Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If you’ve hurt my wife, I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you.”

The bald one’s misshapen mouth appeared to turn into a grin. “Uh, hello? Do you understand your situation at the moment? Do you think you’re in any position to be making threats? Maybe I need to make that clear to you right this fucking minute.”

And he gripped the handle again, held his finger over the trigger, and squeezed.

“Shit, Mortie!” said the dark-haired one with the knife tattoo.

“No!” I shouted. This time, I couldn’t hold back the scream.

I reflexively tried to jerk my hand away, but that only dragged the hedge trimmer closer to me. The bald one still had a firm hold of the machine, his finger still gripped about the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The trimmer made no noise. My fingers, beyond the pain they were already in by being jammed into the teeth of the machine, felt nothing.

The bald one dropped the trimmer into my lap and began to laugh. “Oh fuck!” he said, taking a step back, bending over, putting his hands atop his knees, laughing the entire time. “That was priceless! You should have seen the expression on your face!”

“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me, too!” his partner said.

The bald one managed to pull himself together, let out a couple of enthusiastic hoots, then walked over to the wall, where the yellow extension cord disappeared behind some cardboard boxes. He kicked them aside, exposing the wall outlet, and I could see that the cord had not been plugged in.

He knelt down, grabbed the end of the cord, and shoved it firmly into the receptacle.

He walked back over to me, rubbing his hands together, still smiling inside his mask. He grabbed the trimmer, lifted it, and my hand, up to the level of his waist, and said, “The next time, it’ll be the real deal.”

"Now, to get to the business at hand, so to speak,” said the bald one, the one I knew went by the name Mortie, if his associate was to be believed. “There’s some things I’d like to ask you.”

“What?” I said. My fingers, still held in the teeth of the hedge trimmer, were sweating inside the tape.

“You have a copy of a certain book,” he said. “On a disc? Am I right?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t know if you’ve got a printout of it, too, or it’s just on a disc, or two discs, or what the fuck, but we want it.”

“Okay,” I said, my mind racing. “You can have it. But I want to see that my wife is okay. I’m not telling you where it is until I see that my wife is unharmed.”

Mortie laughed. “I don’t think so, pal, because-”

I cut him off mid-sentence. “I want. To see. My wife.”

“What I was trying to tell you, asshole,” he said, moving around the hedge trimmer, “is that you’re not in a position to negotiate.”

I mustered as much courage as I could, given my circumstances. “I don’t care if you cut off all my fingers and all my toes. You can cut off my dick and suck on it if you want, but I’m not telling you anything until I see that my wife is okay.”

Mortie thought, weighed his options, then glanced over at the dark-haired one with the tattoo. “Go get his fucking wife.”

“I gotta take this thing off my head,” he said. “Just for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll go get her.”

As he left the shed and my field of vision, he was peeling the stocking off his head. “Jesus,” I heard him say. It didn’t sound like Lance to me. And besides, why would Lance want that disc?

“You must be getting a bit warm, too,” I said to Mortie.

“The heat doesn’t bother me,” he said.

“So Conrad sent you,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’d never have thought that a college president would know where to find people who do your kind of work.”

“I said shut the fuck up. You want me to squeeze this?” He waved his index finger playfully about the trigger of the hedge trimmer. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “You want me to put all your fingertips in a sandwich bag or something, you can take them to the hospital later?”

I had nothing to say. And for the better part of a couple of minutes, we said nothing to each other. Finally, Mortie said, “Jesus, I am starting to get hot.” He walked out the shed door and stepped around the side of the building, presumably to slip off the mask where I couldn’t see him.

I looked around the room I was in, my own shed, looking for some sort of inspiration, some idea of how to get loose. But they had me well tied into the chair, and even though my right arm was not secured to it, with my hand taped to the trimmer, it was useless to me.

When it became clear to me I couldn’t actually escape, I started thinking about other plans. Assuming they brought Ellen in, and she was okay, what was I going to do then?

Because I did not have the disc. I had given it to Natalie Bondurant for safekeeping.

Which was the better way to play this? Tell them I didn’t have the disc, but could get it for them? Would that buy me time, or would they just kill both of us? The Langleys certainly hadn’t found a way out of this alive, and, as far as I’d been able to determine, they’d handed over the computer.

The thing that really worried me was, we knew, and I was sure Mortie and his buddy knew that we knew, what was on the disc. Because I’d run my mouth off to Conrad. So, even if these two were able to leave with the disc, there was the problem of what we still might say. We could still do a lot of damage to Conrad’s reputation, telling people he’d ripped off his bestseller from one of his students.

But how credible would we be without proof?

I could tell them the disc was on Derek’s desk, next to his computer. There were probably dozens of discs there. They could leave with all of them, be tricked into thinking they had what they wanted. But there was no guarantee they still wouldn’t kill us.

Mortie came back in, mask pulled down over his face.

I said, “I guess, when you got the computer from the Langleys, you figured your problems were over. But you don’t have to kill us like you did them. We’re not going to say anything. We don’t care. Honest to God, we just don’t give a shit anymore.”

Mortie appeared to be squinting at me, as though puzzled. “Shut up. Your wife’ll be along in a minute.”

Outside, I heard our kitchen door slam shut, then steps shuffling across the gravel lane. Seconds later, the dark-haired one, mask in place, appeared at the door, dragging Ellen along with him.

She was alive. That was some relief. But it didn’t last long, not when I saw how frightened she was.

They’d taped her wrists in front of her, then run tape around her body at the elbows, and tape around her head over her mouth. There were torn pieces of tape stuck to her jeans down around her ankles, which had clearly been removed so she could be led over here.

Her eyes were wide with terror, and I could tell she’d been crying.

“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “Have they hurt you?” She shook her head nervously from side to side. “That’s good.” I could see her looking at my hand, how it was attached to the hedge trimmer, and her eyes seemed to open even wider. They followed the cord from the trimmer itself to the wall outlet.

“Okay,” Mortie said. “Your wifey’s here, and as you can see, she’s perfectly all right. So, where’s the disc?”

“First of all,” I said, “there’s some pages printed out of the thing I think you’re looking for. I’m pretty sure it’s up in our bedroom, next to the bed. On the table. It should be there.” Looking at Ellen, I said, “Isn’t that where it is, honey?”