Dismember

TWENTY-FOUR

A deputy stood in the kitchen, peering at the broken glass like a mystic studying tea leaves, as if he thought he might divine some clue from the shape of the mess alone.

A man in jeans and a t-shirt, who might have been a cop or a doctor or a lumberjack for all Mike knew, swabbed the knife wound in Mike’s hip. “You’re very lucky, Mr. Pullman,” he said in an almost nonexistent accent that might have been British or Irish. “Something like this could have been much more serious.”

It’s just a booboo, Mike expected him to say, No big deal. Let’s get you a Big Bird band-aid.

Mike sat on the couch with his pants around his ankles, his underwear pulled just beneath his thatch of pubic hair but still covering his penis and testicles. Barely. He looked at the third man across the room, the quiet, bearded deputy with the inch-long scar just beneath his eye who had answered the phone when Libby called. “Listen,” he said, “isn’t there something else we can be doing? I mean, that asshole’s got my son. We’re not gonna find him sitting around my living room playing doctor.”

The man hovering over Mike’s lap huffed.

Rather than answer Mike’s question, the bearded deputy, Willis, asked one of his own. “This man you say took your son, did he have a dog with him?”

Mike shook his head, though not in answer to the question. “First of all, I don’t say he took my son, he did take him. They’re gone, and getting farther away every second. Did he have a dog? How the hell should I know? What kind of question is that? He had a knife and he had a foot the size of Texas. How’s that? Maybe if you get a sketch artist up here we can figure out what kind of sneakers he was wearing.”

The bearded man stared through the living room window and never turned to Mike. “We think he might have had a dog,” he said to the window, “and if you would answer my questions, we’d be that much closer to finding your boy.” He seemed focused on something outside.

Mike sighed and rubbed his face while the man on his knees before him continued his ministrations.

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “I think I might have heard some barking, but I never saw a dog. I’m not even a hundred percent sure about the barking. With all the stabbing and kicks to the head, I might have been out of it a little.” Mike saw the deputy’s face reflected in the window, looking transparent, ghostly. The lawman smiled.

“Of course, Mr. Pullman.”

“What’s the deal with the dog?” Mike asked. “How does that help us?”

Willis finally turned away from the window and came across the room. “Do you know a Bethany Winston?”

“Beth—” Mike started and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess. She lives just down that way.” He gestured with his head. “Why? Did something happen?”

Willis sat down on the edge of the coffee table, his holstered gun tapping against the tabletop and the leather of his utility belt creaking. “Bethany Winston was attacked earlier tonight,” he said simply and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guy stole her dog and cut her up a little.”

“Cut…my God,” Mike said. “Is she okay?”

“Will be,” Willis said. “She said the guy had a boy with him; little boy about her age.”

The second deputy came in from the kitchen, looking unsatisfied, thumbs tucked into his belt and chewing at his bottom lip.

Mike said, “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Skinny kid, maybe eleven years old. He attacked the guy in my bedroom. I don’t think he was exactly here voluntarily.”

“No,” said the deputy.

The doctor, if he was one, poked at Mike, who hissed. “Easy,” he said. He turned back to Willis. “So what? You’re saying there’s two kidnapped kids?”

The lip-chewing deputy, whose name Mike had already forgotten, opened his mouth to say something, but Willis held up a hand to him. “I’m not saying anything,” Willis said to Mike, “but that’s one possibility.”

Mike didn’t want to ask about the other possibilities—he could figure those out for himself—but he did say, “Isn’t there something else we could be doing right now? If he’s out there, if my son is with that lunatic and there’s another boy with him, shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“Trust me,” the deputy said, “we’re doing everything we can.”