It’s a rhetorical question and one that doesn’t require an answer, I presume, given that I have a gag in my mouth. The son in question is a young boy whose age I can’t peg because I’m not really around kids, but if you put a gun to my head instead of the knife Crystal’s waving around, I’d place him around four or five. He speaks. By the roundness of his eyes and the fear flickering, he has some understanding of either the situation or his mother’s unsteadiness. It’s the fear in his eyes that is holding more tightly than the zip ties around my wrist and ankles.
"You should be ashamed of yourself. You have a wife and children to take care of. You can't be running off and shacking up with random hoes." She sends a scathing glance toward two pillows she has tied to a chair opposite of me. I gather it is supposed to be a stand-in for Glory who has crept off to investigate the very woman who has me bound and gagged in Mark Toscati's living room. Much like his car, his house is a wreck. I guess he kept his neatness for balance sheets and ledger books. Crystal, the stalker from the city, is unconcerned that she's standing in trash from three months ago.
I realize in a moment of writerly inspiration that having all this trash would easily cover up the stench of a decaying body. At some point, your neighbor is going to report you, but the moment the authorities get a glimpse of the interior, they'll just write it off as a hoarder gone bad.
A pair of fingers snap in front of my face. "Are you paying attention to me?"
We both know I wasn't, but since I have a cloth taped across my mouth, I feel fully justified in remaining silent.
"What are we going to do, Corby? I want to believe you're a good man and that you'll do the right thing, but when I told you about the baby, you ran off."
"I can't talk while there's a dishrag stuffed halfway down my throat," I say from behind the gag, but it comes out something like ah hain haw hmmm hmmm uh ihuh uh awfhae how mwa whoa.
Crystal frowns. "I don't like your tone."
The one good thing about my situation is that Glory is safe. The only one in danger is the boy upstairs. He needs to be permanently separated from this woman.
"You're not all there, my friend. Best untie me, take some money, check yourself into a hospital, and forget about me," I advise. She, of course, can't understand me.
"I spent a lot of time planning this. I had thought about kidnapping the girl, but I didn't want to sully my hands on that filth."
My brows crash together. It's one thing to insult me and my manhood, and an entirely other thing to ridicule Glory.
"Oh, you don't like that?" Crystal huffs. "Well, I didn’t like seeing you stick your penis in her”—I stiffen immediately—“and that's all I've been imagining since I saw you bring her into your house," she screeches. She slaps her hands across her eyes.
At least she wasn't spying on us. I heave a sigh of relief. Glory doesn’t deserve to have her privacy invaded because of my problems. I need to get rid of this woman, figure out what to do with the boy, and get back home before Glory decides I’m too much of a story for her to want to be involved with. She was shocked and dismayed by the number of journos outside of the house today. I want—no, need—Glory to go back to thinking I’m the loner thriller writer whose most exciting thing in life is writing five paragraphs in a day instead of three.
Like she said repeatedly, she’s not supposed to be the story. When we met, she had doubts about me, and I don’t need shit like this stirring those up again. I would’ve walked out or even wrestled Crystal to the ground, but in front of the boy she’d held the knife up to her throat and swore she’d take her own life if I didn’t sit in the chair and listen to her. I managed to talk her into taking the boy upstairs, but she only agreed to that after she’d bound me. I don’t know if Crystal is his mother, but I didn’t think a young kid needed to be traumatized by seeing someone kill themselves.
Crystal swipes a glass of cloudy liquid off the counter and wades through the trash. I think I wrote this scene in my third book, “Love Kills.” A madman serial killer has captured the policewoman he’s obsessed with and proceeds to drug her and keep her drugged for a whole year while he carries out gruesome killings in front of her. My mind flashes to the boy upstairs. I wrote about kids dying in my eighth book, “Happy Life,” which went through several revisions because my editor thought it was too graphic. I should’ve listened to her. Crystal bends close and peels away the tape. I spit the cloth out.