He probed her chest, pinching, trying to find her nipple through her shirt as she twisted her head away from him, spitting and screaming.

“What the hell’re you doing?” the Missionary cried, dropping the ax. He ran to the window.

But before he could pull Tom off, Mary Beth gripped the hand that spidered across her chest and pulled downward, hard. She ran Tom’s wrist into a stalagmite of glass rising from the window frame. He cried out in pain and shock and let go of her, stumbling backward.

Wiping her mouth, Mary Beth ran from the window to the middle of the room.

The Missionary shouted at Tom, “What the fuck’d you do that for?”

Hit him! Mary Beth was thinking. Nail him with the ax. He’s crazy. Turn him over to the police too.

Tom wasn’t listening. He was squeezing his bloody arm, examining the slash. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus …”

The Missionary muttered, “I told you to be patient. We woulda had her out in five minutes and spread-eagle at your place in a half hour. Now we got a mess.”

Spread-eagle…

His comment registered in Mary Beth’s thoughts an instant before its corollary arrived: that there’d been no call to the police; there was no one coming to rescue her.

“Man, look at this. Look!” Tom held up his split wrist, blood cascading down his arm.

“Fuck,” the Missionary muttered. “We gotta get that stitched up. You dumb shit. Why couldn’t you wait? Come on, let’s get it taken care of.”

Mary Beth watched Tom stagger into the field. He stopped ten feet away from the window. “You fucking bitch! You get yourself ready. We’ll be back.” He glanced down and crouched out of view for a moment. He stood up again, holding a rock the size of a large orange in his good hand. He flung it through the bars. Mary Beth stumbled backward as it sailed into the room, missing her by a scant foot. She sank onto the couch, sobbing.

As they walked toward the woods she heard Tom call again, “Get yourself ready!”

They were at Harris Tomel’s house, a nice five-bedroom colonial on a good-sized cut of grass the man’d never done a lick of work to. Tomel’s idea of lawn decorations was parking his F-250 in the front yard and his Suburban in the back.

He did this because, being the sort-of college boy of the trio and owning more sweaters than plaid shirts, Tomel had to try a little harder to seem like a shit-kicker. Oh, sure, he’d done fed time but it was for some crappy scam in Raleigh where he sold stocks and bonds in companies whose only problem was that they didn’t exist. He could shoot good as a sniper but Culbeau’d never known him to whale on anybody by himself, skin on skin, at least nobody who wasn’t tied up. Tomel also thought about things too much, spent too much time on his clothes, asked for call liquor, even at Eddie’s.