“I’m so sorry,” Tean said and kicked him in the head.
The man dropped down.
Tean bent to check.He was still breathing.
The scraping shriek of something sliding across linoleum came from inside the house, and then a crash, and the sound of running footsteps.
When Tean got to the kitchen, he paused to orient himself: a doorway directly ahead that opened onto a flight of stairs; a closed door to his right; to his left, a Masonite table that had been pushed up against an ancient Amana side-by-side; a chair overturned on the floor.From the front of the house came the sounds of struggle.
Tean started to turn toward the sounds.And then he saw the blood.
A trail of it led from the stairs and passed beneath the closed door to Tean’s right.
Daniel.
He tried the door, and the handle turned.His eyes followed the trail of blood over sea foam-green tile, streaking up and across the side of the tub, and ending at what had once been a human being.
A shout—Jem’s shout—came from the front of the house.
Tean barely heard it.He was still in the little clapboard rambler.Still staring at the gory mess in the tub.But he was back in that little cabin, too.Back in a canyon.At the end of the world.
He made himself step forward—over the bloody smear on the floor.His hands were trembling, and he put his hands on the doorjamb to steady himself.His watch thumped against the partially open door.
It—he—had been male.What was left of his genitals was propped between his legs on a bar of soap, like some bizarre sculpture.The clinical part of Tean’s brain, the part that dealt with animal carcasses all the time, took over.It was like stepping into a cold room.
Male.Cuts and stab wounds covered—at Tean’s conservative estimate—ninety percent of him.Circular burns.Broken fingers and toes.Between the streaks of dried blood, dark hair was visible on his legs, chest, and arms.
The face matched the picture Tean had seen of the man called Rydel Owens.The scruff.The mustache.The freckles.
Something loosened in Tean’s gut, and for a moment, he thought his knees might fold.
Not Daniel.
It wasn’t Daniel.
A scream from the front of the house.
The crash of breaking glass.
Tean took out his phone and placed a call to 911.When the dispatcher answered, he said, “There are men in my house trying to kill me,” and he gave the address.He put the phone in his pocket without disconnecting.
A door on the opposite side of the small bathroom connected with a bedroom.A queen-sized bed without a frame had been placed under the only window, and the October sunlight turned the dust white: a thick layer of it across the dresser, on the mirror, even on the aluminum blinds.A few framed pictures were lined up on a box next to the bed—an improvised nightstand.Tean glanced at them, but he didn’t recognize any of the people.On the wall, in bloody letters three feet high, someone had written GROOMER.
Another door led him into a short hallway.Two doors led off it, and then the hallway continued toward the front of the house.Labored breathing, grunts, the unmistakable thump of a body hitting a wall.
You have to help him.He needs your help.
But Tean felt like he was moving inside a dream.He was here.He was awake.He was noticing a streak along one wall that he’d taken for shadow and now, he realized was more blood.He was turning the handle on that door, and he was opening the door, and he was stopping because the door was stuck—blocked by something heavy, soft, unmoving on the other side.
And, at the same time, he was in that little cabin, with the smell of water and salt-cedar and the gun glued to his hand.
He put his shoulder to the door and forced it far enough that he could slip his head in.
A bedroom.Two twin beds with train-pattern quilts.The closet doors had been taken off their tracks.
Two bodies on the floor.Covered in blood.
He recognized Van Cleave’s little chin puff.That was how he figured out who it was, because the features were otherwise unrecognizable; the side of his head had been smashed in.The smaller, darker figure that lay facedown had to be Trevino.