Chapter 54

Eddie was in the living room, watching a Season One episode of The Boondocks on DVD, when the doorbell rang.

Up until then, it had been a quiet morning. He’d seen his wife and child off, and before leaving, Ariel had gladly loaned him her stun gun. She believed, as Joshua had said, that Bates might pay them a visit. Tanisha’s murder had badly shaken her, too.

“Call the police if anything happens,” Ariel had said. “Anything. They need to catch this guy.”

“You do the same,” he’d told her, though he doubted she was in any danger. If Bates invaded their home, he would be coming for him, Eddie knew. He was Joshua’s best friend, and Bates might know that, and would assume Eddie could give him answers. The worry in Ariel’s eyes reflected that she believed the same thing.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. He made a show of whipping out the Taser like a gunslinger in a Sergio Leone western. “Fifty thousand volts here agrees with me.”

He’d sent his wife out of the house with a hopeful smile on her face—and the moment she closed the door, he locked it. He locked the other two exterior doors—one side led to the garage, the other, to their backyard—and he locked the windows. He closed all of the blinds, too. Like a man battening the hatches against a cataclysmic storm.

He had plenty of work to do that day—a couple of programming projects for small businesses—but his simmering anxiety made concentration impossible. He soon gave up all hope of working to re-watch some of his favorite episodes from The Boondocks. He rarely purchased DVDs since he could rent them more economically from Netflix, but the cartoon series was too damn funny not to own. Laughing hard, he almost forgot about the worries that had driven him to set aside his work in the first place.

And then the doorbell rang. Coco had been on the sofa with him, curled up against his leg, fast asleep. But at the chiming of the bell, she sprang awake and perched on the arm of the couch, eyes bulging, letting loose her distinctive, high-pitched barks.

“Relax, girl. It’s probably only a delivery.”

The dog quieted. She scurried into her kennel, which Eddie had placed beside the sofa.

She was such a nervous little dog. But the dog’s anxiety re-ignited his latent fear. He pushed off the sofa, touched the Taser on his hip.

Hold up, man. Bates wouldn’t announce his arrival by ringing the damn doorbell like UPS. You’re overreacting.

Eddie pulled down his sweater, to conceal the stun gun. He went to one of the front windows and parted the blinds.

There was no delivery truck parked outside. But he did see something alarming: someone had knocked over the family of plastic snowmen that graced the front yard.

“Damn kids playing pranks. Don’t people teach their children manners any more?”

Back in the day when he was growing up—not that long ago—his parents had taught him to respect the property of others. You didn’t vandalize someone’s house or screw around with their shit. Hell, you didn’t so much as walk through someone yard without permission. But nowadays, the youth did whatever they wanted. On numerous occasions, Eddie had caught kids walking through his backyard as a shortcut to getting to a neighborhood park, tramping across his wife’s flower garden, and he’d finally had to erect a fence to put an end to the trespassers.

He unlocked the front door and walked outside. The prankster kids were nowhere in sight, which was to be expected. After they did their damage they never hung around to own up to it. Brats.

He set the snowmen upright and returned inside the house. He locked the front door again.

That was when he noticed the smells.

The first was an outdoorsy odor: like old leaves, damp earth. Another, sharper smell was blended with it: a musky scent that reminded Eddie of a locker room after a football game.

The final olfactory thread, woven in with the other two, was the pungent scent of blood.

Bates. Somehow, he got in here.

But how? He’d kept all of the doors locked, and the windows, too.

Until he’d gone outdoors to fix the snowmen . . .

Eddie remembered what Joshua had said. Something about Bates being able to walk around, seemingly invisible. Eddie had chalked up Joshua’s story to a pressure-triggered delusion. No man could be invisible. It was ridiculous.

Now, Eddie wasn’t so sure.

He seemed to be alone. There were no visual signs whatsoever of Bates’ presence. But there were the awful smells.

Cold sweat slicked his spine. He reached for the Taser, unclipped it, slid his finger across the button that would release the electrifying prongs.

“Hey,” Eddie said, pleased with the firm authority in his voice. “I know you’re in here, man. I can smell you, you funky motherfucker.”

There was no reply.

Eddie wondered if he were imagining things, if perhaps the odors merely had been carried inside the house from outdoors by the wind. What tangible proof did he have that Bates had invaded his house? Could he call the police and say, hey, come get this psycho, he’s in my house, I can’t see him, but I can smell him? They would laugh and hang up.

“Come on out, man,” Eddie said, but with less forcefulness.

He crept down the hallway, glancing in the bedrooms, the bathroom. He found nothing.

“I’m not scared of you,” Eddie said.

The smell had faded, giving further credence to his doubts. He would check the rest of the house, just to be sure, but he was almost certain that he’d allowed his imagination, fueled by Joshua’s fantastic theories, to run away with him.

As Eddie moved toward the kitchen, his Blackberry beeped, signaling the arrival of a text message. It had probably come from Joshua. Eddie would read it after he had finished walking through the house.

He went to the kitchen. There was no one in there. However, the basement door hung open.

A frown knitted his brow. He’d circulated from the basement to the first floor and vice versa several times that morning, and could not recall if he’d left the door open, or closed.

He walked to the doorway. Thirteen steps dropped into dense shadows, which he expected, as he’d shut off the lights when he returned upstairs. But he caught that medley of foul odors again.

If it had been a scent borne into the house on wind currents when he’d opened the front door, it would not have dissipated, and then resurfaced at the entrance to the basement. Someone was definitely in the house, lurking in the cellar.

He was calling the cops. He would fabricate a story and say Bates had broken in. And hope they made a liar of him when they arrived.

As Eddie started to turn around, someone shoved him down the stairs.