In her bedroom she laid it carefully on the bed, throwing a sweatshirt over her slacks, pulling on heavy socks and her hiking boots. In the kitchen she found a paring knife, which she wrapped and inserted into her boot. Her flashlight was in the Bronco. She had to hurry. Ralph might not wait, and she had to get out before anyone came back. She picked up the loaded Colt and checked the safety, then stuck it in her big pants pocket. The heavy sweatshirt covered the bulge.
She passed Matt on the corner, talking to a neighbor. He tried to flag her but she pretended not to see.
Pioneer Trail to Upper Truckee Road. Moonlight sifted into the black forest. She passed the last house and the Bronco labored up the steep road to the turnoff, which wasn’t marked. The road became washboard gravel and asphalt, and she passed a meadow, the tall grass and trees rejoicing under the moon.
Such a beautiful night. She drank it in, the perfection and harmony of it, as if it were some treasure she was throwing away. Really, it was simple. She didn’t care if she lived, if Bob died.
She stopped a half-mile away from the lookout, hoping Ralph wouldn’t hear the Bronco. She was high on the ridge, and there was nowhere to hide, only barely room for the road. The heights of the mountains shone whitely down their thousands of feet. On her right, illuminated into stark black and white, the U-shaped glaciated valley of Desolation Wilderness fell to Fallen Leaf Lake. Behind, to the right, Lake Tahoe stretched away endlessly. To her left, thick forest obscured the houses where vacationers and locals watched their TVs and slid under the covers, safe in a life she seemed to be climbing away from forever. Quietly, very quietly, she crept forward, along the spruces and pines that shadowed the sides of the road from the treacherous moon.
Paul called Andrea once more from a gas station on Interstate 5 somewhere north of Stockton, knowing he shouldn’t call the house, but unable to help himself "Nina hasn’t come back," she reported. "Two officers came and I told them everything I knew. They’re patrolling town and have alerted all the other police on patrol in El Dorado County and Douglas County on the Nevada side."
Paul said, "How long has she been gone?"
"That’s just it, we’re not sure. We were both out looking and she was getting ready to go out in the Bronco—Matt saw her go by in the car, alone, some time ago."
"She stayed home, while you went out?"
"I suppose, for a short time. Then I came back to watch the phone while she went out, and she was gone."
Nina would have left the phone for only two reasons. First, and more likely, she got a call. Second, she had been kidnapped. If she was alone in the car, theory number one looked most probable.
"Any sign of a break-in?"
"Oh, no. She locked the front door. It’s been an hour and twenty minutes. We called the South Lake Tahoe police and told them. Paul, what else can we do?"
"Stay by the phone. Stay there with Matt and keep the doors locked, just in case. Be careful. Do you have a weapon at the house?"
"Matt has a gun."
"Go get it."
A few seconds later, Matt got on the line. "It’s gone!" he said in a high voice. "What’s going on? My wife and kids are here! Are they in some danger?"
"I don’t think there’s any danger at your house," Paul said. Eighteen-wheelers roaring by the station at eighty miles an hour made it tough to hear. "My guess is Nina’s got the gun. She got a call, and she’s gone to try to take care of it herself."
"If she took my gun, it wasn’t Bob on the phone," Matt said. He sounded far away, on another planet. "Jesus," he said. "Why didn’t she tell us, call the cops?"
"She was told to come alone, I’m sure. Who’s been sitting in at the trial with her?"
"Sandy’s been sitting in. Since you ... weren’t around."
"Believe me, I wish I hadn’t left," Paul said. "I’m kicking myself all over this highway."
"You’re not the only one," Matt said.
"Anyway. Call Sandy and get a list of all the nonpolice witnesses she’s cross-examined. Ask her how far Nina’s been getting, if there’s something new coming out regarding the killer. Have her stay at the office."
"Okay."
Paul replaced the phone in its holder, jumped into his van, and rocketed out of there. Outside, he was passing through farm country, a sea of darkness to bypass as quickly as possible. Far off to the right the town of Lodi twinkled under the moon. He banged the flat of his hand against the steering wheel. Damn the woman!
In the empty darkness of the shack, Bob needed to pee. He had heard nothing for some time from the outside, not even a bird. Ralph was out there somewhere, looking for his mom. He yawned, amazed that he could feel so tired, but it was late. Way past his bedtime.
He worked his hands harder. Ralph had twisted the leather thong around his hands several times, but leather stretched. Stupid guy! Little by little he inched it over the big part of his right hand. Squirming there on the floor, he worked it harder and harder, tears starting out of his eyes at the pain.
It snapped off. For a second he just lay there, getting his breath back, not believing it. Then he ripped it off his other hand. Bound much more tightly at the feet, he couldn’t get the knots undone even with his hands free. He worked the gag in his mouth, pushing the kerchief that held it in place over his head.
The table in the corner might have something he could cut with. Don’t make a sound.... He wriggled through the awful muck on the floor until he bumped up against the leg, and tried for long minutes to pull himself up. At last he was standing, his hands groping. He touched something long and metallic. A big, sharp knife.
For the first time since that freak had hit him and knocked him off his bike, he felt a twinge of hope. Hurry, hurry! He fell to the floor as quietly as he could and began cutting the leather. In no time he was free, standing there holding the knife up. He wanted to scream and dance up and down. He would cut Ralph’s head off with it! He sneaked to the door.
It was padlocked from the outside. He could hear the chain when he pushed.
Around the shack he roamed, pushing at the boarded-up window, searching the walls with his fingers. Nothing. He couldn’t get out.
Then he remembered feeling a square where the floorboards didn’t come together while he was wiggling around on the floor. He scrambled to find it in the disgusting muck.
His hands found a ring, and he raised a trap door. Dank, cool air rushed up at him. He dropped three or four feet into a dirt-floored, polluted-smelling cellar in pitch blackness. He reached around him for the walls.
He was in a sticky, fur-lined nest full of smooth, hard, sticklike things, loosely connected to each other and covered with some substance that smelled like nothing he’d ever smelled. Oh, man! Bones!
He crawled jerkily as far away as he could, searching the walls for a way out. Concrete, a couple of steps— push, push hard, into the welcome creaking sound of a short cellar door opening.
He slipped into the night, knife clutched between tremulous fingers, running straight across the road and down the mountain, just far enough away to feel safe. He saw headlights in the far distance, but they went out before reaching the summit. Who?
41
NINA CROUCHED ON THE NARROW RIDGE ROAD FOR only a moment. The Bronco sat well back in the trees on the last turnout before the road became too narrow for turns. The only direction she could go was down.
About twenty feet below the road, she began scrambling sideways along the steep hill, belly close to the ground, slithering like a snake, aware of every leaf she crushed. She had left the road before she could see the lookout and before Ralph could spot her. Now closer, she saw no signs of human beings. Either Ralph and Bob weren’t there, or Ralph had parked farther up the road. Or he had lied.
It could have been a lie. Ralph could have summoned her to an intermediate place where he would meet her and take her to some other hidden place. That would be smart.
But Ralph wasn’t smart, or even cunning. He was unpredictable, though,
and he had Bob.
She moved along, almost flat on the steep ground, from bush to tree to bush. Occasionally she dislodged a rock, or lay on a crackling branch, sounds that discharged like firecrackers into the still night. The stars and moon lit the scene like a dreamscape.
She rested behind a boulder, panting as quietly as she could. Over the top she could just make out the green top of the station roof and the roof of the old storage shed beside it.
Raising herself on her hands, she lifted her head to see better.
And a hand grabbed her ankle, squeezing hard. She was being yanked down the hill too fast to wriggle around and get the gun trained that way.
A big body landed full on her, squeezing the breath out of her. Hands held her hands down. Her head was shoved into the dirt so that she breathed it in, coughing and choking, and the gun was roughly pulled from her pocket. Pinned, immobilized under the heavy weight, she thought she might suffocate. A hand pulled her head up by the hair and she gasped in some air. Matt’s Colt flew off to the side, scuttling into the brush.
"You ain’t following the rules," Ralph said very softly in her ear, his breath coming out in hot gusts, her body cringing at the feel of it. "But I got you now. Easy to do you now. But I got a plan for you and the l’il guy."
"Let ... go.
"You come alone?"
"Can’t ... talk."
He let go, and she tasted dirt again. His knee pressed into her back. He pulled her to her knees, so that her back remained to him. A hand moved down her back, to her rear, fondling her roughly. Wrenching one arm behind her, and keeping her head up, he pulled her sweatshirt off her, to her confusion, leaving her T-shirt intact, and maneuvered her left arm through the arm of a long jacket, then the right arm: silky, incredibly plush on the outside.
Fur. Terry’s lynx coat.
"Little different from court, hey? Now who’s on top? I get to be judge." He pushed her face down again, and spread himself over her, rubbing against her, working himself up, while she frantically tried to breathe, to kick....
A scream cut through the darkness, echoing on both sides of the drop-away ridge, all the way to Tallac, hovering over the Tahoe valley, long, wailing, endless. Ralph’s body jerked, then fell away from her, and she clawed upward, clutching at the hillside.
Bobby had appeared beside her out of nowhere. He half ran, half crawled to her. She took his arm and turned her back to the man writhing on the ground, his right arm reaching back to his left shoulder where Bob had sunk a knife in him....
And Ralph screamed, "Stay right there or I shoot you both, I shoot the kid, don’t move now, careful ..." Nina turned back, still holding Bobby, and saw Ralph holding another handgun in his left hand, pointing at them from six feet away.
"We won’t move," she said, her voice gentle, soothing. In the moonlight Ralph’s eyes seemed to be starting out of his head. His right hand pulled at the haft of the knife, and he screamed again as he slowly pulled the blade out of his left shoulder. You didn’t pull knives out of wounds, Nina knew. They kept the blood inside.... She prayed that he would pass out and give them one chance to make it to the road. His eyes rolled back into his head for an instant, but the gun only wavered for a second.
"Unh!" Ralph said. His face convulsed. The bloody knife in his right hand dripped onto the hillside. His gun steadied itself, aimed at them.
He wiped his hand, the bloody one, on his cheek. He looked like a statue she had seen of the Hindu goddess Kali, black and terrible, weapons in all her hands, blood dripping from her jaws.... She tried to think of something to say. She knew if she or Bobby moved they would be killed instantly.
They watched him, horror-struck, as he pulled himself up and leaned against the rock, breathing hard. He looked at the knife, at them, then flipped it down the hill toward the lake far, far below.
He shifted the gun into his right hand, said, "Naughty, naughty." Then he gestured up the hill with the gun. They climbed up slowly, Ralph grunting behind them.
At the road he staggered up behind them before they could make a break. "Get in the shed," he said. Still holding the gun on them, he painfully pulled the key chain on his pocket and opened the padlock, forcing them inside.
Bob clung to her, hanging back. "Get that boy inside or you’re both dead right now," Ralph managed, nudging her with the gun barrel. She wondered if she should shove him past Ralph to freedom, felt terrified by the risk, and finally couldn’t take it. She half dragged Bob inside, and Ralph followed. The door slammed shut behind the three of them, and Ralph turned on a light.
They were in what must have been the storage shed for the station, a single room cobwebbed and empty, abandoned of its original purpose for years. A filthy sleeping bag covered with an even filthier long piece of fur lay in a corner on a floor practically papered with torn and tattered magazines, empty bottles, and decaying rags of clothing.
The violent light from the swinging bulb exposed them to each other: the man, tearing a rag with his teeth while he stared fixedly at them, his bloodshot eyes and hideous face, the red smears all over his shirt; the frightened boy’s eyes that moved back and forth, captive, hunting for freedom, and Nina, vigilant, as potentially lethal, as amoral, mind casting about for weapons to kill the bloody oaf who wanted to hurt them. She still had the knife in her boot....
He stuffed the rag under the shirt against his back and slumped down onto the floor in a sitting position. "Stabbed me with my own knife," he said in wonder. "How the hell did you get out?" His eyes fell on the bare floor of the trapdoor, and he pointed to it with the gun, saying, "Oh. Went down through the toy bin. Saw my playthings. Well, you two done caused me a lot more trouble than you’re worth. Get over here, both of you. Don’t try anything."
He made them crawl over to him, lie down prone, and put their hands behind their backs. He removed the coat from Nina, gently laying it beside him, and he tied them both up, his hands twisting the leather so tightly, Nina’s feet and hands began to numb almost immediately.
"That’s more like it," Ralph said in a calmer tone, and, lurching to his feet, he padlocked the door from the inside this time, then turned off the light. Nina heard him slide down the wall again a few feet away.
Silence. No, not silence, three sets of breaths in the room, each with a distinct rhythm. Bobby lay beside her, not moving. Over the next long quiet moments his breaths became deep and regular. He had fallen asleep! Was it possible? Had he passed out? Had Ralph hurt him? She began moving slowly, cautiously, thinking maybe somehow she could get at the knife in her boot.
"Don’t do that," Ralph barked. "I’m thinking."
"We’ll never say a word," Nina said, her voice low and cajoling. "Let us go."
"Like hell. Shut up." They sat there in the dark. "Last warning."
She wanted to say, kill me, please, just let my boy live, but she was afraid if she spoke one more syllable he would shoot them both. They had sunk into the darkness where the horror lived.
"You smashed up my whole life," Ralph said out of the darkness. His breathing had slowed. His voice barely disturbed the air. "They fired me offa Satan’s Hoof yesterday ’cause of what you said in court. The mechanic was ridin’ me, and I got upset and decked him. The owner comes runnin’ up and says get off the track or he’d have me arrested. I ain’t never gonna be famous now. Ain’t never gonna get myself fixed up."
"I’ll help you find another job."
"Too late."
"Ralph, you’ve got problems. I can get you help."
"You tell anybody else to come?" Ralph said, his voice raspy and menacing. "You tryin’ to get me talkin’ so I can’t think?"
"I think you wanted to talk to me, Ralph. Things just got out of hand. I’m sorry if I upset you."
"That don’t do me no good now."
"I’m worried about my son," Nina said as ingratiatingly as she could. "He’s sick. Could you—"
"The li’l dude knifed me. He ain’t goin’ nowhere."
"I’m a l
awyer," Nina said. "Think of all the good I could do you—" She stopped. Ralph was laughing over there in the darkness.
"Yeah, a lawyer," Ralph said. "A lawyer doin’ something good. That’s rich. I ought to shoot you right now. But I’m thinkin’ up a better plan, so shut up." She heard a curious soft rubbing sound, and realized he was kneading Terry’s fur, lying on the sleeping bag, like a baby kneads his blanket.
"Tell me about the fur, Ralph," she said in a breathy little voice. "It seems so exciting."
"You like it?"
"I like fur," she said, hoping for the right words.
"I need it for my satisfaction," Ralph said, and Nina felt nausea coming up, she was going to throw up for sure, but even this she managed somehow to suppress.
A fur fetishist. Ralph was a fur fetishist. She had read about a case of fur fetishism years ago, in Krafft-Ebing.
"Girls wearing fur. All I need is to stroke my face on the fur and rub against it a little. That’s all she has to do, just wear the fur for me. It’s not much to ask," Ralph said in a voice heavy with self-pity. "Thick, smooth, long, stand-up hair. I heard once they’re called bearded furs. Not coarse and bushy. That turns me off."
"Like rabbit? Is that the kind you like?"
"Not the cheap hides," Ralph said. "Too thin. But the best ever is the lynx. I love my sweet lynx." He was rubbing it now, she could hear it. "She had the coat, and she would watch me touching it. When I was fifteen, Terry wore the coat for me," Ralph said. "She got me so excited, I thought I was gonna die. God, it was so good."
"The lynx coat," Nina said. "The one you’ve got there."
"Usually I keep it down the trapdoor in the toy bin. What do you care? Shut up." His voice had that odd, raspy, frightening tone to it again.
"It’s all right to talk about it, Ralph," Nina said very softly. "I enjoy listening."
"You could take another minute or two," Ralph mumbled to himself. "No, you stupid fool! She’s buttering you up. She doesn’t care. Do ’em like you planned." He was still muttering, but she couldn’t catch the words anymore.
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