Then he hears a cavalcade of screams and turns to see Isiah’s and Derek’s heads explode in a shower of blood and bone.
Ike opened his eyes.
Narrow beams of light from the rising sun sliced through the slats on the blinds in the bedroom window. Ike sat up and touched his face with both hands. His cheeks were wet. Mya’s side of the bed was empty. She must have gotten up during the night and gone to lie with Arianna. She did that from time to time now. From time to time Ike had to fight the urge to be jealous of a three-year-old. Ike swung his legs up and out of bed until his feet hit the carpet. He grabbed his phone off the nightstand and checked the time. It was ten minutes after seven. He had fallen asleep almost immediately after Buddy Lee had dropped him off around eleven. After the bar. After jacking that guy up against the wall. Isiah would have had a lot to say about that situation.
“You’re just projecting your fears about your own masculinity, Dad. It’s called overcompensating.” He could almost hear Isiah saying it with his telltale razor-sharp sarcasm.
Ike stood. He didn’t want to admit it, but Isiah would have been right. When that guy touched him, all he could see were the faces of …
“Stop it,” Ike said out loud. His voice sounded hollow in the early morning stillness that filled the house. Ike grabbed his T-shirt off the floor and pulled it over his head. He was still wearing his jeans. He slipped down the stairs and into the kitchen. He turned on the coffee maker. While it began to rattle and hum he thought about what Nice Guy Jeff had told him last night. Mr. Get Down. Tariq. He and Buddy Lee could just go and find a house with the flying buttresses and try to bluff their way inside but Ike didn’t think that was going to work. Problem was, he couldn’t think of anything else that would work, either.
The coffee maker was taking its own sweet time, so Ike decided to grab the paper. The sun peeked from behind the clouds as Ike searched for it. The retired grandmother who was their paper carrier had terrible aim. Ike rooted around in the boxwood shrubs near his front door until he found the Saturday edition. When he straightened he saw Mya’s car coming down the road.
A banana-yellow Caprice was following her. She turned in to their short driveway and parked. The Caprice kept on going down the road. Mya climbed out of the car holding a big bag from Hardee’s. Her mouth was set in a grim line that aged her by ten years. She hurried toward the house, toward him.
“I went to get us some breakfast. I think … I think that car followed me to the Hardee’s, then followed me back here. Ike, I think they followed me,” she said. Her voice had a breathlessness that made his skin break out in gooseflesh.
“Go inside. Lock the door. Go upstairs with Arianna. Don’t come down until I come get you.”
“Ike, what’s going on?”
“Go upstairs, boo,” Ike said. Mya clutched the bag to her chest and hurried into the house. Ike went around to the back of the house. He went into his shed. Pushing past the heavy bag, he grabbed something from a hook and headed back to the front of the house.
The cul-de-sac they lived in was more like a side road. It didn’t end in a circle. The gravel-covered road just stopped half a mile past his house. In addition to Ike and Mya’s story-and-a-half house, Townbridge Lane had five more homes of various sizes. When he and Mya had first moved here it was considered the poor side of the county. Then some bright-eyed developer had placed cheap modular homes around them, spread some gravel on their dirt road, and rechristened it Townbridge Lane. Neighbors came and went with alarming frequency. They brought various levels of care for their front yards with them. Manicured lawns sat a few feet from front yards full of children’s toys and car parts.
Ike crouched down, hiding among his shrubs. That Caprice was on its way to a dead end. They’d have to stop, turn around, and come back. Ike gripped the handle of a bush axe with both hands. The bush axe was an old, time-honored farm tool. In the days before string trimmers and brush-cutting blade attachments, the bush axe was used to clear weeds and brush from difficult-to-access areas, like a ditch bank or a rolling sloping hillside. The tool consisted of a long flat wooden handle and wide curved blade that came to a wicked point. It looked somewhat like a comma. Except a comma wasn’t double edged and made out of steel.
It was entirely possible that whoever had followed Mya to and from the Hardee’s was a lost traveler with a busted GPS on his or her phone. The kind that told you that you had arrived when you pulled into a cornfield. It was possible. It was also possible that the Caprice was connected to what had happened at the shop yesterday.