Trap Door Read Free

more at the memory of his final encounter with the kid, only a week earlier.
    One last chance, he’d decided, which by itself was uncharacteristic of him. And he’d already known that it probably wouldn’t work, that if the court’s order
and
a felony conviction wouldn’t stop the kid, then nothing else would.
    Only one thing would stop him. Still, for Jen’s sake, Walter had made it his business to run into the boy in front of the hardware store down on Water Street in Eastport’s tiny business district.
    “Sure, Mr. Henderson, I understand,” the kid had replied when Walter, in reasonable tones, had explained his concerns. Jen had a future, college and a career to look forward to. Jen had a life.
    Unlike you,
he’d wanted to add. The kid had a pretty face and curly blond hair like an angel’s, but that was the only even faintly angelic thing about him. His smile was mocking—that alone would have gotten him killed back where Walter came from—and he wore torn dungarees, ratty sneakers, and a T-shirt that said
The Liver Is Evil and Deserves to Be Punished
on the back.
    “I sure am going to miss her, though,” the kid added slyly. His inflection deliberately left no doubt about just which of Jennifer’s many fine qualities he most would regret losing.
    You know nothing of regret,
Walter had thought clearly. “I’m sure you will,” he had replied, his own voice gone soft. Back in the city, men who heard that tone out of Walter generally reacted by soiling themselves in terror.
    But the kid just stood there grinning impudently at him. Walter yearned to tear the T-shirt off his back and ram it down his throat, preferably in front of the smirking gaggle of friends who hung back a little ways listening.
    “Tell Jen I said so long, though, will you?” the kid added. “I mean, since I’m not going to be seeing her again.”
    All the while his snotty expression and his eyes, alight with ignorant malice, conveyed another message entirely:
Get stuffed, you stupid old fart. I’ll see her if I want to see her. Do anything else I want to do to her, too
.
    Then the kid had turned and swaggered away with his sniggering pals—also clad in T-shirts, though the temperature was a bare fifty degrees—into the hardware store, leaving Walt out on the sidewalk watching his reflection in the store’s front window as he ran a hand over his short silvery hair.
    Smiling to himself because Walter now knew what the score was, which the kid so clearly did not that it was pitiful. That conversation was the other reason why if the kid was out here in the barn tonight, Walter was going to kill him.
    And he was here, no question about it. Being very quiet. But with senses sharpened by thirty-plus years at the top of a human food chain so brutal it made jungle man-eaters resemble tenants of some particularly benign petting zoo, Walter could feel it.
    Smell it, too, as if the new creatures he meant to acquire for his estate were already inhabiting and fouling the place. Walt’s nose wrinkled involuntarily as he took another step into the darkness.
    And… that sound again.
Creak-creak
. Was it a beam? In its faint regularity it summoned the mental picture of a boat tied to a pier, moving with the gentle swells of the sea, a rope rubbing against wood.
Creak…
    Creak
. Only not quite. Familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He knew the smell, though. He hadn’t been expecting it, not yet, but all at once its identity came to him.
    The smell of death.
Oh, Christ…
    Jen.
No…
    Dropping the pistol as a rush of ice-watery terror poured through him, Walter Henderson scrambled back to the barn door, its window a rectangle of deepest marine blue against the darkness of the wall.
    Had the kid killed her? He fumbled against the particle-board panel to the right of the door, where the new circuit breaker box and the light switches were hung.
    Had he? Walter’s breath came in painful gasps. Oh, sweet Jesus God in heaven, had the stupid little