Relentless

mind me. I’ve got the best sense of humor in the family. If I’m not careful, Uncle Frank’s gonna pull me off the register and make me stockboy again.”
    “Oh,” I said, forcing a smile, then a small laugh. “I see what you mean—chains, padlocks, duct tape. Pretty funny.”
    Suddenly deadpan again, he said, “So you want that chloroform or not?”
    I half thought he would produce a bottle of the stuff if I asked for it. But I laughed again, said “Not,” and he hit the TOTAL key.

    The windows of the old church were boarded up, and weeds grew from cracks in the walkway and in the front steps.
    The gravel parking lot behind the building was not visible from the highway out front, and it backed up to rolling fields with no other structures in sight.
    Milo and Lassie remained in the front seat, but the rest of us got out of the Hummer.
    At my instruction, Waxx put his wallet and the contents of his pockets in the empty hardware-store bag.
    I ordered him to lie on his back, and he refused to complain about the gravel, though his eyes told the whole story of what he wanted to do to me, starting with the extraction of all my teeth using pliers and a ball-peen hammer.
    As Penny stood aside from Waxx, covering him with her gun, I told her, “If you see some guy coming, he’s barefoot and buck-toothed and carrying a banjo, wound him first and ask questions later.”
    “This place isn’t all that
Deliverance.”
    “Yeah? You didn’t meet Uncle Frank’s nephew, he’s got the best sense of humor in the family.”
    With a length of chain and two padlocks, I fitted Shearman Waxx with shackles, allowing enough slack for him to shuffle but not to run.
    Next, I shackled his hands together in front of him, not behind, and left a comfortable but cautious foot of chain between his wrists.
    Previously, I transferred our gear from the cargo space to the backseat. Waxx’s black suitcase stood on the ground by the Hummer.
    Chained, he had some difficulty getting to his feet.
    At last I assisted him, and he glared at me as if my assistance might be another reason to mutilate and murder me.
    I made him lie faceup in the Hummer’s cargo space, head toward the backseat.
    Penny stood at the open tailgate, her pistol aimed at Waxx’s crotch. As I worked, they got into a staring contest that neither of them would break.
    Flip-up metal rings were recessed in the carpeted floor of the Hummer. Items could be secured to the rings to prevent them from shifting during transit.
    With additional lengths of chain, I padlocked Waxx’s wrist shackles to one of those anchors, his ankle shackles to another.
    When that task was completed, Penny put her pistol away, and we opened the black bag with the stainless-steel fixtures.
    In an aluminum case within the suitcase, we found a formidable pistol with two spare magazines, a screw-on sound suppressor, and a shoulder rig.
    Penny fitted the silencer to the barrel, stepped away from the Hummer, and fired two shots at one of the boarded-up windows of the church. The cracking plywood made a lot more noise than the weapon.
    “I’ll take this,” Penny said.
    “You were made for each other.”
    The suitcase also contained a Taser and what we assumed must be instruments of torture: a scalpel, four nasty little thumbscrew clamps, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a culinary torch of the kind used to glaze crème brûlée, and an array of other toys for sadists, including a thick rubber bite guard to prevent the subject from chewing his tongue while convulsed with pain.
    A pharmacy kit was stocked with a variety of drugs, several individually packaged hypodermic syringes, cotton balls, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a length of rubber tubing to be used as a tourniquet.
    After examining the drugs, Penny selected a sedative.
    “This is going to make the drive a lot more pleasant for us.”
    She leaned in the back of the Hummer and asked Waxx how much of the sleeping drug she could safely administer to him, and how often.
    “You could accidentally give me an embolism if you inject an air bubble with the sedative,” he said.
    “You mean like you did intentionally to John Clitherow’s father on that boat?”
    “You are so dead,” he said.
    Penny said, “If the time comes to kill you, I won’t make it as easy as a needle.”
    Waxx hesitated, but then told her the proper dosage.
    She crawled into the cargo space with him, used the tourniquet to help clarify a vein in his right arm, and