had started earlier than Cline, under his father’s fists or in the rattling cell-blocks of juvie. Squid didn’t know. He hadn’t been forced to see a shrink in a long time, and anyway, he always lied to them.
But on his bike, pedaling through the dark woods of Dogtown, he felt the old familiar tingle of something like fear. The forest north of Gloucester was so dense, the morning light barely penetrated it. There were legends about this place, stories he’d heard from the locals of witches and ghosts and shit. There were weird rocks carved with words that appeared from between the trees like messages from someplace else, somewhere scary. He passed one that said USE YOUR HEAD, the letters green with moss. It made him think of the Druly woman, the sick, wet sound of the saw going through her spinal column as Turner heaved the tool back and forth. He swallowed hard, tried to shake off the feeling that someone was watching him as he rode. When Squid told Cline he didn’t want to do the drop-offs out here anymore, the man had laughed and increased the number of people on his route.
Squid looked over his shoulder at the winding road. Nothing.
In the distance he spied safety. The double-wide trailer that served as a makeshift bar in the evenings sat nestled in the trees. Squid had passed this place a couple of days earlier in the car with Cline and the others, everyone in the vehicle silent with the weight of their dark mission. Vermonte, the bar owner, would be pissed they’d dumped the Druly woman’s body out here, would probably bitch about it. But Squid wouldn’t pass on the dissent to Cline. Cline’s people looked out for one another, didn’t snitch. They all knew the man’s mood could turn on a dime.
Squid looked back, thinking he’d heard a car. Nothing again. His chest felt tight. There’d been what felt like a rock lodged in his throat since Cline had come to him the morning before and asked him to text Marni, a girl he’d known from school. The rock had grown as the ambulances and squad cars arrived at the house and people left the party and fled into the woods and surrounding streets. As he did with his fear, Squid pushed thoughts of Marni down. They would go away eventually. Nerves frayed. Emotions burned. There was no such thing as witches and no room in his life for guilt. He was a soldier who’d done what he’d been directed to do.
The car came out of nowhere, veering out of the oncoming lane and heading right for him. Squid jerked the handlebars and hit the slope on the side of the road at an odd angle. They seemed to be on him before he had even stopped skidding and rolling on the dirt and pine needles; they grabbed his wrists and shoved his face in the earth.
He thought it was cops until the hood came down over his head.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE PLAN ROLLED out almost naturally, as though it was our only available course of action. Kidnapping. Violence. I stood in the tiny, abandoned house in the dusty darkness created by the boarded-up windows and looked at the boy in the chair as Effie secured his wrists and ankles with duct tape. Nick, Effie, and I had come together in the forest in the early hours of the morning; it was as though we felt our plan would stain the house if we were to build it within its walls. Later that morning we had tailed Squid as he left Cline’s house for a drug run into Dogtown. He had been a pitiful kidnapping victim, his body nothing but bone and taut sinewy muscle, as easy to pin and bind and pick up as a struggling lamb. From the old student ID I found in his wallet, I learned he was sixteen. He had cried nonstop from the moment we grabbed him to this moment, and now he sat hooded, waiting to know his fate.
Nick ripped the hood off the kid’s head and he took in the sight of us, his surroundings. His face was wet with tears and sweat. I watched a hundred emotions flicker over his face. We’d bagged him too fast for him to know who we were, and now that he knew, he was confused. We weren’t a rival drug crew who would kill him and leave him somewhere with his genitals in his