that any of it could be true—but how could anyone? My one thought was that wights had framed him, staging kidnappings and killings to look as if Abe had committed them, in hopes that Leo’s clan might have killed him and done the wights’ work for them. As for my grandfather being identified at the scenes of some of these crimes (a point Leo had emphasized), the wights were masters of disguise. Maybe one of them had dressed