Shelter(18)

“He’s just having fun,” Gillian says. “Why don’t you come back and listen now?”

Kyung returns to his seat, grateful to reach out and feel her fingers lace with his.

“Thursday,” Connie sighs. “It started on Thursday night. Your mom went for a walk a little after eight.”

“But she never goes out after dark.”

Connie shrugs. “Civil dusk.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know, civil dusk. Right before the sun sets and there’s still a little light out … Listen, are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Please,” Kyung says. He hasn’t said this word to his father-in-law in years, not since he asked for Gillian’s hand in marriage and was refused. “Please,” he repeats.

Connie takes a knuckle to each eye and rubs them in slow circles. “This is a bad idea,” he says. “I don’t know much, but I know that, at least.”

*

Mae went out for a walk at eight. The doctor told her to, for her blood pressure. It was hot that day, so she waited until the sun had almost set. Then she walked down Crescent Hill, looped around the main road, and took Starling back to the house—a thirty-, thirty-five-minute trip at most. The men must have been following her—for how long, she didn’t know—but as she unlocked the front door, one of the men put a gun in her back and shoved her inside. Her purse was on the table in the entryway, so she tried to give them the cash from her wallet, about fifty or sixty dollars. The younger one, Dell, took the money, but he laughed when he put it in his pocket, as if it was hardly enough. That was how they referred to each other from the start—Nat and Dell—which frightened her. They didn’t seem to care that she’d seen their faces or knew their names.

Nat was the one who carried the gun. It seemed to come more naturally to him, even though the gun didn’t look like it was his. It was the kind that you had to load bullets into—the old-fashioned kind—with a mother-of-pearl handle. It almost looked like a woman’s, small enough to fit in a bag. Jin woke up staring into its barrel, listening to a voice he thought he’d imagined: You’re coming with me. Before he knew what was happening, someone was dragging him out of bed, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, where Mae had been tied to a chair. They used duct tape on their wrists, ankles, and shoulders. A strip to cover their mouths. They left them like this for over an hour while they ransacked the house.

Jin thought they’d leave as soon as they’d taken what they could carry, but Mae knew they wouldn’t. The liquor cabinet in the living room had a squeaky hinge. She heard them open and close it, open and close it again. The more they drank, the clumsier their footsteps became, the louder their voices. Dell kept insisting there was a safe somewhere. Big houses like theirs always had a safe. Look behind the paintings, he shouted. Take down those mirrors. When they’d looked long enough, he walked into the kitchen and ripped the tape off Jin’s mouth. Where is it? he screamed. Where is it? The more Jin claimed not to have one, the angrier Dell became. That’s when Mae thought something about him didn’t look right. It wasn’t that he was drunk. It was that being drunk wasn’t enough. By the time Nat joined them, Mae was rocking back and forth in her chair, trying to get one of them to pull the tape from her mouth, which he did. Little lady, he said—that’s what Nat kept calling her—Little lady, you’ve got one chance to tell us where that safe is, or your husband here loses an eye.

She told them there wasn’t a safe, but they had jewelry, silverware, and some gold coins in the house. There were furs and computers too. Dell said he didn’t want their stuff—pawnshops were too risky—he wanted cash. Jin suggested taking them to an ATM. They could get all the cash they needed. Dell seemed to like this idea; Nat, less so. He looked at the gun, tossing it from one palm to the other as if he was thinking, and then smash. He hit Jin in the face with it, right above the eye. He seemed to know exactly where to hit to draw the most blood. Then he turned the gun over to Dell, told him to use it if he had any trouble.

Jin didn’t want to be split up. He didn’t want to leave Mae in the house with that man. Gun or no gun, Nat seemed like the more dangerous of the two, but he had no choice. He drove Dell to an ATM downtown, the one on the corner next to the clock tower. It was almost midnight when they arrived, and the streets were empty. He tried to take out a thousand dollars, but the machine wouldn’t let him. Then he tried five hundred, and the machine spit out a stack of twenties. Dell told him to do it again, get another five hundred, but the message said he’d reached his daily withdrawal limit. They drove to another ATM down the block, next to the dry cleaners, but got the same message. Five-f*cking-hundred? Dell kept shouting. That’s all I get? Five-f*cking-hundred?

Jin assumed they’d go back to the house after this, but Dell made him drive two towns over, to Westbury. He seemed to know the streets well, telling him to turn here, turn there, until they came to a corner next to some old row houses. A skinny teenager with a ring through his nose leaned into Dell’s open window and sold him a handful of small envelopes and a marble-sized ball of something white. Then they had an argument about rigs. The kid said he wasn’t in the business of selling rigs, there was a twenty-four-hour pharmacy the next town over, but Dell refused to go there. He said he needed one right away. They kept yelling about it, haggling back and forth over the price. Fifty dollars. Ten dollars. Forty, then twenty. Eventually, they settled on thirty. The kid ran into the first row house and came back a few minutes later with a single syringe in a plastic bag. It’s clean, right? Dell asked. You’re sure it’s clean? But the kid had already taken his money and run off in the dark.