And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(45)

“I was. She left a long time ago.”

“Did you have kids?”

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“Wasn’t a matter of wanting or not wanting,” Emmett said.

“What’s that mean?”

Emmett stared at the end of his cigarette. “It means you don’t always get to decide. It’s not up to you.”

“Like me being your prisoner.”

Emmett shook his head. “I don’t know about that. It’s one hundred percent your fault you’re here.”

“It’s one hundred percent my fault you caught me in your basement, but it’s one hundred percent your decision to keep me here. You could let me go and this would be over.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Why not? I’ve never seen you in town before. I have no idea where I am. Jesse drove and drove and drove the other night. I kept falling asleep because it was so late.”

“You know enough,” he said. “Were you born around here?”

“I was born in Minneapolis. We moved here when I was five and my parents opened their restaurant.”

“What restaurant?”

“The Sweet Pea.”

Emmett knew the place but had never been inside. The girl was too young to remember the fear that had gripped the locals when Wanda and the jogger both disappeared within a couple of years of each other. Cops moved like a cloud of black flies from one long-shot suspect or theory to another. Boats spent weeks dragging the lakes for bodies. Local women were constantly warned not to go out alone at night, to be extra cautious around strangers. The girl’s parents might remember those days, but she wouldn’t have any idea.

“You finished with that?”

The girl picked at the last of her chicken, then handed Emmett the plate. He gave her a half pill from his pocket and watched her swallow it with the last of her water. She found her pump under the blanket and started pushing its buttons.

Emmett held out his hand. “Give me that,” he said.

She looked at him, confused. “My pump?”

“Give it to me,” he said. “Take it off like you did when you went to the shower.”

She reached under her shirt with her good hand and unhooked the pump from her port. “I need that,” she said as she watched him wrap the tube around the device. “I have to have insulin now. I just ate.”

“I’ve been taking care of you for three days. Food, shower, carrying your shit out in a bucket. What do I get in return?”

“Maybe you should have built this room around the toilet so there’d be no bucket.”

Emmett stepped forward and smashed her in the mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t get smart,” he said.

She touched her mouth with the tips of her fingers, checked to see if she was bleeding. She had furious tears in her eyes.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want your pump,” he said.

“You can’t,” she said. “I’ll get so sick if I don’t get insulin.”

Emmett stared at the pump in his hand like he was evaluating its worth. “Then trade me something for it.”

“What? The chemistry book?”

Emmett shook his head.

The girl looked at him like he was asking for the impossible. “What? My retainer? I don’t have anything else.”

“Never mind then. I have what I want.”

They stared at each other like a pair of battling mind readers. The sounds of the evening frogs and cicadas suddenly seemed very loud.

The girl folded back the blanket, grabbed the phone, and held it out. “Here.”

Emmett took the phone, gave her the pump in exchange.

The tears she was trying to hold back rolled down when she blinked. She shook her head like she was trying to deny them. “You knew it was in the bag. You knew I had it this whole time.”

Emmett opened the phone and bent it backward until it snapped in half. The tiny screen went dark. “Nothing is going to come in or out of this room that I don’t know about. Everything that does come in is going to have a price. I wanted to know what you valued more, the pump or the phone.”

“Some choice,” she said as she reconnected the pump to her port. “My life or my freedom. One’s useless without the other, you know.” The device made three loud beeps as she pushed its buttons. Her face screwed up like she was about to cry again. “That’s the low-supply alarm. I’ll be out of insulin tomorrow. I have enough to bolus this meal and maybe get through the day tomorrow. That’s it.”

Emmett smoked his cigarette and regarded the pieces of phone in his hand. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

“I can tell you what to do. It’s not complicated.”

“Everything about this situation is complicated.”

She opened and closed her mouth, trying to figure out how to respond. After a deep, hitching breath, she said, “Jesse should have had money in this backpack. Enough I would think for what I need right away. More than enough.”

“It’s not just about the money.”

“You can buy insulin over the counter. There’s a kind that’s not expensive. I’ll need needles. They’re cheap, too. That’s it. Just those two things.”