“Take the pretty boy. Quickly,” said the leader of the team as they hurried back to their car. They tossed the bulging bag into the trunk of the Pontiac and got out of town.

The job was perfect.

Chapter 63

Chapter 63

HERE WAS THE DEAL as Francis saw it now, as he tried to be calm and logical about it. Nothing that had happened to him could possibly have happened! He couldn’t have been abducted a few hours ago from the campus of Holy Cross by three absolutely terrifying men. It just couldn’t have happened. Nor could he have been transported in the trunk of a car for four, maybe five hours to God only knew where.

Most important, Vince couldn’t be dead. That cruel and heartless piece of shit couldn’t have slit Vince’s throat back at the college. It hadn’t happened.

So all of this had to be an impossibly bad dream, a nightmare of the sort that Francis Deegan hadn’t experienced since he was maybe three or four years old. And this man standing before him now, this absurd caricature with curly tufts of white-blond hair around the side of his balding head, dressed in a tight black leather bodysuit—well, he couldn’t be real either. No way.

“I’m very angry at you! I’m good and pissed!” Mr. Potter yelled right in Francis’s face. “Why did you leave me?” he screeched. “Why? Tell me why. You must never leave me again! I get very scared without you and you know that. You know how I am. That was thoughtless of you, Ronald!”

Francis had already tried reasoning with the madman—Potter, he called himself, and no, not Harry. Mr. Potter. But reasoning didn’t work. He’d told the raving lunatic several times that he had never seen him before. He wasn’t Ronald. Didn’t know any Ronalds! That had earned him a series of full-handed slaps across the face, one so hard that it bloodied his nose. The dweeby Billy Idol-looking freak was a lot stronger than he looked.

So out of desperation, Francis finally whispered an apology to the creep. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again.”

And then Mr. Potter was hugging him fiercely and he was crying all over him. Wasn’t this too weird? “Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re back. I was so worried about you. You must never leave me again, Ronald.”