Page 80 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“Come with me,” he says. “There’s a bolt. There’s room for two of us behind it.”

“There’s a car outside. He’ll come in. He’ll go through the house and find you.” I take his shoulder and turn him toward the hall. “Go.”

“You could go out the back.”

“Yes.”

“So go out the back.”

“Go and put the bolt across, Fin.”

He goes about four steps, stops, and turns around with both hands out in the traffic-stopping gesture. I

“Why?” he says.

“Because I’m the reason he found this address,” I say, “and because nobody stood in a door for me. Go on.”

I hear the bolt go across at six forty-one.

I turn the porch light on. It doesn’t work. Then I stand in the open front door of a rented house on a county road with my hands at my sides and wait.

It takes twenty-nine minutes.

There’s a lot of country out here in the dark, almost silent except for a dog about half a mile off that starts and stops. The road is a mile of nothing in either direction. Cold comes up the three steps into the hall behind me. I stand in it until my feet go numb through the soles of my shoes. At one point, the fridge cycles on in the kitchen, and I put my hand on the frame at the sound. Behind me, Fin is alive in a locked room. For the moment, that’s enough.

I go through the tax file in my head, line by line, the way I used to go through a book of shots at nineteen while I waited for a bus. It’s a good file. It will still be a good file next week.

Twice, down the hall behind the bolted door, the floor creaks where a man is standing up and sitting back down again. Both times, I want to call out to him. Both times I don’t, because a voice in this hall is a voice on the road.

He comes at ten past seven.

The gray car goes past the end of the drive first and comes back, which is what he does. It parks on the road, not on the gravel. The door opens and shuts.

Leonard Roth comes up the three steps into the light from the hall. He stops on the second one and looks at me standing in the doorway with my coat on.

He doesn’t say anything at all.

He takes his hands out of his pockets.

“He’s not here,” I say.

“That’s not true.”

“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”

I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m five foot eleven. I carry twenty pounds I didn’t carry at twenty-five. I haven’t raised a hand to a human being since I was nineteen years old in a corridor outside a rink, and I didn’t win that one, either.

I don’t do anything clever. There’s nothing clever to do. I stand in a doorway that’s thirty-two inches wide with one hand on each side of the frame because a man can’t get through a doorway that has a body in it without moving the body.

He puts one hand flat on my chest, almost politely, and pushes.

I don’t go.

Then he hits me under the ribs on the right side. The strength goes out of my legs.

I keep hold of the frame. I have no memory of deciding to. He hits me in the same place twice more. I hear a crack in my right ribs. My knees come down onto the boards. I still have one hand on the frame. I get an arm across the gap at shoulder height. It’s nothing, not a defense, just a thirty-eight-year-old man’s arm in a doorway.

“Move,” Roth says.