Hush by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 53

THE BLOW TO the back of the skull didn’t draw blood. It didn’t even render Ridgen unconscious. I needed him to be awake. He was like a man sleepwalking as I led him to the dining-room chair I’d pushed against the wall of his big, empty kitchen. I duct-taped him into place and he watched, stunned. Within fifteen minutes he was coming to his senses, stirring to the sound of the objects I was clunking onto the kitchen table.

“What the fuck is this? What—what are you doing here?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “I haven’t escaped. If I was a fugitive on the run from the law this hellhole is the last place I’d spend my precious time.”

“What do you—I’m gonna…” He was working hard, trying to form threats and deadly promises, but we both already knew that he was never going to report this. A man like Ridgen wasn’t going to have his fellow guards telling stories next week about the police cutting him from a kitchen chair, drenched in sweat and shaking, a woman’s name on his lips.

“I should probably be surprised, but I’m not,” I said, continuing to lie the weapons out on the table. “You have basically no furniture here. No knick-knacks. No pictures on the wall. Everything is functional. So when I went looking for things to play with, I had to scratch around. The one thing I come up with? Knives. Lots of knives. Of course a predator and a creep like you has a huge knife collection.”

Ridgen and I looked at the knives on the kitchen table. I’d found the weapons lovingly displayed on the wall of the garage, where a normal man might have hung tools. The garage itself had been converted into a half-hearted man cave, with another recliner, a big-screen TV, a bar fridge and the knife rack. Ridgen lifted his eyes from the knives to me and tested the duct tape binding his wrists to the arms of the chair.

He drew a huge breath, ready to bark and bluff.

“I’d keep it down if I were you,” I said, selecting a small, thin knife from the collection. “I need my focus. I’m not trained. I’m just an amateur.”

“Not trained?” he exhaled. “Not trained in what?”

I walked to the other side of the kitchen, lifted the knife by the blade and threw it with all my strength at Ridgen’s head.

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