Page 13 of The Pretenders of Copper County
I’d thought about this, when I’d first gotten into his car tonight. Imagined doing a sexy striptease for him, if I could get up the nerve. And obviously—obviously!—I had no interest in doing that anymore, but those dang crossed wires, and, yes, okay, the way Reed was watching me with total absorption made it hard to remember why not.
I slowly undid my zipper… and my baggy jeans fell to my ankles in an utterly un-seductivewhoomp,leaving me in my boxers and my stretched-out and slightly worn striped sweater.
Reed stared at me, and his eyes flared with something—impatience, maybe? Probably impatience—that made my stomach flutter and my mind go blank.
What next? Too late, I remembered that I hadn’t taken my shoes off first, so I turned and bent to ease the pants over them?—
Behind me, Reed made a garbled noise, and when I turned with my pants in hand, he grabbed them and quickly backed away. “Never mind. I have to do things. Security things. Right after I take a shower. So… here.” His duffel sailed across the room and landed heavily on the bed. “Borrow whatever you want for now.”
Then he stalked out of the room, clutching my jeans in one large fist, and slammed the door closed behind him.
I blinked. Was that it? No stern warnings that I was his prisoner? No threats about what might happen if I tried to escape? It felt strangely anticlimactic.
I sat down on the bed uncertainly. Somethingin Reed’s bag made a soft, metallicclinkat the movement. Frowning at the closed door, I opened the zipper.
It was mostly filled with clothes—large, soft, good-smelling sweatshirts, T-shirts, jeans, and a pair of sweatpants so big that even when I tugged a pair on, rolled them up, and cinched the waist as tight as possible, I probably still looked like a kid playing dress-up. Beneath the top layer of sweatshirts, I found the source of the noise: a multitool, two boxes of bullets, and a small holstered gun that looked exactly like Uncle Danny’s.
Holy, holy crap.
I wouldn’t—couldn’t—use a gun. Uncle Danny had insisted on taking me to target practice as a teenager so I could learn to protect myself, but as much as I’d wanted to please him, I could barely make myself hold a weapon, let alone fire it. Something about feeling the hunk of metal in my hand, knowing that it had the power to hurt and maim and kill, felt too wrong. After the third or fourth time, I’d told Danny very seriously that I thought I might be allergic to gunpowder, and he’d never taken me to the range again.
But Reed didn’t know any of that.
I mentally downgraded Reed from “bad at kidnapping” to “worst kidnapper ever.” And while I should have been thanking my lucky stars, I actually felt a little bit… sorry for him? I knew what it was like to try your hardest, to be determined, and to never be quite good enough—not strong enough, not hard-edged enough, not dominant enough—to be taken seriously.
But after spending a long moment staring at the pile of clothes—two weeks’ worth, at least, so how long was he planning on keeping me here?—and watching the weapon shine dully in the overhead light, I realized how foolish I was being. When I heard the shower turn on somewheredown the hall, I realized I might not get another shot, so I wrapped the gun in a T-shirt and hid it under the mattress, tied my borrowed sweatpants a little tighter, slipped my shoes back on, grabbed the multitool, and headed for the window.
Having watched Reed check the lock earlier, it was easy enough to repeat his steps and get it open, and since I was pretty handy with tools—a consequence of occasionally, not often, and never intentionally breaking things was that I’d learned to fix them—it only took a second to jimmy the screen out of the way. I heaved a leg over the sill, grabbed the flamingo-bedecked trellis I’d noticed earlier—John Ruffian would besoproud of my situational awareness—and started to climb to freedom.
Unfortunately, it seemed the trellis wanted freedom, too.
The second my entire weight was on the thing, whatever had been attaching it to the house detached without warning, and I tumbled to the lawn in the side yard with pieces of rotting wood and several decorative pink birds on top of me.
“Whoa,” a man’s voice said appreciatively. “That was freakingsick, bro. You looked like Superman. Until the landing.”
It took me a moment to remember how breathing worked and two more to confirm my entire body was still operational. Once I did, I adjusted my glasses, levered up on an elbow, and looked around. Next door, a man wearing nothing but underpants, flip-flops, and a blanket cape leaned over his front porch railing to watch me. And in his hand, he held a cell phone.
“Thank the stars,” I said under my breath. Then,a little louder, I croaked, “Sir, I need you to call the police. Immediately.”
His eyes widened, and I noticed belatedly that in his other hand, he held a cigarette. I sniffed. A very pungent cigarette.
“No way, Superdude. Whatcha wanna call them for?”
“I—oof—” I pushed to my feet, wincing, hitched up my pants, and hurried across the grass between us, dodging around the flamingoes. “The thing is, I think I’ve been kidnapped.”
He blinked. “Youthink?”
“N-no, I know. I know I’ve been kidnapped. Just… really poorly.” I darted a glance back toward the house, but Reed seemed to have missed my escape. “Could I please borrow your phone? I wouldn’t ask, but my kidnapper threw mine away, even though it was brand-new and really special to me, and…”Not the point, Chris. “Please?”
The man blinked at me with unfocused eyes. “Superdude, I want to help you, but I can’t call the cops. This is my grandma’s house. Cops come poking around, they’re gonna ask questions.” He leaned over the railing and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Like why Gran’s got more plants than the legal limit in her garden out back. You feel me?”
I shook my head, confused. They put limits on gardens in Massachusetts? That was awful, considering the plight of butterflies and other pollinators due to habitat loss and pesticide use, but—Once again, not the point, Chris.
“I won’t call the cops directly, I promise,” I agreed. “I’ll call…”
It hit me then, how few people Icouldcall to help me take care of this.Nonna was gone, and Uncle Danny was someplace in Alaska, Van was out of town, Nicky wasn’t speakingto me, and I didn’t know anyone in the Hollow well enough to ask for help except maybe Webb, and—I glanced back at the house again—I couldn’t call him for obvious reasons.
The circle of people who loved me had never been huge, but it had shrunk a lot in the past year, and realizing it made my chest ache.
