To Trust a Stranger

by Karen Robards

  He should have taken her and run while he had the chance. To hell with everything else: Julie was what mattered.

  God help him, what was he going to do?

  Her purse. Where was her purse? He looked around on the floor by the couch, where she had set it down. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere he could see.

  She’d been carrying it as she’d followed him down the hall. He remembered now. Please God she was still hanging on to it. Please, please God.

  He’d put a button-sized homing device in her purse that morning, just in case she got it into her head to try to elude him at some point during the day.

  In his experience, women rarely went anywhere without their purses. That quirk of female nature might very well save her life.

  He left his office, leaped down the stairs without sparing so much as a thought for the men he’d left in the elevator, and ran like a madman for the Blazer, cursing himself with each step for parking so far away. Finally reaching it, he jumped inside, and fished frantically around in the back for the global positioning unit the homing device worked with. Turning it on, he waited with bated breath for the screen to warm up.

  Then—there it was. Or rather, there she was: a tiny green dot moving at a fast pace through the maze of streets laid out like a map on the dark screen. If she and her purse were still keeping company, that is. He wasn’t ordinarily a religious man, but he was getting religion fast. He prayed that she was hanging on to that purse as he had never prayed for anything in his life.

  Starting the Blazer, he stepped on the gas, meaning to peel rubber out of the lot. A small white shape bounding toward him through the darkness caught his eye. He stared, frowned, and stood on the brake, then swung open his door.

  “Get in,” he yelled at Josephine.

  31

  “HOW DOES IT FEEL to know that you’re going to die tonight, Julie?” Sid’s voice was eerily conversational. Julie felt her stomach cramp. She was so frightened that her body seemed to be drawing in on itself, with all her organs squeezing painfully together. He had been waiting for her in a dark-colored car that she had never seen before when the man with the bitten nose—Sid called him Basta—had brought her out of the building. He was driving now, heading north on a narrow, dark country road, with her sitting beside him and Basta—terrifying Basta, who smiled at her with the coldest eyes she’d ever seen—silent in the backseat. Sid and his hit man: Mac had been right all along.

  “You don’t want to kill me, Sid. Remember how we loved each other? There’s still something left of that.”

  Not screaming and clawing at the door in a frantic attempt to escape required almost Herculean control on her part. Any minute now she expected to feel Basta’s hands slide around her neck, or his gun nudge the back of her head. Then he would squeeze, or pull the trigger—and she would be dead.

  Oh, God, would it hurt?

  Sid laughed. “I never loved you, you trashy little slut. I may have thought I did, once upon a time, but all I really wanted was to fuck you, and now I don’t even want to do that.”

  The words did not carry the sting he obviously intended them to have. The rose-colored lenses with which she had once regarded Sid had already been ripped from her eyes, and she was easily able to see him for the cruel, self-centered man he was. As much as she wanted to tell him so, though, now was definitely not the time. What she needed to do, what she had to do if she was to survive, was to reestablish their relationship, to somehow reconnect with him, at least in his mind.

  It would be easier without Sid’s hired killer watching her from the backseat like a vicious dog eyeing a rabbit. The knowledge that he was there made the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She did her best to block him out, but it was hard: she could see his massive shadow from the corner of her eye, and she could hear his raspy breathing.

  She could almost, even, smell onions. . . . But she wouldn’t think of that. She wouldn’t remember that night, not now. She would concentrate, focus, do what she had to do to save her own life.

  “Do you remember when we first met? It was at the governor’s reception just after I was crowned Miss South Carolina. Remember how much we talked that night? For hours. You wanted to know everything about me. I think I fell in love with you then.”

  Like Scheherazade, words were the only weapon she had. Julie folded a leg beneath her and turned sideways in the seat, doing her best to draw him into the memory. The darkness outside the windows seemed to close in on the car. Huge trees flashed past on either side of the road, illuminated only briefly by the slashing headlights. Sid was driving fast, much too fast for the twists and turns of the road. Wherever they were headed, it was somewhere far off the beaten path. The knowledge was like an icy finger running down her spine.

  Forcing back the fear that would turn her into a gibbering idiot if she let it, she smiled at Sid.

  “You still don’t have any idea, do you?” Sid’s laugh was contemptuous. “We didn’t just happen to meet that night. You think I usually went to receptions for beauty-contest winners? Get real. I was there that night specifically looking for you. You want to know why? Because your father, who worked for us once upon a time, stole something that belonged to my father and me, to our company, and I was trying to get it back. I had information that you knew where it was, and the reason I wanted to know all about you that night was because I thought you might slip and tell me. You didn’t, but I kept on seeing you, thinking you would tell me what you knew sooner or later.”

  “You dated me just to get back something my father stole?” Julie’s mind flashed back over her practically nonexistent relationship with her father. If he had stolen something, she wouldn’t have known anything about it. “What was it?”

  Basta made a protesting sound, and Sid glanced at him through the rearview mirror.

  “You don’t need to know that.” His voice was rough. “It was important enough for me to come sniffing after you to get it. You were a pretty thing then—that was about twenty pounds ago, wasn’t it?—and I wanted to sleep with you. But you wouldn’t sleep with me, remember? Not unless I married you. That was smart. I confused lust with love like many a man before me, and I married you. I hoped you would tell me what I wanted to know about the whereabouts of the company’s stolen property once you were feeling real secure in our relationship, but you didn’t, and I gradually figured out you weren’t telling me anything because you didn’t know anything. That’s the story of your life, isn’t it, Julie: You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything, and I don’t want to sleep with you anymore: that makes you disposable. Just like the trash you are.”

  The truth of it hit her like a slap in the face. As his words swirled around her, painting various incidents in their past in a hideous new light, Julie felt dizzy. She realized that what he was telling her explained so much: the way, at the beginning, he’d always insisted on talking about her and never himself. His inordinate interest in her father. His contemptuous attitude, which had been growing stronger over the years.

  She looked at him, realized with a terrible clarity that the whole last eight years of her life had been spent living with and loving a man who was capable of arranging to have her killed, and was finally, irrevocably, forever and ever, set free of any last vestigial ties of affection or loyalty that might have still existed somewhere deep inside her.

  There was a smirk to his mouth that told her he was aware of the effect his words were having on her and reveled in it. It roused her from the shock of his revelation like a bucket of cold water. Grimly she reminded herself that what was important here was her survival: any lingering psychic pain she could deal with later.

  “If you’re nice, though, maybe I’ll let you go down on your knees for me one last time before I turn you over to Basta.” His tone was malicious, taunting. Julie realized that she had been wasting her breath, trying to rekindle their connection. There never had been a connection to rekindle. Sid had never loved her.

  “Oh, do y
ou have your Viagra with you?” The words were out before she could stop them. Julie was appalled—so much for trying to sweet-talk her way out of this—but not really all that sorry. She knew, deep in her heart of hearts, that she could talk for the rest of her life, and it wasn’t going to change a thing: Sid meant to see her dead.

  Time to move to Plan B. She wet her lips, casting a surreptitious look around the interior of the car. Time to move to Plan B—just as soon as she could come up with it.

  Sid’s face flushed. Even in the dim light reflected by the headlights, she could see it change color, see the self-conscious glance he cast in the mirror at Basta.

  “You can just shut up about that. It was for recreational use only, to give me a buzz.”

  “Yeah, right. I know you used it on Amber. Did you use it on the girls at Sweetwater’s too?”

  “Listen, bitch, I didn’t go to Sweetwater’s for the girls. Ever since we acquired it, I’ve been going there several nights a week to pick up the cash they take in. Did you know that we own Sweetwater’s now, by the way? Of course you don’t: I keep forgetting you don’t know anything. The last couple of times I went there, though, it was basically for you: I was providing myself with an alibi so the big guy back there could break into our house and snuff you. Only he kept screwing it up, didn’t you, Basta? You must have felt pretty stupid when she got away from you because she bit your nose. Then you ran over the wrong girl.” He sent another of those quick glances into the backseat, shook his head, and laughed. “Well, never mind. You can pay her back tonight.”

  “Yeah, I felt pretty stupid.” It was almost the first thing Basta had said since he’d shoved her in the car. Hearing his voice made Julie want to cringe. Along with the smell of onions, and the sight of his masked face staring back at her through her bathroom mirror, the memory of it had haunted her nightmares. Now she was hearing it again in reality, and the reality was far more terrifying than any nightmare could ever be. “About as stupid as I imagine you felt when you figured out she’d been cheating on you with Daniel’s little brother.”

  Basta meant Mac, Julie realized. Frowning, she remembered Mac saying something about Daniel. It took a second, but she came up with the context. Daniel had disappeared at the same time as her father, and Sid’s first wife. . . .

  “Did you kill Kelly too?” she asked Sid fiercely.

  There was a laugh from the backseat.

  “No, I did,” Basta said. “Just like I killed Daniel. And your father. And now I’m getting ready to kill you. Sid, you want to slow down. The road’s up here on the left.”

  Julie felt her heart lurch. The journey was coming to an end, she knew. As Sid obediently slowed, then turned left onto a bumpy dirt road that was little more than a path, Julie suddenly had to work hard to breathe. It was difficult to draw air into her suddenly constricted lungs. Her hands automatically clenched into fists as her mind swooped around like a frightened bird, trying desperately to come up with anything that seemed remotely like a plan.

  “The police will be looking for me. They were there—with Mac—they’ll have missed me by now. They’ll know you did this.”

  “Ya think?” That was Basta, sounding amused.

  “You stupid little slut, I sent those cops to get your boyfriend out of the way. They don’t just work for the city; they’re on our payroll, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if McQuarry didn’t have an accident on the way downtown. Maybe shot while trying to escape, or something.”

  “There’s your car, right there,” Basta said. “Pull in behind it. Then you can leave.”

  As Sid pulled in beside what looked like the green Lexus he’d been driving the last time she’d seen him, terror rose like bile in Julie’s throat. This was it—and she had no plan. Nothing. As the car rocked to a stop, she released her seat belt. Her fingers scrabbled for the door handle, closed over it, pulled . . .

  “Childproof lock,” Sid said mockingly, shifting into park, as the door failed to open.

  Damn those things!

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Basta move. Panting with terror, heart pounding, stomach churning, she turned fully to face him. His eyes met hers, glinting like jet in the darkness. She could only watch in horror as he lifted his gun. He was going to shoot her now, she realized, and realized too, with a terrible sense of fatalism, that there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Closing her eyes, backpedaling against the locked, immovable door, she said every prayer she had ever heard in her life.

  She was still in the act of raising her hands to cover her face when the gun exploded like point-blank thunder.

  32

  THE MOON WAS RISING IN THE DISTANCE, yellow and round as a tennis ball. Mac got one look as the Blazer topped a rise, then lost all view of the sky—and all light—as the SUV dipped back beneath the overhanging canopy of trees. He was running without lights, following the green blip on the global positioning unit and the red glow of the taillights not too far ahead.

  Julie was in that car.

  Or at least, Julie’s purse with the homing device in it was in that car.

  Mac’s blood ran cold as, not for the first time, it occurred to him that maybe, somehow, she had become separated from her purse.

  At the thought that he might have gotten it wrong, icy terror ran through his veins. He knew as well as he knew anything that Julie had only this one chance.

  The idea that, at this very moment, someone might be hurting her made him homicidal. If she were killed . . . If she were killed . . .

  He couldn’t even finish the thought.

  Earlier, when she’d cried, he had gathered her up in his arms and faced the fact that he loved her. Now he was confronting the truth of how much.

  If anything happened to her, he would rip Sid and all his cohorts, past or present, real or suspected, from limb to limb. He would go insane. He would howl at the moon.

  For the rest of his life.

  Oh, God, he prayed. Let her be all right. Let me be right. Let me be in time.

  The forest was thick and dark. The road was curvy. Staying on it without any illumination beyond the occasional patch of moonlight required all his concentration. He dared not wreck. If he did, Julie was at far greater risk than he was himself.

  It occurred to him that he might have to leave the Blazer at some point, and when he did he might not wish to be observed. Driving one-handed, he hefted his Glock and used the butt to systematically smash all of the SUV’s interior bulbs.

  Up ahead, the taillights vanished. The green light on the screen made a right turn. The light didn’t seem to be following a road any longer, and Mac wondered if it had left the pavement. The occasional glimpses of it that he managed as it had streaked through sections of moonlight ahead of him had revealed a midsize passenger car, not an SUV.

  He needed backup, bad. Knowing that he was Julie’s sole hope terrified him. His cell phone had been in the Blazer, and he’d tried calling Hinkle: answering machine. Twice. Who else could he trust? The answer was stark: no one. The reach of the mob was long, and their twin weapons of money and fear were powerful: no one was immune.

  In the end, before the overhanging trees had taken the signal out, he’d done what he could: he’d called the cops. They would have found Dorsey and Nichols by now; the entire police force of the state of South Carolina was undoubtedly looking for him. He wasn’t their favorite person to begin with, and they sure weren’t going to be liking him any better now that he had pulverized two of their own. Cops were clannish that way, as he knew from experience. By now, if they spotted him, they were likely to shoot first and ask questions later.

  And a whole posse of them would be coming after him.

  Among their ranks were sure to be some who had been corrupted by the mob. But only some; not all. Not even the majority. If he got enough of them together at one time, the public good would win out.

  He hoped. No, he prayed.

  He’d called his old captain, Greg Rice, putting the facts o
n the line and telling him what road he was on and which way he was headed. Then the trees had cut him off.

  He trusted Greg more than most. If he was right, if Greg was solid, there were only two problems: Greg had made skeptical sounds as Mac had tersely laid the whole thing out. Mac wasn’t sure Greg had believed a word he’d said. And the road he’d been on when the signal had cut out had been many twists and turns ago. He wasn’t even headed in the same direction anymore.

  For Julie’s sake, he was willing to take his chances with his former comrades-in-arms. At this point, he didn’t even care if they shot him on sight, as long as they rescued her first.

  To his right, Mac caught just a glimpse of a pair of taillights disappearing through the trees. There was a dirt road cutting through the trees. He had almost passed it. Hanging a hard right, Mac turned off onto it. The Blazer hit the mother of all bumps, and Josephine, perched beside him, lost her balance, sliding off into the footwell.

  “Sorry, Josephine.”

  The poodle scrambled back onto the seat, unhurt. She’d been riding with her paws on the dashboard, seeming to peer at the road in front of them with a concentration almost equal to his own, and Mac wondered just how much she understood. The green dot slowed dramatically, then stopped. Mac glanced down at the screen, registered that, then looked up again and stood on the brake. The Blazer was at the edge of a clearing. Up ahead, in the full glare of the moonlight, a dark-colored Ford Taurus pulled to stop beside a foreign luxury car—a Lexus, he thought, although he couldn’t be positive because the Taurus was between him and it.

  This was it. Zero hour. If Julie was in there, this was his chance. Shoving the transmission into park, he stepped out of the car, closing the door as quietly as he could, leaving Josephine, who was watching anxiously through the windshield, behind.

  Crouched low, moving fast, gun drawn, he closed on the Taurus. There were three people inside. He could just barely make out the dark shapes of them. Julie was in the front passenger seat, pressed up tight against the window. He couldn’t mistake her: her black hair gleamed in the moonlight.