Just One Look

Better to wait and play it out. As if she had a choice.

“Who are you?” Grace asked.

Total stone face. He took hold of her purse and emptied the contents into his lap. He went through it, sifting and tossing items into the backseat. He found her cell phone, removed the battery, threw it in the back.

She kept peppering him with questions—where is my husband, what do you want with us—but he continued to ignore her. When they reached a stoplight, the man did something that she did not expect.

He rested his hand on her bad knee.

“Your leg was damaged,” he said.

Grace was not sure how to respond to this. His touch was light, almost feathery. And then without warning his fingers dug down with steel talons. They actually burrowed beneath the kneecap. Grace buckled. The tips of the man’s fingers disappeared into the hollow where the knee meets the shinbone. The pain was so sudden, so enormous, that Grace could not even scream. She reached out and grabbed his fingers, tried to pry them out of her knee, but there was absolutely no give. His hand felt like a concrete block.

His voice was barely a whisper. “If I dig in a little more and then pull . . .”

Her head was swimming. She was close to losing consciousness.

“ . . . I could tear your kneecap right off.”

When the light turned green, he let go. Grace nearly collapsed in relief. The whole incident had probably taken less than five seconds. The man looked at her. There was the smallest hint of a smile on his face.

“I’d like you to stop talking now, okay?”

Grace nodded.

He faced forward. “Keep driving.”

• • •

Perlmutter called in the APB. Charlaine Swain had had the good sense to get both the make and license plate. The car was registered to Grace Lawson. No surprise there. Perlmutter was in an unmarked car now, heading toward the school. Scott Duncan was with him.

“So who is this Eric Wu?” Duncan asked.

Perlmutter debated what to tell him but saw no reason to hold this back. “To date we know he broke into a house, assaulted the owner in such a way as to leave him temporarily paralyzed, shot another man, and my guess is, he killed Rocky Conwell, the guy who was following Lawson.”

Duncan had no response.

Two other police cars were already on the scene. Perlmutter did not like that—marked cars at a school. They’d had the good sense, at least, to not use their sirens. That was something. The parents picking up offspring reacted in two ways. Some hurried their kids to their cars, hands on their shoulders, shielding them as though from gunfire. Others let curiosity rule the day. They walked over, oblivious or in a state of denial that there could be any danger in so innocent a setting.

Charlaine Swain was there. Perlmutter and Duncan hurried toward her. A young uniformed cop named Dempsey was asking her questions and taking notes. Perlmutter shooed him away and asked, “What happened?”

Charlaine told him about coming to school, keeping an eye out for Grace Lawson because of what he, Perlmutter, had said. She told him about seeing Eric Wu with Grace.

“There was no overt threat?” he asked.

Charlaine said, “No.”

“So she might have gone him with him voluntarily.”

Charlaine Swain flicked a glance at Scott Duncan, then back to Perlmutter. “No. She didn’t go voluntarily.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Grace came alone to pick up her kids,” Charlaine said.

“So?”

“So she wouldn’t just voluntarily leave them like that. Look, I couldn’t call you guys right away when I saw him. He was able to make me freeze from across a schoolyard.”

Perlmutter said, “I’m not sure I understand.”

“If Wu could do that to me from that far away,” Charlaine said, “imagine what he’d be able to do to Grace Lawson when he was right next to her, whispering in her ear.”

Another uniformed officer named Jackson came sprinting over to Perlmutter. His eyes were wide and Perlmutter could see he was trying everything he could not to panic. The parents picked up on it too. They took a step away.

“We found something,” Jackson said.

“What?”

He leaned in closer so no one would overhear. “A van parked two blocks away. I think you should come see this.”

• • •

She should use the gun now.

Grace’s knee throbbed. It felt as if someone had set off a bomb inside the joint. Her eyes were wet from holding back tears. She wondered if she’d be able to walk when they stopped.

She sneaked glances at the man who had hurt her so. Whenever she did, he was watching her, that bemused look still on his face. She tried to think, tried to organize her thoughts, but she kept flashing back to his hand on her knee.

He had been so casual about causing her such pain. It would have been one thing if he’d been emotional about it, one way or the other, if he’d been moved to either ecstasy or revulsion, but there had been nothing there. Like hurting someone was paperwork. No strain, no sweat. His boast, if you want to call it that, had not been idle: If he’d so desired, he could have twisted off her kneecap like a bottle top.

They had crossed the state line and were in New York now. She was on Interstate 287 heading toward the Tappan Zee Bridge. Grace did not dare speak. Her mind, naturally enough, kept going back to the children. Emma and Max would have come out of the school by now. They would have looked for her. Would they have been brought to the office? Cora had seen Grace in the schoolyard. So had several other mothers, Grace was sure. Would they say or do something?

This was all irrelevant and, more than that, a waste of mental energy. Nothing she could do about it. Time to concentrate on the task at hand.

Think about the gun.

Grace tried to rehearse in her mind how it would go. She would reach down with both hands. She would pull her cuff up with her left and grab the weapon with her right. How was it strapped in? Grace tried to remember. There was a strip covering the top, wasn’t there? She had snapped it into place. It kept the gun secure, so it wouldn’t jerk around. She’d have to unsnap that. If she just tried to pull the gun free, it would get caught.

Okay, good. Remember that: Unsnap first. Then pull.

She thought about timing. The man was incredibly strong. She had seen that. He probably had a fair amount of experience with violence. She would have to wait for an opportunity. First—and this was obvious—she couldn’t be driving when she made her move. They would either need to be at a stoplight or parked or . . . or better, wait until they were getting out of the car. That might work.