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“You’re pissing me off, Baxter,” Letty said.
“So what?”
Letty, tapping alongwith her cane, led the way to Harp’s front door, with Baxter hanging back on the sidewalk. She could see a light in a second-floor window, and one back through the house in the kitchen. He was still awake.
During the stick-fighting lessons, John Kaiser had taught her a reversed hold on the cane. If she held the cane in a conventional grip, she had to lift it before she could hit with it. If she reversed her hold, so her elbow pointed to the front of her hip, she could windmill it, striking almost instantly.
She used the metal head of the cane to bang on the door. She paused five seconds, then started banging again. A moment later, looking through the door’s security window, she saw Harp drop down the stairs from the second floor to the living room, and then walk to the door. She reversed her grip on the cane.
Harp turned on the porch light, looked at her through the security window, then opened the door and asked, “What...?”
Windmilling the cane, she whacked him hard on the face—not too hard, she didn’t want to crack his skull—and he collapsed backward, landing on his butt, looking up at her, one hand covering his face.
Letty stood over him, pointing the cane at the bridge of his nose. “Tell me why I shouldn’t beat you to death.”
“What, what...” Blood was pouring from his nose, and his eyes were unfocused.
Baxter stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind him. Letty said to Harp, “You put the FBI on us, you twat.”
“No, no...”
“Yes, you did, and you know it.” Letty turned to Baxter. “Give me the hotline number. I want him to hear us make the call.”
A woman called, from up the stairs, “Gene? What’s going on?”
“Stay up there,” Harp shouted. “I’ve got a problem I’ve got to work out. Stay up there.”
The last command was met by silence, and Harp said, “I’m bleeding.”
“Tough shit,” Letty said.
Behind her, Baxter called out the ten-digit number that went to the Title IX hotline, and Letty began punching it into her phone. Holding his bleeding nose with one hand, Harp rolled over on his stomach and began to push up off the floor. Letty whacked him, again, hard, across the back, and Harp yelped and went flat and the woman upstairs shouted, “Gene! I’m calling 9-1-1.”
“No,” he shouted. “No, don’t do that.”
They heard her stepping down the stairs and then the young woman poked her head around the corner of the landing and she asked, “What’s going on?”
Letty: “That ain’t Hannah Baldwin, Paul, unless she dyed her hair last night.” The woman had dark brown hair, not blond.
The woman asked, “Hannah?”
Harp shouted, “Go back upstairs and stay there.” He added, “Please.”
The woman hesitated, then turned back up the staircase. Letty said to Baxter, “It’s not Hannah, but she left her purse the same place Hannah did. Get her wallet, shoot her driver’s license and student ID with your phone.”
Harp groaned and said, “Give me a chance.”
Letty hit his arm with the cane, not hard enough to break it,but hard enough to hurt. Harp yelped again and said, “Please stop, please stop.”
“Why? You tried to put us in prison for fifteen years,” Letty said. “To be absolutely honest, Paul talked me out of killing you, but he said I could break some bones. Which I plan to do after we call the hotline.”
“I got names. I got real names for you,” Harp said, his words shaky with pain.
From the dining room table, Baxter said, “Hey—she’s even younger than Hannah. Ashley Klein, twenty. Won’t be able to buy a beer until April.”
“This asshole’s creeping me out,” Letty said. “Get a photo. Prop the cards up in the kitchen and get some identifiable background.”
Baxter went to do that and Letty said to Harp, “Roll over on your back so we can talk. C’mon...”
