Free A Time of Torment by John Connolly Page B

all that mattered right now was Corrie.
    He turned back toward the drapes, lifting them with his left hand, the other holding the gun. He saw Corrie lying on a couch. He saw—
    Brown heard a sound like a paper bag bursting, and TP toppled backward and fell to the ground on his back. Another bag burst, and Brown was punched hard in the gut, pirouetting with the force of the blow and landing on the tarp covering the pool. It bowed under his weight, but held. Water flowed over him, but it wasn’t deep, and he could keep his face above it. Still, he was hurting now. The water was cold, but not cold enough to cancel out the heat of the pain in his belly.
    A man appeared by the pool, watching him. He was tall but hunched, his legs too long for his body, his fingers too long for his hands. His eyes were barely there at all. One arm hung free, and the other was holding on to TP’s left hand. The man had dragged TP from where he had fallen to the edge of the pool. TP’s face was turned toward the water, and Brown could see, just below his right eye, the entry wound from the bullet that had killed his friend.
    The man smiled, and Brown saw that his teeth were so perfect they could only be dentures, an impression confirmed when he ejected them into his right hand and dropped them in a pocket of the old army jacket he was wearing. But his hand was not empty when it reemerged from his pocket, and was instead holding one of those plastic boxes in which folks kept their mouth guards. He allowed TP’s arm to fall, freeing up two hands, and used them to place a new set of dentures in his mouth. Once they were in position, he displayed them to Brown. Each consisted of a pair of long blades set into the acrylic base at slight angles, leaving a gap in the middle of each row. The man reached down, lifted TP’s right hand, bit off the top half of TP’s index finger, and chewed for a time before spitting the resulting mess into the pool close to Brown’s head, the blades of the dentures now stained red.
    Brown felt himself dying. He just prayed that it would come before this creature went to work on him.
    A second man appeared, the one responsible for bringing them here, the one who had taken Corrie. Beside the other, he appeared unutterably normal. Brown tried to speak. He wanted to ask the man from the bar to prevent Corrie from being bitten, but death was stealing away all his words as a preparation for the great silence to come.
    ‘Time to go,’ he heard the man from the bar say.
    The other one kicked at TP’s body, and it landed on the tarp by Brown’s feet, yet somehow the cover still held, although Brown felt himself beginning to slide. The man from the bar produced a knife and cut at the ropes holding the tarp in place – one, then another – until they came away, and TP and Brown drifted slowly down to join the dead boy.

15
    Y ears later, and a life away, Jerome Burnel, the Disgraced Hero, withdrew cash from his bank account. His hand trembled as he filled in the slip. He used his passport for identification, since his driver’s license was no longer valid. He watched the teller take the passport away and show it to a supervisor, and some kind of consultation followed before the teller made a photocopy of the relevant page and returned the passport to him. Burnel thought that her expression was different when she came back, that it bore a trace of distaste, but perhaps he was just projecting. After all, he wasn’t exactly infamous, and he’d been behind bars long enough to allow most people to have forgotten about him. But the teller was in her fifties, and who knew what kind of memory she had, or what notes had been appended to his banking record. His name was unusual, and so was his history. She didn’t look up at him when she told him to have a good day, and the security guard at the door appeared to give him a more hostile examination than before as he left.
    The private detective had called back while Burnel was