Jenner glanced at his watch again. It was just past one thirty, and Gordon still wasn’t back.

They were in Shirley’s living room. The curtains were closed, and Shirley was sitting on the floor by the radiator, bound and gagged. Her ankles were bound with baling wire, her hands similarly secured behind her back (and additionally tied to the radiator), and her mouth was gagged with a strip of duct tape. Her face was shocked white, her eyes wide with fear. Blood was oozing from a nasty-looking gash on the side of her head, the redness bright against her ashen skin. Jenner had hit her when she’d gone for his face with her fingernails, trying to claw out his eyes. He’d cracked her in the head with the barrel of his pistol — not too hard, but hard enough — and she hadn’t given him any trouble after that.

“You didn’t say anything about a gun,” Dake had said when he’d seen the pistol.

Jenner had stared at him. “You got a problem with it?”

“No . . . it’s just . . . you should have told me.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . I don’t know. You just should have told me, that’s all.”

Now Jenner was looking at his watch again. He knew he’d only just looked at it a minute ago, and he knew he was only checking it again because he was getting really edgy, and he didn’t know what else to do, and he also knew that if Gordon didn’t show up soon . . .

“What was that?” Dake said.

Jenner had heard it too — the sound of the front door being opened. A key turning in the lock, the door creaking faintly on its hinges . . .

“Is that him?” Dake whispered.

Jenner frowned, confused. “I didn’t hear a car. Did you —?”

“Shirley? Hello?”

It was a woman’s voice, calling out from the hallway.

“Shirley? Where are you? Is everything all right?”

Jenner and Dake heard the front door being closed, then footsteps moving along the hallway toward the living room.

“Shirley? Where are you?”

The living room door was open, and the first thing Grace saw when she got to the doorway was a ratty little man in a cheap Santa Claus costume pointing a gun at her head.