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Vic shook her head. “Massachusetts. I need to call my mom. She hasn’t seen me in days.”

From that moment on, Vic was never able to work her way back to anything like the truth. She had been missing from Massachusetts for two days. Now she was in Colorado and had escaped a man who had her locked up in his house, who’d tried to burn her to death. Without ever saying she had been kidnapped, it became clear to everyone that this was the case.

That became the new truth, even for Vic herself, in the same way she was able to persuade herself she had found her mother’s bracelet in the family station wagon and not at Terry’s Primo Subs in Hampton Beach. The lies were easy to tell because they never felt like lies at all. When she was asked about her trip to Colorado, she said she had no memory of being in Charlie Manx’s car, and police officers traded sad, sympathetic looks. When they pressed her, she said it was all dark. Dark like she had been locked in the trunk? Yes, maybe. Someone else wrote her statement. She signed it without ever bothering to read it.

The soldier said, “Where’d you get away from him?”

“Right down the road,” Louis Carmody said, answering for Vic, who could not find her voice. “Half a mile away. I could lead you back there. It’s out in the woods. Dude, they don’t get the fire trucks there pretty quick, half the hill will be on fire.”

“That’s the Father Christmas place,” said Popeye, moving his mouth away from the phone.

“Father Christmas?” the soldier said.

A gourd-shaped man in a red-and-white-checked shirt said, “I know it. I been by there hunting. It’s weird. The trees outside are decorated for Christmas all year-round. I’ve never seen anyone there, though.”

“This guy set fire to his own house and drove off?” the soldier asked.

“And he’s still got a kid with him,” Lou said.

“What kind of car is he in?”

Vic opened her mouth to reply, and then she saw movement, outside, through the window in the door, and looked past the soldier, and it was the Wraith, pulling up to the pumps, arriving as if summoned by this very question. Even from a distance, through a closed door, she could hear Christmas music.





Sam’s Gas & Sundries


VIC COULDN’T CRY OUT, COULDN’T SPEAK, BUT SHE DIDN’T NEED TO. The soldier saw her face and where she was looking and turned his head to see what had stopped at the pumps.

The driver climbed from the front seat and walked around the car to gas up.

“That guy?” the soldier asked. “The limo driver?”

Vic nodded.

“I don’t see a kid with him,” Lou said, craning his neck to look out the front picture window.

This was met by a moment of sickened silence, everyone in the store taking stock of what it might mean.

“Does he have a gun?” the soldier said.

“I don’t know,” Vic said. “I didn’t see one.”

The soldier turned and started toward the door.

His wife gave him a sharp look. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The soldier said, “What do you think?”

“You let the police handle it, Tom Priest.”

“I will. When they get here. But he’s not driving away before they do.”

“I’ll come with you, Tommy,” said the hefty man in the red-and-white-checked shirt. “I ought to be with you anyway. I’m the only man in this room got a badge in his pocket.”

Popeye lowered the mouthpiece of the phone, covered it with one hand, and said, “Alan, your badge says ‘Game Warden,’ and it looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box.”

“It did not come out of a Cracker Jack box,” said Alan Warner, adjusting an invisible tie and raising his bushy silver eyebrows in an expression of mock rage. “I had to send away to a very respectable establishment for it. Got myself a squirt gun and a real pirate eye patch from the same place.”

“If you insist on going out there,” said Popeye, reaching under the counter, “take this with you.” And he set a big black .45 automatic next to the register, pushed it with one hand toward the game warden.

Alan Warner frowned at it and gave his head a little shake. “I better not. I don’t know how many deer I’ve put down, but I wouldn’t like to point a gun at no man. Tommy?”

The soldier named Tom Priest hesitated, then crossed the floor and hefted the .45. He turned it to check the safety.

“Thomas,” said the soldier’s wife. She jiggled their baby in her arms. “You have an eighteen-month-old child here. What are you going to do if that man pulls a pistol of his own?”

“Shoot him,” Tom said.

“Goddamn it,” she said, in a voice just louder than a whisper. “Goddamn it.”

He smiled . . . and when he did, he looked like a ten-year-old boy about to blow out his birthday candles.

“Cady. I have to go do this. I’m on active duty with the U.S. Army, and I’m authorized to enforce federal law. We just heard that this guy transported a minor across state lines, against her will. That’s kidnapping. I am obligated to put his ass on the ground and hold him for the civilian authorities. Now, that’s enough talk about it.”

“Why don’t we just wait for him to walk on in here and pay for his gas?” asked Popeye.