Innocent Foxes: A Novel. Torey Hayden
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Название: Innocent Foxes: A Novel
Автор: Torey Hayden
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007458998
isbn:
She’d thought at first that the noise was the boy trying to cry, but Dixie realized then it was a bull snort, full of rage. When she went to pick him up again, he exploded at her touch, kicking out as viciously as his bound legs would let him.
Dixie darted into the house. ‘Billy? Billy, you got to come help me,’ she cried.
Groaning with annoyance, Billy followed her. ‘Fuck, Dixie. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?’
Dixie climbed into the back of the truck. Billy hopped in with one easy motion. ‘Hey, kid. Stop it,’ he said.
At the sound of Billy’s voice, the boy struggled even more fiercely against the duct-tape bindings. Billy kicked him. Hard. Then again. Then a third time.
‘Don’t. You’re going to kill him!’
Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Billy turned and grabbed the front of Dixie’s blouse. He pulled her right up close to his face. ‘You shut up. It’s all your fault that we’re in this mess to start with, so if you don’t want to feel my boot next, you shut your trap. I mean it, Dixie. I’m pissed off. I won’t take no more fucking around. You understand?’
Dixie nodded meekly.
Billy let go of her. Kneeling, he bent down close to the boy’s head. ‘So, you want to fight me some more, kid?’
The boy whimpered.
‘Good thinking.’ Then he picked the boy up by the waistband of his shorts, carried him inside and dumped him unceremoniously on the bathroom floor. Without saying anything to Dixie, he went back out into the living room.
Dixie softly shut the bathroom door. The boy, lying in an ungainly heap on the floor, made squeaky little noises through the tape, like the mewing of a newborn kitten.
Tentatively Dixie touched his head. His hair was an uninteresting birdy-coloured brown, a bit wavy and flowing down over his shoulders like girls’ hair. Boys around Abundance would have laughed so hard at long hair like that. Dixie felt pity for him. She hated it when parents didn’t notice things that made their kids look weird to other kids, when they just left them to get on with being teased or left out. Gently she tried to smooth his hair back and soothe his crying but it wasn’t really possible because of all the binding.
The boy kept making creepy noises. His nose was congested from the crying and so there were all sorts of gurgles and strangulated sounds that worried Dixie.
‘Listen, I’m going to take that tape off your mouth, because I don’t think that’s good for you at all. But you got to be nice, OK? You got to not yell or anything, because if you do, my man’s going to come back and beat the crap out of you again. You understand?’ She carefully peeled back the tape. In the process the car rag came off his face as well, giving her a first proper look at him, but there was no time to think about that, because the boy was coughing and gagging. Dixie thumped his back to help knock the breath back into him. The second he managed to draw a decent breath, he screamed blue murder.
Billy flung the bathroom door open. ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ he shouted. The boy stopped screaming immediately, but it was too late. Billy hauled off and kicked him so hard that he slid right across the floor and up against the bathtub. He howled.
Grabbing the car cloth, Billy whipped it around his wrist to make a gag out of it. Terrified the boy sucked in his pain and the small room fell into a sudden, jarring silence. Billy knelt and tied the cloth firmly around the boy’s mouth.
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