Rusty nodded, furtively, not meeting anyone’s eye. Aubrey just looked at him, disgusted and enraged. She turned to Scott, who was holding his wrist in agony, his face white as paper. She looked up at Espinoza. “You broke his wrist. A teenager. You proud of yourself?”
Espinoza looked away, and Zielinski rolled his eyes.
“Let’s not play the blame game, OK?” he said. “This is very simple. We need money. You’ve got some on the way. You may not know it, but you do. When it gets here, we will take it and we will go. Celeste is going to come home with me where she belongs, and you’ll never see any of us again.”
Scott’s face flushed with anger, and he looked up. “She’s not going fucking anywhere with you, you piece of shit!”
For a short, fat man, Zielinski moved with remarkable speed. One second he was in his chair, across the coffee table from Scott, and the next he was on his feet, over the table, and had a knee in Scott’s chest. He punched down, cracking his fist into the boy’s face two, three, four times.
Celeste screamed and lunged to protect Scott. Zielinski turned on her, backhanding her away from him. He would have done more damage had Espinoza not run over and pulled him off.
Rusty stood inertly by the window, his back half-turned.
There was a knock at the door, and they all froze.
Zielinski, breathing hard, turned to the room and spoke in a hushed, urgent voice. “Not a fucking word, not one of you.” He turned to Rusty. He nodded toward the window, where there was a narrow crack in the drapes that Espinoza had pulled a few moments ago. “See if that’s him,” he said.
Rusty edged toward the crack in the drapes, peered outside, and stepped carefully back again. He shook his head from side to side and whispered. “Some asshole with a cake.”
Aubrey’s eyes whipped toward the door, praying that Phil would not take it upon himself to open the door.
He didn’t. He waited. He knocked again.
Zielinski held a hand out to all of them, palm down, warning them to stay exactly where they were. They waited. Phil knocked one or two more times, then called out, puzzled. After another agonizing sixty seconds, they heard him set something down and walk away, down the stone steps.
Zielinski sat again, rubbing his sore right hand and flexing his fingers. Scott moaned in pain, Celeste choked back sobs, and Aubrey breathed hard, full of rage and unable to do anything about it.
Zielinski picked up a box of kitchen matches from a side table, struck one, and lit the two candles that were there.
He spoke quietly to Aubrey. “I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to say to your brother when he gets here, and you are going to say it. Word for word. After he leaves the money, me and Celeste are gonna take it and go. But until he gets here, we are all just going to sit here and wait. Silently. Anybody says anything I don’t like”—he nodded toward Espinoza—“I’ll put the barrel of his gun between their teeth and pull the trigger.”
He looked around the room. “Are there any questions?”
34.
Cayuga Lane
The first thing that gave Thom pause was the two SUVs, parked nose to nose, that were stationed at the end of Cayuga Lane. It made sense, he supposed, given the condition of some of the neighborhoods he’d driven through on the way here, but it wasn’t reassuring. Neither was the fact that the two lawn chairs in the beds of the trucks were empty. If this was a guard post, it was unmanned tonight.
His fears were somewhat allayed by the Edenic nature of Aubrey’s block itself, which looked like it was out of a Utopian future. It was dusk, so some of the vibrant colors of the fields were dimmed, but he could see, as far as the light allowed in both directions, the rich, verdant plantings that had been carefully sown, tended, and harvested over the past several months. He kicked himself for never having considered this, in even one of the dozens of think-tanking, brain-dating, and strategic-planning sessions he’d held over the past ten years.
Had he actually picked the desert? Live in the desert and eat freeze-dried food? What had been the matter with him? Eat what you can grow, grow everything you can. Nothing else would work. Why had he never seen that? He was so concerned with continuing to live life as it was that he’d never thought about living it as it might be.
The street was quiet as he approached Aubrey’s house. He’d been there only once, but remembered it because it was the oldest one on the block, and he’d thought she was crazy to buy it. It sat near the end of the street on the left, or loomed there, he’d thought at the time, like the scary old money pit it was. There were no lights on, of course, but there was a wavering glow visible through a tiny part in the curtains of the front windows.