Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,49

be.”

She began fussing around the room, yanking open drawers, tossing boxes aside. Steve didn’t move from the window. He assumed the two men had retreated out of sight to converse privately. It seemed pointless, considering he couldn’t have heard them anyway. Maybe they thought he could read lips.

Jenny crossed the hallway to the dining room.

She screamed.

For a moment Steve was convinced she’d been shot. But when he turned, she was standing in the entranceway to the dining room, both hands covering her mouth. He went to her, put his arm around her shoulder, and led her away from the dead boy.

“What did you do, Steve?” she whispered, her eyes glistening with tears. “What did you and Noah do? That’s why they’re coming after us, isn’t it? They know you killed that boy, and now they’re going to kill us for payback.”

“That’s impossible, Jen. The boy died, it was an accident, the radiator fell on him, but that only happened ten minutes ago. The old man came home minutes later. He didn’t call anybody. Nobody called anybody. Nobody could have known.”

“Then why are they here?” She was whispering hoarsely.

“Go upstairs,” he told her. “Keep searching for the phone. You’re right. There has to be one. I must have overlooked it.”

Steve guided her toward the staircase. Jenny hesitated, then tromped up the steps, zombie-like. Steve didn’t believe he’d overlooked the phone, but if she didn’t do something to occupy her mind she was going to have a nervous breakdown right then and there.

He returned to the window, pulled the floral-patterned curtain aside, and peered outside.

Nothing but fog and rain.

What were they doing? he wondered. What could they be discussing at such lengths? Were they hiding from him? Did they think he was going to pick them off with the rifle? Would he attempt that given the chance, without knowing who they were or what they were doing here? Would he even be able to hit them? A few years ago he’d fired a handgun at a friend’s cottage in the Pocono Mountains. They’d set up beer cans as targets and shot at them with the cheap .25 caliber Saturday Night Special his friend’s father kept in the cabin. Steve had missed the cans more times than he’d hit them, and he’d only been twenty feet away. So, rifle or not, how would he fare striking a mobile target at fifty yards?

Not good, he suspected.

Abruptly the man with the muttonchops and handlebar mustache emerged from the mist into the headlights. He held his hands over his head, the machete gripped in the right one. “Don’t shoot, boy!” he called. “I just wanna talk about this.”

“Talk about what?” Steve shouted.

“We don’t wanna hurt you, y’hear? We only wanna get our friend some help.”

Steve hesitated. Could this be true?

In a show of peace the man turned and set the machete on the hood of the utility coupe. He turned back, smiled, and stepped forward.

“Hold it!” Steve said. “You can get your friend, I’ll let you get him, you can take him to the hospital, I won’t shoot. But first tell me what you’re doing here.”

“I told you, we heard—”

“You heard nothing! There were three shots, not two!”

“That’s what I said earlier. Three shots.”

“Stop bullshitting me!”

“I ain’t bullshitting—”

Steve sensed movement to his right and dropped to the floor just as a gunshot boomed and a bullet whizzed past his head, so close he heard it. In the second it took the bookish man to cycle the rifle’s bolt and fire again, Steve had moved fast and far enough to avoid the second shot. He charged the man, driving him into the dining room table and chairs. They collapsed in a tangle of limbs, dropping their rifles. They were roughly the same size and their struggle became a grappling match that had them rolling back and forth. Steve gained some leverage and kneed the man in the groin and shoved apart.

Steve considered scrambling for one of the rifles, but the man got to his feet just as Steve did. His eyeglasses sat askew on his nose. Blood smeared his mouth and chin. He raised his fists like a boxer, taunting Steve, then launched a punch. Steve dodged it and kicked him in the right knee. The man buckled. Steve went for the nearest rifle and grabbed it just as the man wrapped his arms around Steve’s midsection. Steve jammed the rifle’s stock into the man’s gut. They stumbled backward and crashed into the dining room table a