Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(34)

Another mile and they turn off into Juniper Creek, a wooded neighborhood on the outskirts of town, every driveway curling away from the road into an acre lot. Browned pine needles rain down on the windshield. Patrick can see the house, twenty yards ahead, a ranch home with a lava-rock exterior that makes it appear as though it is rising out of the ground.

Then his attention is lost to movement all around them. Out of the bushes, from behind trees and under the front porch, come dogs. More than a dozen of them. They kick up dust when they tear toward the car. Among the assorted mutts, Patrick spots a German shepherd, a Rottweiler, and a wiener dog. They bark furiously, surrounding the car, pacing it as it crawls up the driveway.

His mother does not seem to notice them, humming along with the radio. She shifts into park, kills the engine, and swings open her door before Patrick can tell her, “No!”

The barking ceases, replaced by whimpers and soft cries for attention. His mother speaks to them in baby talk and ruffles their ears and pats their backs.

“Who lives here?” Patrick says.

“A friend.”

She doesn’t invite him to join her, doesn’t ask for his help with the carrier she removes from the backseat. “Back in a flash,” she says when she starts toward the house, not bothering to nudge a hip against the driver’s-side door and close it. Some of the dogs follow her, darting in front of her, begging for her attention, all tongues and tails—excited by the scent of the cat—and others remain with the car, including the Rottweiler, who observes Patrick from the open door, panting, licking its chops.

A minute passes before Patrick says, “Good dog?” and the Rottweiler considers this encouragement enough to leap onto the front seat, its face inches from his. All Patrick can focus on is its mouth. Its breath smells like old hamburger. Its gums are a spotted black, its teeth the size of his thumbs.

He does not breathe when he raises his hand, so slowly, to pet the dog. It sniffs his hand once, gives him a lick, then nudges—with its cold, damp nose—his hand upward for a scratch behind the ears.

It isn’t long before Patrick stands outside the car with his arm cocked and a stick in his hand. The dogs surround him, their eyes on the stick. “Ready?” he says, and they yap and their paws drum the ground. He hurls the stick and it flies end over end into the woods and the dogs go ripping away, their paws kicking the ground hard enough that Patrick can feel the tremor in his chest like a furious heartbeat. A moment later the German shepherd appears, smiling around the stick, the rest of the pack trailing behind.

Patrick throws the stick, now damp with slobber and dented with tooth marks, a good twenty times. The dachshund grows tired and stays behind after the last toss, and Patrick picks the dog up and cradles it in his arms. He can’t believe he felt afraid, a few minutes ago, when they first drove up. The dachshund licks him, a tongue worming from a snout run through with white hairs. Harmless. But when Patrick peels back the skin, he exposes the jagged line of teeth hidden inside this tiny old dog.

At that moment the front door swings open and his mother starts down the porch midconversation. “Which will be good, I think,” she says. “So I’ll see you soon.”

A man stands in the doorway, watching them. He wears a dress shirt tucked into khakis. He is tall and eerily lean and bald except for a silver horseshoe of hair. He gives an almost imperceptible nod, a slight dip of his chin, which Patrick does not return.



*



Chase shivers in and out of consciousness. His skin is as pale as the bone peeking out of his shredded arm. Every heartbeat brings an electric surge of pain. He is lying on a blue tarp, he realizes. A blue tarp in a white room. Not a hospital; they can’t risk a hospital. His head rolls to the side and the tarp pops beneath him and he recognizes the couch against the wall, the tacky white leather couch, as Buffalo’s. His living room.

Buffalo. Chase can hear him, dimly. It’s a comforting sound. Like when, as a child, on long car trips, he would intermittently wake to the murmur of his parents talking in the front seat. He strains his neck to observe his friend pacing back and forth with his handheld pressed against his ear. His voice is panicked, hurried. Chase wants to tell him to take it easy, but then the darkness of sleep once again overtakes him.





Chapter 13



THE GRAY-EYED BOY named Max lives in old town. A neighborhood of Old Mountain untouched by all the new development, every house on his street a one-story shoebox with a concrete-slab porch and a mature maple tree planted left of the cracked driveway. Three cars and a truck are parked out front, all Chevys. The streetlamps buzz and telephone lines crisscross the moonlit sky. Before Patrick can knock, the door cracks and in the crack hangs the craggy face of a man—Max’s father, Patrick guesses—who waves him in, says the boys are downstairs.

The basement is pine paneled and smells vaguely of mothballs. Mounted on the wall, three trophy bucks, a lacquered rainbow trout, and a shelf busy with beer steins and age-tarnished softball trophies. A gun cabinet stacked with rifles and shotguns. Minor Threat plays from a laptop set on top of an ancient minifridge. When Patrick thumps down the stairs, a dozen faces turn toward him, some nodding along with the music, some still and expressionless. Everyone wears their head shaved, so at first it’s difficult to distinguish between them, and then one steps forward and comes into focus: Max. “We’re glad you came,” he says.