I wanted you here when I found out exactly what kind.”
“Jesus, Erik.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think the Man has anything to do with it. But there’s this, too.”
He showed me a thin leather wallet.
“Erik?” My throat closed up again, for an entirely different reason this time.
“We can go through all of the stuff in it later. For now, I think I’ve got your Tony Markham down below. Don’t worry. He’s trussed up tighter than my Aunt Gert in her Sunday girdle.”
I found myself dizzy, and I held on to the table until the world stopped spinning. Then I found myself turning around, looking for something I couldn’t put a name to.
Frustrated, I turned to Erik. “I feel like I need…something. Something to have in my hands.”
Erik laughed, and it scared me. “Like a piece of pipe?”
I nodded, relieved to have identified what it was that was driving me. “I guess. Silly, huh?”
“Not at all.” Erik leaned over, but he didn’t bring out a chunk of lead pipe. He pulled out a shotgun. “Perfectly natural urge.”
I stared at it.
“Shall we?”
He led the way down to the cabin, and paused before the door. “Ready? Only…just so’s you know. There might be some blood. I had to hit him a couple of times to get him compliant.”
I nodded, not smiling, thinking of how Tony could be. “Perfectly natural urge.”
I thought I saw wolf ’s teeth by the moonlight, but I’m sure it was too dark to see whether Erik was really smiling. He opened the door.
We stepped in, turned on a light, and while I waited for my eyes to adjust, I heard a moan, somewhere ahead of me in the cabin.
“Hey, butthead,” Erik said, striding into the cabin. “Wake up. Time for answers.”
I saw a man stretched out on the bunk, feet bound together with duct tape, his hands raised above his head and secured to the wall with a rope looped through a tiedown. Another moan, and Erik turned him over.
It wasn’t Tony at all.
Chapter 15
IT’S NOT HIM,” I SAID. I COULDN’T STOP STARING AT the guy. He was about the right build and coloring—well, coloring last time I thought I saw Tony close up, at any rate—but he seemed too old. Not that I could be sure about his age, the guy wasn’t looking his best. His face was gray, where it wasn’t streaked with dried blood, a piece of gray duct tape slapped haphazardly across most of his mouth, and his nose probably hadn’t started out the day at that odd angle—I remembered a quote: his nose is executed and his fire’s out.
I shook myself. I didn’t have the luxury of retreating into Shakespeare. “Who are you? Why did you go into the bar? Why do you have my address?”
The guy tried to sit up, as well as he could with no free arms to support himself and his feet stretched out in front of him. He just glared at me, his breathing ragged because his mouth was nearly sealed shut and his nose wasn’t working properly.
Holy snappers. “Erik, I’ve seen him before! He was working at Caldwell!” It took some effort, what with all the blood and all, to see the resemblance. I told him about seeing “Tony” while I was in the lab, our chance meeting in Duffy’s office.
“That so? Well, that makes sense, and I’ll tell you why,” Erik said. “This one…he came into the back of the kitchen.” He pulled out several shells and began loading them into the shotgun. The man’s eyes followed every precise movement.
“He walked in, looked around, saw it was just Raylene, just walked up and slapped her a couple of times. She’s clever, my woman, she grabbed a knife and cut at him, but he slapped the knife out of her hand, too. That’s when I came in. I was in the walk-in. I soon put a stop to it. Wasted a good bottle of Riesling on him.”
There was no trace of sarcasm in Erik’s voice. He put the last shell into the shotgun. “You’ve got a lot to answer for, mister. Bad enough you dared touch my wife, but what if one of my kids came downstairs and saw that?” He turned back to me. “Ray stopped me before…well, we needed to find out what he knows. Got the duct tape and we emptied his pockets. And this is what I found.”
He spread out the wallet and its meager contents on the table. The license was from Florida, and