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“Just get me up the ramp,” Emily gasps. “I’ll be fine once I get home and take a muscle relaxant.”

Bonnie positions the wheelchair facing the ramp and takes a deep breath. She’d like to pull it back first and get a running start, but the pavement is too uneven. One hard push, she thinks. I’m strong enough, I can do this.

“Should I help?” Roddy asks, but he’s already moving behind Bonnie rather than toward the wheelchair’s handles. His hand dips into his pocket. He flips the small protective cap off the tip of the hypo with no trouble; he’s done this before, both in numerous practice runs and four times when it’s the real thing. The van blocks what’s happening here from the street and he has no reason to think everything won’t go well. They are almost home free.

“No, I can do it. Stay back.”

Bonnie bends like a runner in the starting blocks, gets a good grasp on the rubber handgrips, and pushes. Halfway up the ramp, just as she thinks she won’t be able to finish the job, the wheelchair’s motor hums to life. The guide-light comes on. At the same moment she feels a wasp sting the back of her neck.

Emily rolls into the van. Roddy expects Bonnie to collapse, just as the others did. He has every reason to expect that; he’s just injected 15 milligrams of Valium less than two inches from elf-girl’s cerebellum. Instead, she straightens up and turns around. Her hand goes to the back of her neck. For a moment Roddy thinks he’s given her a diluted dose, maybe even no dose at all, only water. It’s her eyes that convince him that isn’t true. A younger and much brawnier Roddy Harris, then an undergraduate, worked two summers in a Texas slaughterhouse—it was where he began to formulate his theories about the near-magical properties of flesh. Sometimes the bolt gun they used to put the cows down wouldn’t be fully charged, or would be aimed slightly off-target. When that happened, the cows looked like Bonnie Dahl does now, eyes floating in their sockets, faces slack with bewilderment.

“What… did you do? What…”

“Why won’t she go down?” Emily asks shrilly from the open van door.

“Be quiet,” he says. “She will.”

But instead of going down, Bonnie blunders toward the back of the van, arms held out for balance. And toward the street beyond, presumably. Roddy tries to grab her. She pushes him away with surprising strength. He stumbles backward, trips over a protruding lip of pavement, and lands on his ass. His hips howl. His teeth click together, catching a scrap of his tongue between them. Blood trickles into his mouth. In this fraught moment he enjoys the taste even though he knows his own blood is useless to him. Any blood without flesh is useless to him.

“She’s getting away!” Emily cries.

Roddy loves his wife, but in that moment he hates her, too. If there were people on the other side of Red Bank Avenue instead of tangled undergrowth, they would be coming out to see what all the ruckus was about.

He scrambles to his feet. Bonnie has veered away from the van and Red Bank Avenue. Now she’s blundering across the front of the abandoned repair shop, one hand sliding along the rusty roll-up door to keep from going down, taking a drunk’s big loose swaying strides. She makes it all the way to the end of the building before he can throw a forearm around her neck and yank her back. She still tries to fight him, twisting her head from side to side. Her bike helmet thuds against his shoulder. One of her earrings flies off. Roddy is too busy to notice; his hands are, as they say, full. Her vitality is nothing short of remarkable. Even now Roddy thinks he can’t wait to taste her.

He drags her back toward the van, gasping for breath, heart beating not just in his chest but thrumming in his neck and pulsing in his head.

“Come on,” he says, and gets her turned around. “Come on, elf, come on, come on, c—”

One flailing elbow connects with his cheekbone. Sparks flash in front of his eyes. He loses his hold on her but then—thank God, thank God—her knees buckle and she finally drops. He turns to Emily. “Can you help me?”

She gets partway up, winces, and plops back down. “No. If my back locks up all the way, I’ll only make matters worse. You’ll have to do it yourself. I’m sorry.”

Not as sorry as I am, Roddy thinks, but the alternative is jail, headlines, a trial, cable news 24/7, and finally prison. He seizes Bonnie under the arms and drags her toward the ramp, his back groaning, his hips threatening to simply lock up. Part of the problem is her pack. He gets it off. It has to weigh at least twenty pounds. He hands it up to Emily, who manages to take it and hold it in her lap.

“Open it,” he says. “Get her phone if it’s in there. You have to…” He doesn’t finish, needing to save his breath for the job at hand. Besides, Em knows the drill. Right now they have to get out of here, and with any luck, they will. If anyone deserves some luck after what we’ve been through, it’s us, he thinks. The idea that Bonnie has had even worse luck this evening never crosses his mind.

Em is already taking the SIM card out of Bonnie’s phone, effectively killing it.

He drags Bonnie up the ramp. Emily reverses the wheelchair to give him room. She’s already unzipped the backpack and started rummaging inside. He’d like to pause and catch his breath, but they’ve been here too long already. Far too long. He kicks Bonnie’s legs away from the door. It would have hurt her if she was conscious, but she’s not.

“The note. The note.”

It’s waiting in the back pocket of the passenger seat, in a clear plastic envelope. Emily has printed it, working from various notes Bonnie has made during her brief term of employment. It’s not an exact replica, but printing doesn’t need to be. And it’s short: I’ve had enough. The note probably won’t matter if the bike is stolen, but even then it might if the thief is caught. Roddy puts it on the seat of her bike and wipes the sleeve of his sportcoat across it, in case paper takes fingerprints (on that the Internet seems divided).

He gets into the driver’s seat, whooping for breath. He pushes the button that retracts the ramp and closes the door. His heart is beating at an insane rate. If he has a heart attack, will Emily be able to drive the van back to 93 Ridge Road and get it in its garage bay? Even if she can, what about the unconscious girl?

Em will have to kill her, he thinks, and even in his current state—body aching all over, heart speeding, head pounding—the thought of all that meat going to waste gives him a pang of regret.

8:18 PM.

July 27, 2021

1

“Just look at this,” Avram Welch says. He’s wearing cargo shorts (Holly has several pairs just like them) and pointing at his knees. There are healed S-shaped scars on both. “Double knee replacement. August 31st, 2015. Hard to forget that day. Cary was at the Strike Em Out the last time I came, in the middle of August—me there just to watch, my knees were too bad by then to even think about throwing a ball—and gone the next time I went. Does that help any?”

“It absolutely does,” Holly says, although she doesn’t know if it does or not. “When was the next time you went back to the bowling alley after your op?”