“Well, it’s a toy. Nothing special. But it’s yours. Isn’t it? You see the problem. I took something that is yours. People do that now. They take all sorts of things. Things that aren’t theirs. It’s just a toy car, they say. As if this means it doesn’t matter. But it does matter. Don’t you think? It is important, if you earned the thing or not. If you deserve it. And then one day there’s an accounting. And nothing is ever the same.”

He opened the black bag and drew out three zip ties and a pair of scissors and duct tape. He laid it all in a row on the nightstand. “Your brother took something of mine.”

The puppy lay down at Matty’s feet. It licked his ankle and put its nose on his socks.

“Do you want to know what he took?”

Matty didn’t answer.

“He takes a lot of things, your brother. Things he hasn’t earned. He’s like his father. Don’t you think? They take things they haven’t earned.”

Still Matty just sat there.

“No? Well. That’s okay, Matty. That’s fine.”

The man stood and picked up the shotgun and the zip ties and looked down at him. “You’re kind of freaking out, aren’t you?”

Matty sat watching him in frozen terror.

At his feet, the puppy growled.

The man smiled. The odd peacefulness in his gaze. “It’s just a toy car. That’s true.”

Bardem tied the boy and taped his mouth. By now the boy was shuddering with cold. Bardem wrapped him in a blanket and picked him up and slung him over his shoulder and set off down the motel stairs. There was a heavy-duty aluminum dry box with a watertight shell in the trunk of the Land Rover. It was altered to fit his needs, insulated to hold in warmth, with little holes drilled into the lid. He stuffed the boy inside with the blanket and closed the lid and clipped down the metal latches.

Then he went back into the motel room and waited.

XXIV

It is all chaos, reader.

The whens and whys and hows.

The sooner you learn this, the better.

They sat in the car, watching the house, but everything was dark. Bleak night, deserted road. No one came or went. There were no close neighbors. Jack got the duffel and moved everything to the backpack so he could carry it on his shoulders. Free hands—better. He chanced several glances at Ava and felt his chest ache. He didn’t know what the ache was about, but he thought it was something about goodness or grace. About trust. Things he’d not thought about in a long time.

“What now?” Ava asked.

“We’ll just have to go see.”

“Do you think somebody is in there?”

“No. It looks quiet.”

“Quiet doesn’t mean there’s nobody.”