Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,105
the couch. One leg draped over. The house is humid. He’s got a sheen of sweat on his brow.
“Do you think he’ll come?”
She nods. “I figure. We all set up?”
“Yeah. Won’t take much to get it all going. You sure this’ll work?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Just remember, whatever happens—stay out of the way. Hide in the coat closet and don’t come out. I don’t need you in the crossfire in all of this. Just say in there and stick to the plan.”
He pauses. Draws a deep breath. “What do you think he’ll do?”
“I’ve been nesting on that. First I figured he’ll come after one of you. But then I got to thinking, he knows I’m vulnerable. Mother’s gone. Dog is at the vet—far as he knows, maybe dead. Day after I shut down a major dog fighting ring I might have some folks who want to come at me, make me pay, so he could pretty easily make it look like something it’s not. Plus, we dangled the bait. So, he’ll come. He’ll come. He’ll try to kill me.”
“I’m kinda freaked out by all this.” He flops his head back on the couch. “I’m scared.”
She lies and tells him, “Me too.” She’s not scared. Not right now, at least. The Adderall smoothes over all the sharp edges. It wears the mountain of fear down to a smooth, comfortable hill.
“I don’t want to die,” he says.
“We’re not gonna die.” Another lie. She doesn’t know.
“I got to touch a girl’s boob.”
“At least you got to do that before you died.”
“At least.”
He stares up at the ceiling for a while, and eventually falls asleep.
For Atlanta, sleep is just a dream.
* * *
Four o’clock in the morning, Atlanta hears it. She’s not asleep. She’s been in the dark, sitting across from Shane the whole time, staring at him but not really at him so much as through him. Her mind wandered onto the subject of Steven and of their kiss and if she could ever really see him as more than a friend, more than just a sad boy with big teeth and here her thoughts hovered like a mosquito over a barrel of brackish water.
But she’s ripped free from those thoughts as she hears the creak of a board upstairs.
He’s here.
He’s in her room.
* * *
The message they wrote and then printed on the gun club printer was this:
ALL YOUR AUDIO FILES ARE BELONG TO US.
YOU’VE GOT ONE WEEK.
MEET ME AT THE WATER TOWER, SATURDAY, MIDNIGHT.
BRING TEN GRAND OR I SEND THE FILES TO EVERYBODY.
--AB
Shane assured her that there was a joke in there somewhere and that it was a good one. She didn’t get it and didn’t much care to and let him have his way.
That was the message. An upgraded version of when they lured the Nazis to the graveyard by throwing a note in through the broken car window. That worked. Sort of.
This message, like that one, is a lie, of course. They don’t have the audio files. And they never intended to meet him at the water tower. They knew he’d come before then. To get the files back on his own. To “handle” the problem.
And now here he was.
Upstairs.
* * *
She’s surprised that he’s here already. They only set the letter to print six hours before. Somebody must’ve gone to the gun club and seen it. Orly, probably. Late night meeting.
Doesn’t matter now.
Atlanta hurries to Shane, shakes him awake and at the same time clamps a hand over his mouth so he doesn’t cry out. She hiss-whispers: “He’s here. Closet. Go.”
He whimpers, then rolls off the couch—and bangs his knee on the coffee table.
Upstairs, the creaking stops suddenly.
Atlanta shoots Shane a real lightning bolt of a look and jerks her head toward the closet. Shane darts toward it like a soldier in a warzone—head down so it doesn’t get shot off.
Her bare toe feels under the couch. Finds the cold metal of the shotgun barrel. Small comfort, but comfort just the same. Then she reaches for the iPod on the rickety old side table her mother bought at a flea market a year back. The iPod isn’t hers. It’s Shane’s. She flicks it on, does what needs doing, and then waits.
Again the creaking. Toward the steps.
And down. One by one. The house is old, and every floorboard is a complainer.
From here she can see the staircase through the wooden railing.
Can see the first shadow—deeper black then the rest of the dark—step at that top step.