“Twine. I use it for my rolled roast.”

“Not strong enough, baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “It holds in the roast.”

“Bert, come here and keep a close aim on him,” I said, pocketing the silver gun and pulling the small man to his feet. He was 130 pounds tops, but deadweight and the noradrenaline cool-down made dragging him to the house an ordeal.

I got him to the door, looked back. No one had followed. Nighttime turned the others to statuary.

“Inside,” I said. “Let’s take a look at that twine.”

CHAPTER

43

Bill was right about the cooking twine. Too flimsy. I used it anyway, sitting the small man in a chair in the front room and using both rolls to create a macramé mummy. He looked out of it, hopefully for a while. My heart started racing again.

I searched the small kitchen, found a crushed, nearly empty roll of duct tape beneath the sink, unspooled enough to run two tight bands around his body and the chair, at nipple and waist levels. What was left, I used to bind his ankles together. He offered no resistance . . . how old was his kid?

I said, “Where’s the phone?”

Bert shuffled over to a corner, bent behind another chair, retrieved an old, black dial phone, and handed it to me. He hadn’t said a word since the shooting.

I lifted the receiver. No dial tone. “Dead.”

Bert took the phone, jabbed the receiver button, dialed O. Shook his head.

“Do you generally have phone problems?”

“No, sir,” said Bill. “Not that we use it much, maybe—” He frowned. “I know that smell.”

“What smell?” I said.

The concussion came from behind, from the rear of the house. The impact of something striking wood, followed by a loud sucking swoosh! Then the xylophone glissando of broken glass.

Bill turned toward the sound. Bert and I stared. Only Aimee seemed unconcerned.

Suddenly daylight—a false, orange daylight—brightened the bedroom, followed by a rush of heat and the cellophane-snap of flames.

Fire licked the curtains, a zipper of it, running up to the ceiling and down to the floor.

I ran for the bedroom door, slammed it shut over the spreading inferno. Smoke seeped from under the panel. The odor hit: metallic, acrid, the chemical bitterness of a flash storm ripping open a polluted sky.

The smoke from beneath the door fattened from wisp to wormy coil to clouds, relentless and oily, white to gray to black. Within seconds, I could barely make out the forms of the other people.

The room grew furnace-hot.

The second firebomb hit. Again, from behind. Someone was stationed out back, in the forest, where the phone wires ran.

I grabbed hold of Bill’s chair, waved frantically to Bert and Aimee’s smoke-obscured silhouettes.

“Get out!” Knowing that what I was sending them to was unlikely to be safety. But the alternative was roasting alive.