“Down you go, monkey,” the mother whispered, her voice trembling with sheer physical collapse. “Land on the mattresses. Nice and soft.”
Arthur heard the faint, muffled crinkle of plastic and the dull thud of small boots landing on foam.
The mother pulled herself up, her boots scrambling for purchase against the slick, rusted iron exterior, her breath catching in an agonizing, strangled grunt as her ribs hit the sharp metal rim. She tumbled inside, and the blue tarp dropped shut, cutting off the view of the interior.
Advertisement
Arthur Vance stood in the freezing mud of the drainage ditch.
His hands were shaking so hard the plastic bags rattled against his knees.
A dumpster.
An eight-year-old child was spending Christmas Eve inside a rusted steel garbage bin behind an abandoned storage yard in the richest agricultural county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, twenty miles from where his own five-million-dollar company was currently framing a thirty-million-dollar administrative complex for the state university.
