He aspires to be a serial killer. She’s known this from the moment she read his letters. But his behavior has always been more stalker than murderer. Can she appeal to the former side of him? Can she soothe and seduce him?
“You scared me, Jason. The things you did . . . they scared me.”
Feed his ego. Make him feel as if he’s the center of my world.
“Well, that’s ridiculous, Trina,” he says, with a great pained smile that almost looks like a grimace. “I’d never hurt you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To bring you back,” he says. “To bring you back to your life, your real life. Your destiny.”
“With you,” she says. She tries to keep her voice as neutral as she can, to not betray her disgust at these words, and apparently she’s successful because he nods fiercely as he takes another step toward her.
“You made the first step yourself, and that’s good. You cut yourself off from your birth father and got him out of your life. And that was the best thing you could have done. And then . . . well, the universe stepped in and handled the rest.”
“The rest?”
“Your grandmother.”
“What about my grandmother?” A mistake to ask this; there’s a tremor in her voice now.
“It was for the best. She was in your way, too. I know you were sad when she died, but it was the only way for you to be free.”
“Did you hurt my grandmother, Jason?”
“No!” he whines. He sounds like a child. And he’s so genuinely wounded she knows he’s telling the truth. “I can’t cause heart attacks. I’m not God. But if there is a God, he took her away when he did because she wasn’t your real family, Trina. Abigail is. I am.”
She runs for it.
There’s a few feet of space between the sink and the door to the living room. As soon as she bounds in that direction, she hears him erupt. “No, no, no, no, no,” he says like a man whose dog has just jumped from the back seat of his car.
He crashes into her from behind, arms around her waist suddenly. He still holds the gun in one hand, which is stupid. Stupid and untrained. The two of them careen into her desk, and at any moment he could fire wildly by accident.
Her head slams into one of the computer monitors, then the solid wall behind it. She feels no pain. None of the bone-rattling, stomach-churning agony that should follow such a double blow. It’s shock; it has to be. But even as she tumbles amid the wreckage of her desk, the tingling she felt earlier is all over her body, along with another sensation. It’s utterly foreign, utterly without precedent in her experience. The words that leap to her mind to describe it are just as strange: bone music. It feels like the bass line of some song is being played inside her very bones.
The desk gives way beneath them as they struggle. Her arms flail. She feels her fingers close around the stand of one of the wide-screen monitors as it falls along with her.
What happens next takes place with the very ease, grace, and speed with which she tried to shoot him moments ago.
She is standing now, facing the living room, and Jason is on his knees. Somehow she is holding one of the wide-screen monitors in one hand. The same monitor it took both hands to get out of the box when she first installed it. The same monitor that was so top heavy she was afraid of dropping the thing before she managed to lower it to her desk for the first time. Now she’s holding it one hand, her fingers gripping the open O in its A-shaped stand, as if the whole thing weighs no more than a flyswatter, and that’s exactly how she’s just used the thing on Jason’s head.
Jason sways back and forth, his eyes wide and unblinking. Blood spurts from his right temple. In another second he’ll be spitting it from his lips. Or drinking it, because his jaw is slack and the way he’s swaying looks like he can’t tell up from down, as if he might keel over at any moment.
“Don’t get up,” she says.
He doesn’t listen. He throws one leg out in front of him, knee bent, foot steady on the floor.
So she hits him again.
This time she’s fully present while she does it. The miracle of it leaves her in a daze. It truly feels as if the monitor weighs almost nothing. Its impact with his skull causes only the slightest recoil in her arm. To accomplish all of this, she needed only a few short breaths. And now that she’s done it, she needs only a few more, and then she feels fully recovered. And she’s still holding the thing in one hand like it’s a costume shield.
This is impossible, she thinks. But how else can she explain the fact that Jason Briffel is now sprawled on his back, looking as if he’s just been dropped from a great height? He doesn’t even stir as she picks up the gun he dropped, keeping it aimed at him as she grabs for the nearest phone, the one that wasn’t pulled to the floor by their collision with her desk.
Her landline is hooked to a satellite Internet connection, and he’s cut the line between the base and the wall. Cell phone service out here is passable, thanks to the three signal boosters she installed on the roof. But her phone’s probably back at Dylan’s office, if she didn’t leave it in the car.
And Jason might not be alone.
Gun raised, she cases each room, the way she taught herself to do after watching countless YouTube videos posted by retired cops. She’s never been so grateful to have such a small house with so few hiding places.
In her bedroom closet, she finds his backpack. But when she reaches for it with one hand, it seems to take flight into the air behind her.
Adrenaline, she tells herself. Just adrenaline. It won’t last.
But the tingling’s still there. The bone music is still there. And there’s no denying that by reaching for the bag with what she thought was a minimal amount of effort, she’d somehow ended up throwing it into the air behind her.
Breathe, she tells herself. Shrink!
She almost laughs at this second command. But that’s exactly what she has to do. Whatever crazy hormonal event is taking place inside her system, the only way she can think to counteract it so she can function normally is to shrink every action, her every move.
She bends down. Gently gripping the zipper’s pull between a thumb and forefinger, she slowly and carefully opens the bag. And even with all that deliberate restraint, the bag ends up opening like some horny dude’s jeans.
When she sees the rope and the rolls of duct tape and the Ziploc bags full of her bullets, all thoughts of shrinking are forgotten.
Jason’s still dead to the world when she returns to the living room.
He might actually be dead, but she doesn’t give a shit. The only thing that matters to her is that he stays exactly where he is so she can bring the cops back here and show them how he broke in. How he violated her space.
She’ll tell them everything. She’s got nothing to hide. By then this crazy adrenaline rush will have subsided, she’s sure. He can’t get away. That’s all that matters to her now. No way will she let him slip away into the shadows so he can lie in wait for the right moment to shatter her sanity and sense of safety again.
First she wraps his head in tape, making a muzzle across his mouth; then she binds his wrists, his ankles. When she starts binding his ankles to his wrists, she realizes she’s hog-tying him just like Daniel and Abigail used to bind their victims, but she banishes the thought before it can take hold. She’s trying not to beat him up, but she still can’t control her own strength entirely. Her tugs and pulls knock his head against the floor with sickening whacks.
Gun drawn, she backs out of the living room.
“I’ll be right back, fucker.”
Amazing, the confidence with which she’s issued this proclamation, the steadiness. Like her voice has recognized the magnitude of her newfound strength even as her mind refuses.
With the lightest touch she can manage, she hits a button on her key fob and opens the trunk of her Escape. With just as much care and restraint, she roots through the plastic bags from the office supply store. No sign of her phone.
Carefully, so as not to pull it off its hinges, she opens the door to the back seat, scans the floor. No sign there, either.
She slides behind the wheel like someone easing into frigid water.
She places the gun in the cup holder, barrel down, within easy reach, positioned to aim right through the windshield if she needs to. Ever so slowly, she reaches for the glove compartment, pops it open with three times less effort than she might ordinarily use. The phone’s not there, either, which means it has to be in Dylan’s office. Which means she’s got to drive to the nearest police station herself.
Just then she realizes there’s one place she hasn’t checked for accomplices.
Outside.
She hits the key fob. The garage door starts to open. Gun raised, she approaches the growing square of dark. It takes a few minutes for her eyes to adjust. By then she’s swept the opening. By then she can see there are no lurking shadows of cars hiding with their headlights turned off. The ground is flat. The nearest hiding place is an arroyo a good fifteen-minute walk away, the same place she does target practice with the Berettas. Besides, Jason has always worked alone.
Jason has always wanted her all to himself.
But how did he get my code?
She’s got no time to speculate. She’s confirmed that there are no vehicles waiting to ram her as soon as she leaves the garage. And that means she’s free to go.
As she slides behind the wheel of her Escape and places her Beretta back in the cup holder, she sees that her fingers have left indentations in the metal handle of her gun.
Not just adrenaline, she thinks. This can’t be just adrenaline.
8
The bikers roar out of the darkness, headlights winking on the minute their tires hit the road.
When Charlotte first met up with the highway, she went to give the pedal the usual amount of pressure and ended up marrying it to the floor, which sent the Escape rocketing through the night at more than a hundred miles an hour.
She’s been soft pedaling it since then. It’s kept the Escape close to eighty. That’s what she’s doing now as they cage her in.
They’ve been waiting for her, she realizes, maybe since they heard her approach. No doubt her third trip past their hideout in one day has them convinced she’s casing the place.
Thor’s next to her again, gesturing for her to pull over.
Her refusal to comply causes his mouth to contort into a snarl. The sight of his anger awakens something in her, a recognition that she’s been impossibly changed. And not changed like that guy, possibly an urban legend, who was able to lift a car in one hand to free an accident victim pinned beneath it. This is ongoing, whatever this is. It’s sustained. My body knows it. My mind’s starting to accept it. And that’s why Thor’s pissed—he doesn’t see any fear in my eyes.
He hollers something unintelligible over the wind, raises a fist in the direction of his buddies.
Watching Thor has distracted her. Her foot drifts down on the accelerator, defaulting to habit.
The Escape rockets up to ninety right as one of Thor’s buddies swerves to cut her off.
Almost gracefully, the man’s body flies upward onto the hood, then crashes into her windshield, leaving a mosaic of cracks. When he flips up and away, going over the roof with a sound like tumbling boulders, she sees the blacktop has been replaced by open desert. She tries to regain control, but the steering wheel’s been pulled almost entirely apart, the ring cracked on top and bottom. A bulge of wires protrudes from a mouthlike fold where the horn should be.
No way could the biker’s impact have done this.
She did it while holding on to the thing for dear life during the collision.
The Escape slams into a saguaro cactus with such force, the hood flips up and turns into something that looks like a wadded-up napkin. Only then does she realize she never put her seat belt on. But it doesn’t matter. She experiences the impact like a kid being jostled by her friends in a bouncy house. She can see everything with the slow-motion clarity of shock—the shattering windshield, the Beretta going airborne and disappearing out the passenger-side window—and then it all comes to an end.
Even though she should be either unconscious or dead, she’s sitting upright behind the wheel, her breathing rapid but barely strained.
There’s a loud thud. The Escape’s roof gives her scalp a sudden kiss. The top half of the giant cactus has fallen onto her hissing SUV.
She feels as if she’s belly flopped into a swimming pool. The car crash has left her with a rash of tingles across her flesh and dull aches here and there. But it should be worse. Much worse given the state of the car and the fact she was bounced around like a rag doll. The music in her bones has grown more intense, as if the trauma of the accident kicked up the tempo. Whatever this thing is that’s happening to her, it’s hooked to adrenaline. But that can’t be the only explanation.
She gives the door a push, and the entire thing comes free of its hinges and falls to the sand.
As they roar toward her through the darkness, the two remaining bikers make hairpin turns around rocks, bushes, and other knee-high obstructions. They’re coming with predatory fury.
Thor pulls around to her right; his friend dismounts at her left and draws a sawed-off shotgun from his back.
Her ears still ring from the crash. But she can hear some of their shouts. They’re gesturing to their feet, gesturing for her to get down, either to her knees or her stomach—they don’t seem to care which. The words bitch and cunt jump out at her from their threats like hot pebbles glancing across her cheeks.
She feels as though she’s observing herself from a distance, and she’s astonished to watch herself sink to her knees. Just as her foot defaulted back to its normal pressure on the gas pedal moments before, she now defaults to fear and submission.
But it’s a big shotgun, and she doesn’t know if this altered state renders her impervious to buckshot.
Then she sees the flex-cuffs in Thor’s left hand.
In his right, he’s got a gun, boxy enough to be a Canik TP9, but she’s not sure. She is sure that he’s aiming at her, lowering it only slightly as he approaches. He’s going to cuff her out here in the middle of nowhere. She thinks she can break the cuffs. Still, the ease and confidence with which he approaches her ignites a fire deep in her belly.
“. . . fucking gave you an order, bitch,” Thor’s saying. “Clear as fucking day, I gave you an order to pull over, and what did you fucking do? What did you fucking do, huh, bitch?”
The Daniel and Abigail Bannings of the world are few and far between, thank God. But men like this one, men who will run you off the road because they have cast you in their paranoid fantasies, are far more common. And the tyranny of their appetites is so woven through every woman’s world that imagining life without it is the same as imagining life without ground underfoot.
“Don’t you fucking move—got it, bitch?” Thor snarls. There’s about a foot of space between them now. He’s going to step behind her to cuff her wrists. His friend raises his shotgun. “We can either have a nice long conversation about what the hell you’re doing all the way out here, or Axel can put a load of buckshot in you and save us all the trouble.”
Axel is a silhouette backlit by the headlight from his bike. But his aim looks steady. Thor is behind her now.
“I live out here.” Her voice sounds vacant, numb.
“Oh yeah? Are you a snake?” He grabs the back of her hair and pulls it like a leash. It should hurt. He wants it to hurt. But it doesn’t. “I said, are you a fucking snake, bitch?”
“Get off me,” she says.
“What?”
“I said get off me.”
“You don’t give me orders, you stupid fucking cu—”
A few seconds later, he’s careening toward his friend like a drunken idiot trying to dance at a wedding reception. It wasn’t the most complex of moves on her part. Just a pull of his arm and a thrust really. But the s
trength she put behind it is otherworldly; it’s like a blast of air has sent him hurtling through the dark toward Axel’s shotgun. There was no preparing for it.
Axel, it turns out, is too prepared.
There’s an explosion of light and a deafening boom. Drifts of torn denim snowflake through the air in front of her. Over the ringing in her ears, she hears Axel bellowing as he realizes he’s just blown a hole in his friend.
Thor’s drop is decisive and sudden.
Before Axel can raise the shotgun again, she runs for him, hands out, gives him what would have been a light shove just hours before. He hurtles backward into the bars of his Harley-Davidson. The impact of his spine cracks the headlight. The shotgun hits the dirt. He and the bike fall over to one side together, their dark silhouette like a time-lapse of melting snow.
The ringing in her ears drowns out the sounds he’s making now, but if his spread arms, trembling hands, and shaking head are any indication, they’re probably stomach churning, and she’s willing to bet he’ll never walk again.
There’s a cold caress around her ankles. Her stopping power punched shallow holes in the ground. When she steps out of them, the holes widen, chunks of caked desert earth tumbling off her sneakers.
There should be regret, she knows. Somewhere within her there should be some primal remorse.
But the music in her bones is at a fever pitch now, and so vivid are the nightmare images of what these two men might have done to her out here, they white out all her other thoughts. And there was a glimpse of something, just a glimpse in Axel’s eyes before he cracked the bike’s headlight with his spine, a glimpse of something that satisfied a thirst in her she didn’t know she possessed—fear.
There’s no sign of the biker she hit with her car. Did they leave him for dead, or is he crawling back to their hideout to get help? How many of them are there?
The darkness seems to close in around her now.
The thought of digging in their pockets for their phones sends a rush of revulsion through her that makes her feel suddenly ordinary again. Do they have satellite phones? They’re well outside the boosters at her house that could provide decent service.
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