By the Light of the Moon Read Free Page A

straight-backed chair that he couldn’t easily wave, rock, or twiddle anything. Inch-wide strips of electrician’s tape wound around and around his ankles, lashing them tightly to the chair legs; additional tape bound his wrists and his forearms to the arms of the chair. His right arm was taped with the palm facing down, but his left palm was upturned.
    A cloth of some kind had been wadded in his mouth when he’d been unconscious. His lips had been taped shut.
    Dylan had been conscious for two or three minutes, and he hadn’t connected
any
pieces of the ominous puzzle that had been presented for his consideration. He remained clueless as to who had assaulted him and as to why.
    Twice when he’d tried to turn in his chair to look toward the twin beds and the bathroom, which lay behind him, a rap alongside the head, delivered by his unknown enemy, had tempered his curiosity. The blows weren’t hard, but they were aimed at the tender spot where earlier he had been struck more brutally, and each time he nearly passed out again.
    If Dylan had called for help, his muffled shout wouldn’t have carried beyond the motel room, but it would have reached his brother less than ten feet away. Unfortunately, Shep wouldn’t respond either to a full-throated scream or to a whisper. Even on his best days, he seldom reacted to Dylan or to anyone, and when he became obsessed with a jigsaw puzzle, this world seemed less real to him than did the two-dimensional scene in the fractured picture.
    With his calm right hand, Shep selected an ameba-shaped piece of pasteboard from the box, glanced at it, and set it aside. At once he plucked another fragment from the pile and immediately located the right spot for it, after which he placed a second and a third—all in half a minute. He appeared to believe that he sat alone in the room.
    Dylan’s heart knocked against his ribs as though testing the soundness of his construction. Every beat pushed a pulse of pain through his clubbed skull, and in sickening syncopation, the rag in his mouth seemed to throb like a living thing, triggering his gag reflex more than once.
    Scared to a degree that big guys like him were never supposed to be scared, unashamed of his fear, entirely comfortable with being a big frightened guy, Dylan was as certain of this as he had ever been certain of anything: Twenty-nine was too young to die. If he’d been
ninety-
nine, he’d have argued that middle age began well past the century mark.
    Death had never held any allure for him. He didn’t understand those who reveled in the Goth subculture, their abiding romantic identification with the living dead; he didn’t find vampires sexy. With its glorification of murder and its celebration of cruelty to women, gangsta-rap music didn’t start his toes tapping, either. He didn’t like movies in which evisceration and decapitation were the primary themes; if nothing else, they were certain popcorn spoilers. He supposed that he’d never be hip. His fate was to be as square as a saltine cracker. But the prospect of being eternally square didn’t bother him a fraction as much as the prospect of being dead.
    Although scared, he remained cautiously hopeful. For one thing, if the unknown assailant had intended to kill him, surely he would already have assumed room temperature. He had been bound and gagged because the attacker had some other use for him.
    Torture came to mind. Dylan had never heard about people being tortured to death in the rooms of national-chain motels, at least not with regularity. Homicidal psychopaths tended to feel awkward about conducting their messy business in an establishment that might at the same time be hosting a Rotarian convention. During his years of traveling, his worst complaints involved poor housekeeping, unplaced wake-up calls, and lousy food in the coffee shop. Nevertheless, once torture opened a door and walked into his mind, it pulled up a chair and sat down and wouldn’t leave.
    Dylan