“What questions? What did you tell him?”

“Like when I saw you last, whether you’d left town. You told me you were working through the next two days. Why wouldn’t your boss know that? What’s going on, Brent? Where have you been for the past two days?”

“Mel, what did you say to him?”

“Nothing! I told him I haven’t talked to you since Sunday. That the last time I saw you was when you asked me to help out with that friend of yours. And he was asking all about that, too. What’s going on, Brent? But he made it sound like there was some kind of problem or something. He made it sound like he thought you were at home. Where the hell are you?”

“I can’t tell you, Mel. Everything’s fine, but I can’t tell you.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, nothing like that, there’s no trouble,” he said. “But, Mel, you have to listen to me. You have to listen carefully. Get out of your studio. Right now. Don’t meet with Charles Scott. You can’t meet with him. Just trust me on this. Don’t go anywhere near him.”

“What do you mean? What’s going on?”

“Mel,” Brent pleaded, “just listen to me. Get out of there. And don’t go back to the museum. Don’t go home, either! Look, just go somewhere else, go to the mall or something. Take a drive somewhere. Go to your sister’s in Rhode Island. Just don’t let him find you.”

“What the hell is going on? What are you talking about? I have to go back to work. I can’t just take off. You need to tell me what this is about. You’re scaring me, Brent.”

“There’s nothing to worry about, Mel. I just need you to do this, okay? I need you to stay away from Charles Scott. I’ll explain it all, but not now.”

“Brent...”

“And turn your phone off, Mel. Turn it off and keep it off, you hear me?”

“What if you need to reach me?”

“Call me tomorrow,” he said. “By tomorrow this will all be over. One way or another.”

Brent hung up on her before she could say anything else and looked at Jeremiah with real desperation in his eyes.

“There’s no other way, Brent,” Jeremiah told him. “We have to do this. We have to do this now.”

“I can’t cut off your finger!”

“I didn’t think I could stab you in the shoulder, either, but I did it. You have to.”

“This is going to hurt a hell of a lot more than that did.”

A little more than an hour later, they were in Brent’s car, parked in the service area behind a strip mall, hidden between two trailer trucks. Brent had gone to three different stores to buy several packages of dry ice pellets, two large bath towels, four nips of vodka, an insulated lunch box, a large assortment of bandages, gauze and first aid supplies and a small ax.