Dismember Read online

  Stupid. She hadn’t really done much. Taken down a few pictures, replaced a rug in the entryway, repositioned the couch and the television, and bought another end table. Little things, mostly. Although Mike would probably notice (the couch at least, the big leather dinosaur of a thing), he wouldn’t care. Surely he wouldn’t be hurt. Would he?

  Libby wasn’t sure. They’d shared the house for a long time. Since he left, he’d come to pick up or drop off Trevor at least twice a week. She supposed that on some level it might still seem like home to him. And now she’d changed it without him.

  Libby sighed and looked over at the empty cup. She’d been right about needing more to drink—she was thirsty already.

  Trevor shuffled forward a few steps and rubbed absently at the tip of his nose. He still had the five-dollar bill clutched between his fingers, and Libby wondered why he hadn’t stuck it in his pocket. Silly guy. She beamed.

  The carousel stopped to let off its current passengers. The first thirty or forty waiters climbed onto the platform and mounted their animals, and the line behind them surged forward to fill the void. Libby watched Trevor carefully until the progression stopped and everyone resettled. When they stilled again, Trevor turned around to the girls behind him and said something that made them laugh.

  That was Trevor, always quick to make friends, whether they were five years older than him or not.

  Libby thought it would probably be okay for her to go grab a refill. She could watch over her shoulder and keep an eye on Trevor the whole time.

  She un-slumped and pushed out of the chair. Carrying the empty cup to the taco station, she glanced back toward Trevor (fine, of course) and then at her watch. 4:45. Mike would be here soon—he was usually early. Afterward, Libby would have the rest of the weekend to herself. She’d miss her son, as always, but she would enjoy the quiet time. Stepping to the soda fountain, she thought of long, steamy baths, glasses of wine, and relaxing music.

  She hadn’t done any work that morning before leaving the house, had planned on getting in a few hours that night after she returned alone, but now she thought she might put it off until tomorrow. She made most of her money from website design, but she’d actually gotten a little ahead in the last couple of weeks and thought she could afford to take both the day and night off. At least this once. She’d have the rest of the weekend for any catch-up work that needed doing.

  She dumped her ice, replaced it with some fresh, and held the cup under the Mountain Dew nozzle until it brimmed. Refitting her plastic lid and moving back toward the table kept her so busy that she didn’t actually look up until she was almost halfway there. While she slipped the straw between her lips and took her first drink, her eyes scanned the crowd for Trevor. He wasn’t where she’d seen him last, just in front of the group of young girls. She detoured to the right, around tables of couples, families and friends, trying to get a better angle.

  It wasn’t her angle, and it wasn’t that she couldn’t see him.

  Trevor had vanished.

  TWO

  The man had been watching the boy for a long time now, sometimes rubbing the stubble on his chin slowly and rhythmically, the way another man might pet a cat, sometimes standing still as a tree with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes wide, studying.

  The boy was brown haired and slender. Not skinny, not wimpy, but lean, like a mountain lion or a coyote. Once, a long time ago, he’d known another boy who looked almost the same. His name had been Georgie, and he had been the man’s brother.

  The man who had been Dave, and not Davy, for just over twenty-three years, had blood under his fingernails, but he’d managed to wash most of the splatter off his face. One splotch lay caked in the crease behind his ear, but for now the uneven locks of his poorly cut hair hid it from view.

  It was his birthday. Thirty years old. A special birthday.

  Still watching the boy, Dave pulled a toothpick from the breast pocket of his shirt, where he kept a small stash of them. The shirt was not flannel, nor was it checked. It was a plain blue button-up that he’d stolen off a backyard clothesline especially for today. He’d kept it hanging on the back of his door that morning until after the bloodshed and his mostly successful cleanup. He stuck the toothpick in his mouth and chomped. Then he pulled a twig from a nearby branch, put it in his pocket to replace the pick. Much better that way. Balanced.

  He wore olive-green cargo pants. In the right cargo pocket, he had a hunting knife with a razor-sharp blade. In the opposite pocket: another. He reached both hands into their respective compartments and ran his fingers down the knives’ rubber grips. They were identical weapons, or nearly so, and although it wasn’t exactly a gun at each hip, Dave couldn’t help but compare himself to an old western cowboy.

  The second knife was just a backup, something he had no intention of using or needing, but Dave liked knowing it was there. He’d never been a boy scout, never had that “be prepared” jargon brainwashed into him, but he’d never been a moron either and he never did anything half-assed.

  He watched and chewed.

  The boy’s mother had gone inside the house almost half an hour earlier, left her son to play. The kid had spent ten of those thirty minutes bouncing a ratty old tennis ball off the side of the house, and then he’d ventured across the back yard to the edge of the property (near Dave’s hiding spot, this was), where a tree house sat high in the branches of a fork-trunked oak. The fort looked so weathered and cracked that it must have been older than the boy himself.

  Dave had noticed it before. He’d come here many times.

  Weathered or not, the wooden rungs nailed to the tree’s trunk had held for the kid when he scurried up them and onto the main platform, which had itself now withstood almost twenty minutes of jumps, half-hearted karate moves, and the various re-positionings of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy who didn’t seem to know whether he wanted to sit, lie, or stand. The old platform hadn’t so much as creaked.

  Dave grinned. Over the last six months he’d visited a lot of houses, and he’d watched a lot of boys, but he always came back here. The boy’s real name, he knew, was Zachary, but he never thought of him that way. Usually it was just the boy or the kid; occasionally, it was Georgie.

  Now the boy moved again. Dave left the weapons in his pockets but removed his hands. He needed to focus on the kid.

  From his place behind the thick tree trunk deeper in the woods, Dave watched the child back off the platform on his stomach and kick blindly for a rung nailed to the trunk about two feet down.

  It wasn’t just the kid’s looks. Even his movements reminded Dave of Georgie. And on several occasions, Dave had noticed the double knots on the laces of the kid’s sneakers. Georgie (the original Georgie) had known how to tie a pair of sneaks so well you could only get them off with a pair of scissors.

  The boy descended the irregularly spaced rungs with almost superhuman agility and pushed away from the trunk still five feet shy of the ground. When he landed, his knees bent and his arms flung out to his sides in a way that made him look like an alighting bird. He straightened himself up and headed back to the house.

  Dave smiled and walked around his hiding tree. Today wasn’t just another day. It was time to stop watching. He moved, and the knives slapped against his thighs.

  THREE

  The pickup moved around the mountain roads like a sickly horse out for one last lap around the racetrack. It leaned around the corners, shuddered more than once to an almost complete standstill, jerked, bounced, and wobbled its way forward.

  Mike Pullman rode it out of the Rockies the best he could, relying heavily on the brakes, cursing himself for continuing to put his life in the hands (or wheels) of such an untrustworthy hunk of junk. He’d realized only recently that the truck was on its last metaphorical leg, and he’d soon have to trade it in for something a little more surefooted, an SUV or a jeep. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. He’d paid the truck off several years ago but hadn’t yet figured o
ut how to bend his budget around the purchase of a new (or even a reliable used) vehicle.

  Still, he had to get one, one way or another. A good set of snow tires and extremely careful driving had gotten him through one winter in the mountains, but they would never get him through another, assuming the truck somehow survived to see it.

  The pickup’s front tires rolled onto a long stretch of flat road, and Mike eyed the interstate ahead. He let out a single short sound, a cross between a sigh of relief and a whoop of joy. The truck groaned as he accelerated, and one short-lived squeal came from a belt somewhere inside the engine compartment, but Mike was soon cruising. The mountains fell away behind him.

  He’d driven the back roads in his usual silence, afraid that the distraction of the radio might make him miss a turn and slide into a ditch or, worse, off the unguardrailed edge of a cliff. But now that he’d reached relatively safe ground, he punched the power button on the dash and flipped through the radio’s presets until he found an oldies station playing some classic Rolling Stones.

  He merged onto I-25, beating his hand against the steering wheel in rhythm with the tune, and reminded himself of a more important reason to get rid of this old clunker: Trevor. The choice to upgrade to a better vehicle wasn’t just the smart one or the practical one—it was the fatherly one. After all, any time he loaded Trevor in the truck, Mike was putting more than just his own life in danger; his son deserved better than to hurtle all around Colorado in a veritable deathtrap.

  Before the breakup, Libby had sometimes hinted that they ought to get rid of the truck—leaving classifieds open on the coffee table, mentioning the great deals their friends had gotten on their used cars, that sort of thing—but back then the pickup had still been a dependable means of transportation, and she’d never gotten confrontational about it. He’d taken the truck with him when he left, and she’d kept the newer Honda. Since the divorce, she hadn’t said a word about the truck, but he knew she probably dreaded Trevor climbing into its cab the same way she would have dreaded him strapping himself into an electric chair or stepping inside a smoking gas chamber. Mike guessed she stayed quiet about it now only because, as divorcés, they sometimes had to choose their battles; for whatever reason, she’d let the issue of the truck slide.

  Part of him, a very petty and illogical part, wanted to drive the pickup until it disintegrated, just to spite her. Fortunately, it was also a small, easy-to-ignore part.

  He eased the truck up to sixty miles an hour and punched at the radio’s presets again when the Stones dissolved into a series of mind-numbing commercials.

  Cars and trucks, motorcycles and eighteen-wheelers zipped by him on the left, the big rigs sometimes leaving his small truck shaking in their wake, but Mike hardly noticed. Since moving to the mountains, he’d traveled this stretch of road dozens, and possibly going on hundreds of times, and at this point he figured just about everyone in the state had passed him at least once. No big deal; he wasn’t usually in a rush, and he’d never been one to indulge in road rage. Let someone else lose control and wrap his skull around a mile marker—Mike would take his sweet time. Of course, the truck maxed out at about sixty-five, which meant his choice to drive slowly wasn’t really much of a choice at all.

  In the back of the truck, an unsecured tool chest slid against the wheel well and made a disturbing clunking sound. Mike peeked back there to make sure the hasp hadn’t come undone and returned his eyes to the road at once after verifying it was okay. Like his ex-wife, Mike worked out of his home, but unlike hers, his work had little to do with any technological mumbo jumbo. He worked with his hands, made high-quality rustic furniture that he sold mostly in town at craft festivals and in furniture stores throughout most of the surrounding counties. He did, however, still sell many items through the website Libby had set up for him early in their marriage, and even a few on auction sites like eBay. Actually, in the last few years his online transactions had become an increasingly larger percentage of his overall annual sales, though he hadn’t admitted this to Libby and didn’t really want to admit it to himself. No matter how much of his furniture sold online, it wasn’t made there, and he was proud of that, as happy about the clunking tools in the bed of his truck as he was about the blisters on his fingers or the sawdust in his hair.

  He’d tuned the radio to a station playing a contemporary song he hadn’t yet heard but that seemed to have an acceptable amount of electric guitar. The band transitioned from a distortion-heavy guitar solo to the chorus, and Mike glanced down at the dashboard clock. If he kept driving at this speed, he would just barely make it to the Mountain View on time. He applied a little more pressure to the gas pedal, meaning to bring his speed that much closer to the limit, but the truck bucked and shook, and he let up. Although punctual by nature, Mike recognized that sometimes it was better to be a little late than a lot dead. Especially when the kind of death you were talking about would more likely than not involve being twisted around the axles of a Mack diesel.

  He drove toward Foothill, the traffic still flowing around him like river water around a slow-floating log; he thought of his son, and the part of him that was Mike faded away. Trevor was waiting for his daddy, and Daddy was almost there.

  FOUR

  Once, maybe a year ago, she’d lost sight of him in the supermarket. He’d strayed down the cereal aisle to get a closer look at a box with a swooping Batman or Spiderman while she searched for an undented can of green beans. It took only three or four seconds for her to look up, realize he was missing, and whip around the corner to find him all but salivating over the combination of sugar and superheroes. But in those few ticks of the clock, her heart must have beat about a thousand times.

  Now, standing motionless in the middle of the overflowing food court, smelling the juxtaposed odors of fried fish and chocolate chip cookies, hearing but not listening to the chattering shoppers and the carousel’s souped-up elevator music, Libby felt the old chest pump beating its way to an all-time record.

  If her fingers hadn’t instinctively tightened around the soda, she surely would have dropped it onto the tile between her feet and ended up standing in a yellow puddle looking like she’d wet herself. But as it was, she managed to hold on long enough to move a few steps to her left and plop the cup onto the corner of the nearest table, where an elderly couple looked up only long enough to eye her suspiciously.

  While her heart continued shooting adrenaline through her body like bullets from a rattling machine gun, Libby wove her way through the tables and chairs toward the spinning carousel and its crowd of would-be riders.

  She’d left her bags under her chair, and although she realized this somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she didn’t care. Until she had her arms cinched around her son’s narrow body, there would be room in her head for only one thought: find him.

  Walking past the table where they had shared their early dinner, Libby looked for the group of girls Trevor had been charming before she’d gone to get her refill.

  Jesus, if I lose him over sixteen ounces of Mountain Dew, I’ll never ever forgive myself.

  The girls clustered together near the back of the gathered onlookers, shuffling their feet and biting at their lips but looking otherwise undisturbed. One of them would have screamed if someone had jerked Trevor right out from under their noses, wouldn’t they? Kids these days weren’t that desensitized. She pushed through the crowd, ignoring half a dozen varying degrees of protestation, and grabbed the shoulders of the first of the girls she reached.

  “Please.” The word came out like the hiss from a broken steam pipe. “Where did he go?”

  The girl’s eyes bulged. “Wh…who?”

  “Trevor.” Libby gave the girl a quick shake and heard a woman somewhere behind her gasp. “My son.” Shake. “Trevor.” Shake shake. “You were just talking to him.”

  Libby looked left and then right, ignoring the non-responsive girl, staring past hairy legs and grungy sneakers to see if maybe her son had simp
ly fallen or was kneeling on the ground and out of immediate sight. “Trevor!”

  One of the girl’s friends, a blonde-haired pixie, stepped forward and plucked Libby’s hands off her friend’s shoulders. “He left, ma’am.”

  It wasn’t only the ma’am that got through to Libby, it was the calm and rational authority in the girl’s voice. For a moment, Libby was looking at a negotiator or some sort of diplomat, a future world leader; then the girl said, “Just chill, okay,” and the moment passed. Libby ran her hands through her hair and gave the doe-eyed girl a quick apology before turning back to the pixie.

  “Did you see where he went? Any of you?” She scanned the rest of the girls and the crowd around them. “Somebody must have seen.”

  They shook their heads, all mute and sorry looking.

  “There’s a candy shop up that way a ways,” the pixie said, tilting her head away from the carousel. “He coulda gone there.”

  Libby’s gaze flicked in the direction the girl had indicated, and she shook her head. “But you were talking to him. He just got out of line and headed off without saying a word, and none of you looked to see where he was going?”

  The pixie shook her head and said only, “I’m sorry.”

  Libby wanted to scream. She’d had her back turned for a few seconds, maybe five, surely not long enough for Trevor to meander his way out of the crowd so casually that no one even noticed which direction he’d gone.

  At least nobody grabbed him—somebody would have noticed that. But she was hardly relieved. Kidnapped or simply wandering, Trevor was still gone, and she had an idea finding him this time would be harder than turning into the cereal aisle.

  She hurried away from the girls and the rest of the unhelpful crowd, too worried about her son to let the scene she’d made or the pity-filled eyes tracking her progress embarrass her.

  Libby rushed toward the candy store. Trevor wouldn’t have disobeyed her so deliberately, but she had no idea where else to look or what other alternatives to pursue. She’d come close enough to smell the licorice when another option, as sometimes happens, presented itself. The barrel-chested man standing stoically beside the cell phone kiosk cocked his head, and for the first time since setting down her soda, Libby felt her heart slowing down and her brain speeding up.