Storm Front

around and buy
guns
.”
    “Shut up, shut up, shut up . . .”
    “And no, it’s not just an Interest Group, it’s a
Mossad
Interest Group. No young girls with small noses for you, Bart Kohl. No, it’s some
meshugenah
bitch with a nine-millimeter.”
    Enough to drive her out of her goddamn mind, and she considered the possibility of standing him on the shoulder of a highway and unloading that 9mm into him.
    Not really. She needed him.
    They watched the house for six hours, almost until midnight. Zahavi was thinking of calling it off—the neighborhood was very quiet, but they’d seen a couple of police patrol cars, moving slowly, looking for trouble.
    Then Case showed up; and they were right behind her.
    “Pull over,” Zahavi said. She got a gunnysack out of the back, purchased that afternoon at a Home Depot.
    “Oh, Jesus,” Kohl said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
    “And give me the tape.”
    “Please God, help me.” But he handed her the role of duct tape, with the end pulled free and folded back on itself, to make a handy tab.
    Case pulled up to the garage door, which was automatic. A light came on inside, and the door began to go up. Kohl pulled to the side of the road, at the front of the house, as they’d planned, and Zahavi got out in the dark, with the bag. Case pulled into the garage. Zahavi took another look around, and moved.
    Case parked, and the garage door started down. Zahavi slipped into the garage with the bag, heard Case get out of the car, humming a little tune. Zahavi was at the Jeep’s fender when Case, still humming, thumbed through her keys for the door—
    Zahavi stepped up behind her and threw the bag over her head and dragged her to the floor, straddled her. Case was trying to scream, but instead made choking sounds, just as Zahavi had seen in a training film, and before she could actually scream, Zahavi hit her twice, in the head, with an open palm, stunning blows, and then Zahavi pulled the tape loose and began looping it around Case’s head. Case began to fight, but it was too late, and too confusing, with the tape going on. Zahavi taped her up like a slow calf at the local rodeo, all the way down to her ankles.
    The overhead light went out, and she started, listening, but couldn’t hear anything but the muffled groans from Case.
    She checked the tape, as best she could in the dark, then opened the garage’s access door and waved Kohl into the driveway. He pulled in, and together they wrestled the struggling woman into the back of their van. She looked, Kohl thought, like a giant joint in a stoner film.
    “You didn’t have to hurt her?” Kohl asked, a pleading note in his voice.
    “I might have had to slap her a couple of times,” Zahavi said, with evident satisfaction.
    “Another felony,” Kohl said. He began to weep. “Oh, Jesus . . .”
    “Pick another God,” Zahavi said. “And slow down. Slow down. We do not hurry.”
    Case struggled and cried and begged, and was echoed by Kohl, but they made it out of town and south on I-35. They’d rented a hotel room, but it was two hours away, and they needed to drive circumspectly. A police stop would
really
have been the end. An hour south, they got off the interstate and turned east, cruising comfortably across the countryside in the dark. Case had gone quiet.
    They arrived at the hotel, on the outskirts of the City of Rochester, after two o’clock. They had the two end units, and smuggled Case into the room at the far end.
    “I’m going home,” Kohl announced.
    “Oh, no. No, no, no, no . . .”
    “Please don’t hurt me,” Case begged, from inside the bag.
    “No going home now,” Zahavi said to Kohl. “Too late for that.”
    She sounded pleased with herself.
    —
    V IRGIL WAS ASLEEP before midnight. With the unconscious sleep-time clock that ran in the back of his head, he knew he’d been down for quite a while when he started dreaming that he was feeding automobile scrap into a hammer mill, and that garbage cans were falling down a stairway, that a Caribbean steel drum band was playing in his backyard. . . .
    Then his eyes cracked open and he heard all of that, plus somebody screaming, “Virgil! Virgil! Get up, Virgil.”
    Virgil rolled out of bed, grabbed his jeans, started pulling them on as he stumbled to the front door. Somebody was pounding on the aluminum screen door, and they were panic-stricken. He got to the door, flicked on the porch light, and saw the bald head of his