It felt as if they’d been driving for hours, circulating through nearly deserted streets. Joey wondered where the man was taking him, why he couldn’t go home, go someplace where he could eat. He was so hungry, his stomach hurt. When he thought of food, Joey thought again about the nice lady at the store, the one who smiled at him and asked his name. The bad man said that Joey made him kill the woman, because he told her his name. Joey felt sad that the nice lady died. He wondered again about his momma, thinking how worried she must be, and about his poppa. He wasn’t on the television looking for Joey like his momma was, but the boy knew that his poppa was upset and worried about him. His poppa worried a lot, and he tried to take care of Joey. Maybe Poppa wasn’t on the television because he was too busy looking for me? Joey thought that had to be true, that his poppa was too busy to be on television because he was looking everywhere he could think of, trying to find Joey.
“My momma and poppa want me to go home,” Joey whispered.
Behind the wheel, the man didn’t respond, simply continued to drive. The boy was tied down to the backseat, ropes around his arms and legs making sure he couldn’t raise his body, even an arm to wave at a passing car.
Joey thought maybe the man hadn’t heard him, so he said it again, this time louder: “My momma and poppa want me to go home!”
In the driver’s seat, Peter Benoit laughed, his voice echoing through the SUV. “No one knows where you are, Joey,” he said, his voice filled with pride. “No one. Not your mother or father, your grandmother or grandfather. Not the police. And even if they are looking, they won’t find you. Not until it’s all over.”
Joey thought about that. “When will that be?”
“When will what be?” Benoit mocked.
“When will it be over?” Joey asked again.
A dour smile on his lips, Benoit at first hesitated, but then answered, “When I’m done with you. When I’m satisfied.”
Joey thought about that and felt better. “After that, can I go home?”
At that, Benoit turned and looked over his shoulder at the boy in the backseat, shaking his head with disgust at the child’s naïveté. He turned back, fixed his eyes on the road, and mumbled, “Very soon, this will be over. This will end.”
At first, Joey thought about the tone of the man’s voice, the anger seething just below the surface. Still, when he thought about what the man had said, it sounded like good news. Soon, this would end. Relieved, Joey wondered if maybe he didn’t need to be as frightened of the man. Since that first night, sometimes, when Benoit looked at him, it made the boy’s heart beat fast in his chest. Sometimes it beat so fast, it hurt. And sometimes, when Joey felt very frightened, he felt his pants grow warm and wet. When that happened, Benoit seethed. It happened so often that Benoit had the boy in diapers from a store, the pull-up kind.
“I don’t want you smelling up my car,” he’d said when he tied the boy down. “And we’re not stopping, not for anything, not until after dark.”
“But the hurricane,” Joey had said, his eyes wide. On the radio, they said the storm was coming and that people needed to hide. “We have to be safe from the hurricane so it won’t hurt us.”
“You don’t need to worry about the storm,” Benoit had told him with a short laugh. “I’ll take care of you.”