by Aric Davis
Somehow, in an instant that made zero sense, Hooper knew that a sniper was glassing him from behind, getting the reticules of his rifle lined up just right on Hooper’s back, adjusting for windage and elevation, and readying to pull the trigger. Hooper heard the crack of the rifle over all of the other noise. It didn’t make any sense, but above the screaming, AK fire, and explosions, the crack of the sniper’s rifle was the sound of an angry but faraway God. Pain erupted in his right calf, dropping him and tearing a scream from Hooper’s throat.
When Hooper woke up, it was the middle of the night and he was covered in a slick sheen of sweat. He ignored the clock; time didn’t matter right now. His leg was killing him, and he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, possibly ever again, until he got the damn metal out of his leg.
He’d been dreaming about Vietnam. It had been years since that had happened. Some guys let that fuck up their whole lives, but not Matt Hooper. His bad dreams had stopped when he’d started snatching and stabbing prostitutes, and they weren’t going to come back, not ever. He cursed under his breath, then stood and walked to the bathroom.
He pissed, then opened the medicine cabinet, took out the aspirin, and ate six of them, washing the bitter powder down with water cupped in his hands from the sink. His leg had been feeling fine before he went to bed, but now it was more painful than ever. Calm down, Hoop. You knew as soon as that happened that that bullet had to come out of there. You’ve just been lying to yourself about it. Hooper tried grunting away the internal voice of reason, then accepted it. The bullet needed to come out, and there was only one person who could help him. Hooper left the bathroom, walked to the kitchen, then filled a pot with water and set it on the stove. He turned the burner all the way up and walked to the garage.
His fishing and camping stuff was all in the rafters, lying on an old door. Hooper’s interest in the outdoors had faded years ago, so there was no need to make it more readily accessible. As he wrestled the folding ladder off of the wall, he regretted that decision more than almost any other that he’d ever made. When he finally had the ladder set up next to the Dodge, he rested and glared up at the rafters. There was going to be no way to do this without putting pressure on his injured leg. It was the only option. Hooper took a deep breath, released it, and began to climb.
Hooper discovered after the very first rung that he’d grossly underestimated the pain that would be involved in this business. He accepted that and went on with it anyway, grunting and squealing as he made his agonizing way to the rafters to retrieve the tackle box. With every step, his leg felt as though it were being worked over with a knife. The worst part was knowing that as bad as this was, the extraction was likely going to be far, far worse.
With his good leg on the fourth rung of the ladder, Hooper could just reach the bottom of the door. Sweat was pouring off of him in what felt like rivers, and his hands were slick with it. His whole body felt as though it had been dipped in oil. He struggled up two more steps, his body tense as a parachutist’s static line, all but ready to rip open and fly apart. Hooper placed his left hand on the door, and then the right, pulling on it to take some of the strain off of his hurt leg. He rummaged blindly atop the door until he located the ancient tackle box with the very tips of his roaming fingers. He strained and scratched at it until he finally found enough purchase to inch it closer and closer. At last he reached the handle and dragged it to the edge.
Hooper set the box on top of the ladder and took a moment to rest and enjoy this minor triumph before setting to conquering the ladder in reverse. He managed to descend two rungs, but then his injured foot clipped a rung and he was airborne, the tackle box still firmly gripped in one hand, his other scrabbling futilely for a hold on the ladder. The moment didn’t last long. Hooper went from flying to landing with a teeth-rattling crash on the hood of the Dodge, the tackle box’s contents exploding across the garage.
The world flashed from black, to black and white, to black again. When Hooper opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on the hood of the Dodge, his leg, back, and head screaming. He pulled himself to a sitting position and then slid from the car and collapsed on all fours onto the garage floor.
He shook his head once to clear it, then tried again. It wasn’t working.
The last memories he’d had were of Vietnam and being shot, but he was in his garage. Even through the pain, Hooper knew that he had not really just been in the jungle. You’re in your garage, he told himself. You were getting your fishing stuff down from the rafters. Why? The bullet’s strike flashed back to him, but why had he been shot if he really hadn’t been in Vietnam?
Amy.
The thought of her brought it all back, and Hooper slowly began gathering his wits, along with the scattered supplies from the tackle box. He kept a neat garage, thankfully, but it still took him a long time to gather the things he needed. When he’d finally located the two small forceps he used to tie flies, he stood, using the car for support. He groaned when he saw the hood. The damage may have been only cosmetic, in the form of one large, man-shaped dent, but it would need to be fixed. There was no way someone like Carl could see the car in this condition and not ask him what in the hell had happened to it. Hooper shook his aching head, thinking about the repair bill—engine work was something he could do, but body work wasn’t—then headed into the house.
He went to the bedroom first and took the small revolver from the nightstand before limping to the kitchen, where he found the pot of water boiling over. He dropped the forceps into the water and then reduced the heat. After scrounging through the knife drawer, he selected a paring knife with a three-inch blade and held its tip in the water for a few minutes. Then he grabbed a plate and a pair of tongs and used the tongs to retrieve the forceps, which he set on the plate with the knife. Finally, he shut off the stove and dragged his afflicted leg toward the basement, the plate and steaming makeshift instruments in one hand, the bottle of Everclear in the other, and with the pistol tucked into the waistband of his briefs.
He slid down the steps in the way he was becoming accustomed to, with his body pressed against the wall to take as much weight as possible off of his leg. He made the bottom without dropping the plate or the bottle, though he could feel his underwear was in dire need of hiking up. The pistol was slipping from his waistband, and with his hands full, Hooper was unable to retrieve it as it slowly slid next to and then under his dick, the weight of it tugging down his shorts a precarious couple of inches.
Amy was just starting to come to, but her eyes widened when he set the plate down and she saw what was on it. “Calm down,” said Hooper. “That shit ain’t for you.” He reconsidered and said, “At least, not in the way you might be thinking.”
He set the Everclear next to the plate, both of them just out of what he figured would be her reach, then walked behind her. Seeing Amy normally made him hot, but today sex was the furthest thing from his mind. His cock felt small and useless next to the cold steel of the revolver, and Hooper removed the gun and held it next to his leg, happy to have it out of his shorts.
Hooper set the pistol on the ground and removed her handcuffs, noting the red stripes that were banding both of her wrists from the weight of her bonds. When he circled her again, she was sitting patiently like a good girl with her hands in her lap, so he bent down to loosen the straps, keeping the ball gag in her mouth. “Same rules as last time, Amy,” he said, then plucked the gag from her lips.
“I need some water,” she rasped. “Please, can I please have some water?”
“When we’re done,” said Hooper. “You got to help me first, though.” He pointed at his leg but didn’t look at it—he was terrified of what he might see if he did. “You’re going to get that fucking bullet out of my leg, and then I’ll get you more water than you can drink.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll do it, but I need some water first. My hands will shake too much if I don’t have any, and you’ll just get mad at me.”
Hooper look
ed into her eyes. Not steely, that had been taken from her, but she was telling the truth. “Fine,” he said, moving the plate and bottle farther from her just to be safe. “But when I get back, no more fucking around.” He looked at the clock over the washing machine. It was almost 6:00 a.m.
38
Despite having snuck out the night before, Tim was the first one up in the house. He dressed quickly, walked to the kitchen, filled a water bottle from the faucet, and went outside. The sun was up, but barely, and Tim opened the garage so he could get to the equipment. He dragged the wheelbarrow and transfer shovel out of their places at the rear of the garage, then filled the wheelbarrow with pea gravel from the slowly diminishing pile and began to push the thing around the house.
Between his and his dad’s trips around the garage to the site of the patio, they had managed to wear a groove from the heavy wheelbarrow into the lawn. Tim had no idea how many trips around the house they’d made, nor did he really want to. He was still shocked that he had been dragged into the whole thing. His dad had been almost impossibly cool about not treating him like a slave just because he’d been unlucky enough to happen to be born a boy and heavy lifting needed to happen. Of course this happened. It was going to be the perfect summer; something was bound to ruin it.
How could he bitch about having a bad summer? The thought burned a pit into Tim’s stomach as he dumped the wheelbarrow’s contents into the hole in the yard. Luke was living in a tree fort, some other kid had gotten killed and left at the drive-in, and Molly was still missing. His face went hot. He felt like a total jerk.
He set the much lighter wheelbarrow down, grabbed a rake that been left leaning against the house overnight, and began spreading the dumped rocks around the hole. When he was done he dropped the rake, grabbed the wheelbarrow, and walked back around to the front of the house.
This is never going to be finished.
Tim was on his tenth trip back to the pile when he rounded the house and saw his dad. “Early start?” Stan asked. “Looks like you made another dent—not bad.”
Tim began filling the wheelbarrow with the shovel. “Yeah, I figured if I wasn’t sleeping I may as well get to it. No time like the present, right?”
“No, I suppose you’re right,” said Stan. “Is the rake out back?”
“Yep, I must have missed it last night when I did cleanup. Sorry about that.”
Tim didn’t see it, but his dad got an odd look on his face when Tim said that, as though an idea popped into his head for the very first time. It was the sort of look that Tim would have described as weird and his mom would have said “uh-oh” about. Stan walked around the house, the look still on his face, and Tim continued filling the wheelbarrow.
When Tim had bullied the wheelbarrow back to the hole for the fifth time, he saw that his dad had strategically moved the pea gravel he’d been dumping to the corners farthest from the front of the hole. That way they wouldn’t have to make the edge of the hole uneven by running the wheelbarrow in and out of it over and over again.
“I think we’re almost there,” said Stan, who was using the side of a level to measure the distance between the top of the gravel and the edge of the hole. “We want to leave about an inch gap, then we compress that down to two and a quarter inches and start putting in pavers. When you come back around, grab the tamper, would you?”
“What’s a tamper?”
“It’s the metal square with a handle sticking up from it. You’ll know it when you see it. Bring it on back so we can start packing this gravel. At this rate I’ll be calling to get some pavers delivered this afternoon.”
Tim grabbed the now-empty wheelbarrow and brought it back around to the front of the house. He hadn’t really noticed before, but he’d made a massive dent in the gravel this morning. The pile had at most three or four more loads to go. He set the wheelbarrow down, went into the garage, then walked around to the backyard with what he thought was the tamper.
“Is this it?” he asked, holding the tamper up. It weighed about twenty pounds or so, and Tim felt sure that some new and horrible labor was to be done with it.
“That would be the one. Go ahead and bring it on over. We can learn how not to screw this up together.” Tim crossed the sea of loose gravel and handed the thing to his dad. It felt more like a crude club than something from the hardware store, like a modern-day mace or war hammer.
“Now, I think the basic gist of it,” Stan said, “is that we use the flat end to compress the gravel.”
Tim rolled his eyes. “I kind of figured that much, Dad.”
Stan walked to the southernmost corner of the hole, close to the hose, and drove the tamper into the gravel five or six times, all in the same general area. “Grab that level, Tim,” he said as he pushed his glasses up on his nose. Tim did, then handed it to his dad, who stuck it in the gravel and against the edge of the hole. “That just dropped it three-quarters of an inch. That’s pretty crazy.”
“We have to do that to all of it?” Tim asked, incredulous. Every step of building a patio seemed to be worse than the one before. As angry as he was with his dad, he couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy, as well as for himself.
“Yep, that’s what we have to do. Even worse, it all has to be level when we’re done. You want to give it a try?”
Tim took the tamper from his dad, gave himself some space, and started pounding the pea gravel into submission.
Stan measured when Tim was done. “Not bad, another quarter inch and we’re there.”
“Yeah, for this spot,” said Tim. “There’s going to be a whole lot of ‘we’re theres’ before we’re finished.”
Stan’s grin at this rolled into a frown. “Tim, I was thinking about something you said in front of the house earlier. I’m not sure it’s going to make a bit of difference, but I was curious. You said you were sorry for leaving the rake out back. It’s a good thing about you. You always say sorry about stuff like that. In fact, I can’t remember you ever not saying sorry after doing something wrong, or forgetting something, ever since you first learned your manners. You want to know what’s weird about that?”
“Sure, what?” Tim said, before pounding the tamper into the gravel, imagining he had a jackhammer or some other piece of heavy machinery, instead of some modern version of what was almost undoubtedly a centuries-old tool.
“You never said sorry for lying at the police station. It never occurred to me until right now.”
“I know I didn’t,” said Tim, speaking in between blasts of tamping the gravel down. “And I’m not going to. You and Mom can punish me as much as you want, but I’m not going to apologize for trying to help a kidnapped girl.” Tim kept working, letting his anger power him and turn his upper body into a piston.
Tim didn’t know it, but his dad was staring at him, looking as though he had just realized he might have made a horrible mistake.
39
Hooper lay on his stomach. Sweat was pouring off of his face and pooling on the cold concrete, and the revolver was in his hand. She had the forceps in his leg again, and in a reversal of how things had been, the ball gag was in his mouth now, though it remained unfastened. He grunted against the ball, the sounds coming from him foreign-sounding even to Hooper’s own ears.
He checked the clock. They’d been at it for only five minutes.
After Hooper had brought her the water, Amy had sipped it slowly. At first he’d been frustrated—he really wanted to get this over with—but then he understood. She’d been dehydrated, perhaps even dangerously so, and she was likely scared of getting sick by drinking it too fast.
She set the glass down before it was empty and said, “So how do I do this?”
“Well, first off, I’m going to have a couple swallows from that bottle of high-test that I brought down,” said Hooper. “Then you’re going to pour some of it on my leg, and after the pain fades, you’re going to use the knife and those fly-tying forceps to try and get that bullet out of my leg.” He watched her s
tare at the tools on the plate for a minute and then continued. “I know what you’re thinking, and don’t for a minute believe I haven’t considered you might try something. That’s why I brought this heater down with me. You start fucking around or thinking this is a chance to escape, I will not hesitate to put a hundred-fifty-grain hollow point into your skull. Get it?”
She nodded, and he took some clean towels from atop the dryer. He set the towels on the floor next to her and then sat heavily. “Look, I know you’re mad as hell and you don’t want to help me. But as much as I don’t want you to be the one to pull that bullet out of me, you’re the only person who can. Hell, it’d be one thing if I could reach it properly, but there’s no way I can do some garage surgery on myself when I can’t even see what I need to be digging around in. So you got to be the one to do it, and I got to let you.
“I figure if you do a good enough job we’ll both be fine, and if not, you get one in your dome and I wind up figuring out some story to tell while I’m waiting on an ambulance. I don’t know if I’m a good enough liar to pull that off, but I sure as shit know you’re not good enough with that little blade to stop me from shooting you if I get to thinking I need to.”
Amy nodded at him. She looked onboard, as though she respected the situation and knew that doing a good job would benefit her just as much as it would him. It was sort of like dangling a carrot in front of a mule, Hooper thought. It was a good trick, but not a fair one. The only thing that was going to be happening for little old Amy once he got put back together was a whole lot of fucking. Maybe she’d come to see that was what would keep her alive, and maybe she wouldn’t, but just like with extracting the bullet, it was going to happen.
