“Well, call a hot line, but don’t call me, Pearse, ’cause I don’t fucking care.”

Bubba shoved his knee into Pearse’s spine, lifted his feet off the floor.

“Please!” Pearse kicked at the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” Bubba said.

“Oh, God!”

“Hey, asshole? Say hi to the fucking dog for me, will you?” Bubba said, and then he blew Scott Pearse’s brains out the other side of his head.

36

I was in the hospital for five weeks. The bullet had entered my upper left chest just below the collarbone and exited through my back, and I’d lost three and a half pints of blood before the EMTs reached the house. I was comatose for four days, and I woke to tubes in my chest, tubes in my neck, tubes in my arm, and tubes in my nostrils, hooked up to a respirator, so thirsty I would have signed over the contents of my savings account for a single ice cube.

The Dawes apparently had some pull downtown, because a month after we’d rescued their son, the illegal weapons charges against Bubba simply vanished. Sure, the DA’s office seemed to say, you walked into the Plymouth bunker with enough illegal firepower to invade a country, but you brought a rich kid out alive. So no harm, no foul. I’m sure the DA would have adopted a different attitude had he known Pearse’s original extortion leverage had stemmed from evidence linking the Dawes to a baby switch, but Pearse wasn’t around to discuss it, and the rest of us who knew the secret declined to mention it.

Wesley Dawe came to visit. He held my hand and thanked me with tears in his eyes, and he told me the story of how he’d met Pearse through Diane Bourne, who in addition to being his therapist had also been his lover. She, and eventually Pearse, had controlled his fragile mind through manipulation, mental and sexual power games, and erratic withholding and dispensing of his medication. It had been his own idea, he admitted, to blackmail his father, but Diane Bourne and Pearse had taken the idea several steps further, ultimately turning it lethal when they came to thinking of the Dawes’ fortune as their own.

In mid-’98, they’d made him their hostage, kept him tied to the chair or his bed, exercised him at gunpoint.

I hadn’t regained my voice yet. It had disappeared when the bullet nicked off a microscopic shard of collarbone and sent that shard careening into my left lung, collapsing it. When I did try to speak those first few weeks, all that came out was a high-pitched wheeze, like a kettle, or Donald Duck losing his temper.