CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
The front door and windows are barred, but there’s a tall gate blocking a walkway toward the back of the house.
I drag a recycling bin up to it, hop up, and jump over.
My heart threatens to break my ribs as I follow the path to an unkempt back garden, all dry weeds and abandoned flower beds.
I pick up a forgotten stone garden gnome and heave him through the back window, climbing through so hastily that I scrape my temple on the broken glass.
It takes a second for my eyes to adjust beyond the dust motes swirling where the light breaks in.
The house is fairly ordinary—run-down but tidy in a spartan sort of way.
There isn’t much in the back hallway, just yellowing curtains over the windows and lidded trash cans in the corner.
I peer inside one. It’s filled with dozens of discarded takeout containers—plastic tubs, Chinese food cartons, broken-down pizza boxes. I feel sick.
I wind carefully through the hall, stepping lightly, but the place seems empty.
“Grant?” I whisper, and get no reply. I have to clamp my lips between my teeth in an attempt to breathe quietly through my nose.
I pass shabby, sparse rooms and scan them for any presence—a bare-bones kitchen, a living room with a moth-eaten striped couch and a boxy little TV, a bathroom lit by a flickering bulb.
And a dismal home office housing a giant computer monitor, filled with unintelligible code that throws green light around the room.
A classic hacker’s den if ever I’ve seen one. I haven’t, but still.
“Damn you, Hoffman,” I say under my breath, hoping there’s still a Hoffman to damn.
There’s a carpeted staircase leading to a second floor, but that doesn’t seem right. Who hides their victims upstairs?
I double back, growing more panicked with every fruitless sweep of the space.
I almost miss it in my haste. It’s just a painting, a small framed image of flowers on the wall right beside a bookshelf crammed with business and productivity books. But it stands out amid the no-frills austerity of the rest of the house. And it’s crooked.
I nudge the frame aside, and there it is: a glowing keypad.
I search in a frenzy, skimming my fingers over the chipped paint until they finally land on a seam in the wall, running along the edges of the bookshelf. A hidden door.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. “Grant? If you can hear me, bang on the wall or something.”
Nothing. So he can’t hear me.
Or he no longer has hands. Oh, God.
I lurch back to the keypad and desperately punch in 1234. There is a red-flashing BEEEEEP that might as well say NICE TRY, IDIOT. I try 4321. BEEEEEP. I try 6969. BEEEEEEEEEEEP. I swear that beep ran longer, the red lights flashing a little more indignantly.
I slam a frustrated hand against the wall, and it’s not the hollow thud I expect.
Whatever this secret room is, it’s heavily reinforced, maybe soundproofed.
Maybe that’s good; maybe the silence doesn’t mean Grant’s dead or unconscious.
Maybe he’s shouting out random desperate trivia about himself even now; I just can’t hear him.
Or maybe I’m too late.
Hang on, Grant! I’m going to get you out of there! is the heroic and reassuring thing I mean to yell at the bookcase, but I’m a little preoccupied fighting off images of him bleeding out on the floor, so instead it comes out “HANG UP GRANT I’M GOING TO OUT YOU.”
I tear back through the house in a desperate search for the key code, taking the stairs two at a time.
The front door slams. I stop cold.
Plodding footsteps drift from downstairs, along with an incomprehensible, agitated muttering.
“Come on, Howard. You can do this. You can.”
There is the sound of a weak slap, as if he has tried to smack his own face but couldn’t quite commit.
I duck down a few inches, hazarding a glance through the railing.
He’s standing in profile, rubbing anxiously at his bald spot.
In the other hand he holds a brown paper bag, from which he retrieves a half pint of whiskey.
I almost laugh. A serial killer so gutless that he had to leave his own crime scene to fetch some liquid courage.
With jittery hands, he peels the plastic off the neck and unscrews the cap, then downs half of it before launching into a coughing fit.
He stills and closes his eyes, his lips pressed into a thin line.
“I am not a coward,” he affirms, as if standing up to some invisible schoolyard bully. “No more Cowie Howie. I am Howard. I can do this!”
With that, he turns abruptly in the direction of the hidden room and, with a visible tremor down his spine, leaves my line of sight.
I fight the urge to charge after him. Much as I would love to pummel him into a warped Picasso of his former self, he has to lead me to Grant first.
With a slow, calming breath, I sneak down the stairs, tiptoeing after him, then dart back when he turns around wringing his hands. A sharp inhale, a trembling exhale, and he says again, “I am not a coward.” He continues toward the room.
I stalk closer, diving into the kitchen when he doubles back to ask himself if he really has to go in there, then ducking behind the bathroom door when he pivots to chug more whiskey.
We continue this way down the hall; him, alternately chickening out and psyching himself up, and me, creeping up on him like a cat.
Step, step, hide. Step, step, step … hide.
I’m in the coat closet when he finally reaches the flower painting and freezes, white-knuckling the whiskey bottle.
I watch him through the sliver of open door as he sinks into a miserable crouch with his back to the bookcase.
“Listen, Howard,” he whispers harshly, thumping his head back against the shelf. A copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People tumbles out, narrowly missing him. “All you have to do is get in, cuff him, get out. That’s all. It hardly takes an MBA to do that.”
Cuff him. The words send a whisper of relief through me. You don’t restrain dead or severely injured people, right?
Right?
He downs the last of the whiskey and rises slowly, then repositions the empty bottle in his hand, gripping it upside down by the neck. Gingerly, he retrieves a pair of handcuffs from his pocket.
I can almost taste the silence that fills the house.
It’s that thick, choking stillness that only comes right before all hell breaks loose.
The tide running out just before a tsunami.
The final girl’s slow, shaking breaths right before the horror movie jump scare.
I myself am holding my breath, because I’m no amateur.
He’s frozen at the hidden door, weighing his last chance: go in, or turn back.
And then, he decides: Go.
He smashes the bottle against the bookshelf, its empty heel transforming into a jagged crown of shards. He holds it high, ready. His fingertip hits the keypad. Three beeps. A flash of green. The door opens.
Somewhere in the hour-long second it takes me to break from the closet and tear down the hall, I hear the voice I’ve been waiting for: “BACK OFF.” And then a decidedly less confident “Oh, shit.” A solar flare radiates from deep in my chest. He’s okay. Okay enough to be freaking out, anyway.
I catch the bookshelf-door just before it swings shut and heft it open to reveal a dank, windowless cement-block room, lit by a single hanging lightbulb. And there in the corner are Howard and Grant, mid-struggle.
Howard has summoned enough courage to catch Grant in a headlock and is awkwardly trying to wrangle him into the cuffs without dropping the threat of the broken bottle.
“Shush,” he’s saying as he tries and fails to capture Grant’s wrist. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Damn right, you’re not,” I say.
Two pairs of eyes flash up to me—Grant’s immediately softening with relief, Howard’s wide with horror.
This is the part where I would normally assess the threat, review my options, ask myself what Uri would do.
None of that happens. Instead, some kind of dormant Rage Monster Roxie awakens, and with a roar of fury, I charge.
I lose sight of everything but the force of my limbs and the vulnerable parts of Cowie Howie’s flimsy body.
The heel of my hand meets the bridge of a nose.
My fingers wrench a wrist. What’s left of the bottle shatters into tiny fragments on the concrete floor.
There are jolts of impact. Grunts of pain.
Twisting, ducking, striking. And then it’s done.
What started in a rage ends with Howard unarmed, whimpering, and cuffed by both wrists to a pipe on the wall.
Out of breath, I watch him for a second, making sure he’s really secure. He’s shaking like a frightened gerbil. He isn’t scary, he’s pathetic. Then again, aren’t the pathetic men the ones you really have to watch out for?
I turn to Grant, finally, and sweep a frantic eye over him. His hair is a mess and his clothes are rumpled, but other than that, he’s exactly as I saw him last: psychologically tormented but physically unharmed.
It’s such a drastic contrast to the visions swarming my head that I rush forward and throw my arms around him.
He wobbles a bit, caught off guard, but right as I’m realizing that we don’t really do this and I’m definitely making this weird, he winds his arms around my back.
“Longest five minutes of my life,” he says into my hair.
“I ran in here in two. What happened?”
“It … it was an accident,” Howard bleats from his place by the wall.
“You. Not a word,” I snap at him with a glare, pulling away from Grant. Howard recoils like a child being scolded by the teacher.
When I look back at Grant, there’s a streak of blood on his cheek that wasn’t there a second ago. My stomach heaves. His face is drawn with concern.
“Listen, we need to get medical attention,” he says.