Hart & Boot & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

sick yellow.
    Zealand put his gun away, wondering if he’d made his point sufficiently. Hannah had stopped screaming, so perhaps not. Feeling himself cloaked in a kind of prevailing numbness, what he had long thought of as his “working state,” Zealand put one heavy boot down on Hannah’s right thigh, just above her destroyed knee, then bent over to grasp her ankle in both hands. He wrenched her leg upward, grunting and twisting, pulling on her ankle while pressing down on the thigh with his foot, until her lower leg came free with a sickening pop. Hannah lashed and flailed at him, but the pain made her imprecise. Zealand noted with interest that she didn’t bleed, though the wound seeped clear water. He hurled her lower leg into the lake, then stepped away from her thrashing limbs. “I hope you’re part starfish, or that leg might be gone forever. You’ll tell me where to find your father’s life now.”
    Tears ran from Hannah’s eyes. Her screams had subsided to whimpers, and the whimpering didn’t stop when she spoke in her magical human voice—both sounds emerged simultaneously. “I only wanted to see my father again. I wanted you to take me to him. I’ve hated him for too long, hated him for his essential nature, and I wanted him to know that I forgave him, if he would forgive me.” Despite her obvious agony, her voice remained clear and barely modulated.
    “Your father has something like Alzheimer’s, but more profound. He doesn’t even remember your existence.” Zealand had asked Grace if he knew anyone named Hannah, and Grace had given him that blank, desperate look and grasped at the air, but that was all. He’d been quiet and morose for hours after Zealand asked him, though, and Zealand suspected that Hannah’s name had set up unpleasant resonances deep inside Grace, below his conscious mind. “But since he doesn’t remember you, it means he doesn’t hold a grudge for whatever drove the two of you apart, if that’s any comfort.”
    “His mind is gone?”
    “Not entirely, but it is degrading more every day. I think it comes from having lived so long without his soul.”
    “You intend to restore his soul to him?”
    Zealand shook his head.
    Hannah stared up at him, her monstrous jaw clenched. “Then you will kill him, destroy his life?”
    “It’s what he wants. It’s why he hired me.” Zealand gestured with a gloved hand. “You’ve exhausted my patience once already. Are you trying to do so again? Direct me to your father’s life.”
    “I have to show you.”
    Zealand sighed. He trudged up the shore to his car and returned with his tool bag. He withdrew a pair of bolt cutters and snapped off Hannah’s teeth, one at a time. Then he flipped her over onto her stomach and bound her hands behind her with thick plastic loops that tightened with a tug. He picked her up over his shoulder and carried her, his knees creaking under the combined weight of Hannah and his tool bag; at least she didn’t thrash. He was breathing hard by the time they reached his car, an SUV rented under a false name. He put her in the passenger seat, and, after a moment’s thought, pulled the scarf back up over the lower half of her face. Looking at her broken teeth and glowing tongue made him feel uncomfortable, and a little guilty, the latter an emotion that had plagued him more and more in recent years. His “working state” was already fading, and the emotions that replaced it were not welcome.
    After he got into the driver’s seat, Zealand said, “Guide me.”
    ***
    Zealand crouched on the edge of a creek in a wilderness area in the mountains above the lake. Hannah lay on her side in the snow nearby. Zealand was exhausted. He’d carried her nearly two miles from the trailhead, most of that well off the path, falling twice when the treacherous snow and ice gave way beneath his footsteps. His knees ached, and his feet were numb inside his boots, but he’d made it. Hannah had led him to a pretty place