by Martha James
She knew he was probably right, about all of it, but she nevertheless gave him a stubborn look, rolling her eyes.
“Yes, dear,” she said sarcastically.
He sighed. “I know we only just... Officially became an item, Desiree, and maybe I seem like I'm being presumptuous telling you what to do.”
“As a matter of fact...” she began wryly, trailing off.
“But I didn't just start caring about you, or worrying about you. It's been my job for the past two months, and you better believe that now I'm taking it more seriously than ever. Not every threat a person has to worry about comes from the outside, you know...”
He'd put this just sweetly enough to get through to her, and in spite of her annoyance, and her desperate wish not to get out of this bed with Julian by her side, she had to admit he was right.
She sighed.
“You're perfect,” she said, summing up her feelings on the matter, then she leaned in and kissed him on the nose. “Alright, I'll go. But you have to promise me one thing if I do...”
“What's that?” he asked, and she gave him a devious smile.
“You have to meet me right back here again, the same time tonight...”
He grinned devilishly back at her, and capitulated only too gladly to her terms.
After that they'd stumbled out and slipped into the shower together. They didn't have sex, but he cleaned her up by rubbing a soaped up sponge all over her naked body, and letting the frothy white suds flow in glorious cascades along the curvature of her form (he also did quite a bit of sliding his slippery erection up and down between her soaped up buttocks while he washed her, and she made a mental note to pick up from this very interesting point later on that evening.)
He'd driven her to her manager's office then, but told her he wouldn't be able to pick her back up again as he had another small job to do before his shift at her place that evening. That was fine, she said, she would call one of her own drivers from home to come and pick her up once the meeting had concluded.
He'd given her a last peck on the lips and driven off, and Desiree had practically floated up the elevator shaft to Geri's floor of the towering office building, ecstatic as she felt about the developments of the previous evening.
The meeting in question went by breezily enough, with the newly pliable Desiree agreeing to almost everything Geri proposed to her.
Yes, she thought she would be back on her feet and ready to tour in the next two weeks.
Yes, she would gladly come in and help pick out a replacement drummer to fill in for at least the remainder of the world tour.
Yes, yes, and yes, she kept saying, actually unnerving Geri a bit, considering how understandably sullen and disagreeable Desiree had been in the weeks since Shade's murder.
Given the amount of money that was at stake here, however, she wasn't about to comment on the change in Desiree's mood, or question her cash cow's decision to let her milk it dry.
They agreed that there would be tightened security for all upcoming shows, but said that hopefully, given that the killer hadn't once raised his head since that first attack, and that the next several dates would be played across Asia and Europe, the potential risks would be relatively low as they proceeded.
Again, Desiree agreed, and by the time she left the meeting, she felt as giddy and as spirited as she had upon her arrival.
She decided that it was far too nice a day out to immediately return home as she'd told Julian she would do once the meeting was over, and reasoned that, since the tabloids were all still reporting that she was holed up inside her father's mansion, there would be no real harm in going out for the afternoon, perhaps to grab a bite of something to eat. She was dressed in a trench coat, wearing dark sunglasses and no makeup, and she thought that was probably enough not to alert any potential fans of her presence among they, the commoners (she thought this jokingly, but then pondered how weird it was that she would never get to be a normal civilian again for the rest of her life thanks to her status as a superstar.)
She shrugged this thought off, however, and made her way down the street- completely disregarding the key observation she'd made at the time of Shade's tragic death.
Things always plummet south at the moment when you're feeling the highest, and you have the least real reason to anticipate the danger...
_____
He couldn't believe it.
There she was, leaving her manager's office on foot, traipsing down the street like she wasn't the biggest effing deal in the entire western hemisphere right now, and as though her drummer hadn't just been brutally murdered at one of her shows less than a month ago.
Jesus Christ, he couldn't believe it...
Was this really the same girl who'd spent weeks on end locked up inside her father's gated mansion out of fear, and who'd had to hire a personal bodyguard just to look after her at night she was so afraid of being his next victim?
He thought about it for a moment, and then pieced the puzzle together in his mind.
“They probably started fucking,” he surmised accurately, aware as he was that love (and sex) could really screw up a person's mind if they weren't careful, as he knew well from experience.
In any case, the why didn't really matter, so much as the fact that her carelessness had just opened up a serious window of opportunity for him to enact his plan. He'd been waiting for weeks at this point for her to come out of hiding. There was no way in hell he was going to try and infiltrate that gated, well secured mansion after he'd nearly been caught by Julian fleeing the concert. He didn't think law enforcement had any especially clear photos of him to go by- just the blurry snapshots from street cameras as he'd fled the scene, and the sort of but not really accurate police sketch that had been distributed based on Julian's description of him wearing sunglasses. But if he'd gotten caught breaking into a place like that, which seemed highly likely, and the material they did have was linked back to him, well- that was pretty much lights out for him, now wasn't it?
This whole thing was about revenge, and going down like that would be an even greater humiliation for him than the already numerous legion of them that he'd already been forced to suffer through.
No, he'd had to wait it out, to bide his time until the ideal moment struck, before he made another go at his plan.
And, lo and behold, now that ideal moment had just presented itself to him, traipsing down the street in broad daylight, in a trench coat and sunglasses.
It was almost too perfect, he thought, and this time he was not going to screw it all up...
He waited until Desiree had made it several blocks down before he started his engine, so that she would remain oblivious to the fact that she was being followed. Then he cruised slowly on behind her, thinking of a specific block up ahead that was scarcely populated, and that would be the perfect place to leap out of his car and grab her.
He stopped suddenly, as Desiree had done the same a few blocks ahead. He pulled quickly into a spot to avoid detection, and looked through his window to see that two eagle-eyed fan girls had spotted the international pop star in spite of her impeccable disguise (sarcasm implied.) They were begging her for her autograph, and Desiree agreed, on the condition that they didn't tell a soul about it and they be on their way the moment she'd given it to them.
He waited, and waited, for what felt like a much longer period of time than it actually was. Then, at last the kids ran off giddily, and Desiree smiled after them, the naive fool that she was.
She turned, and continued on her way.
There were no more interruptions from that point onward, and he drove up behind her as stealthily as he could, certain that at any moment she would turn back to look at him and break out in a run- she never did.
Only at the very last second did she have any indication that anything at all was amiss.
She heard the click of the car door opening, and turned dreamily to see what was intruding upon the euphoria of her afternoon. Then she saw the man
leap out at her, his eyes concealed by dark glasses and a damp rag clutched in his hand.
It took her mind too long to make the connection between what she saw and what she knew must be happening, and by the time the appropriate neurons in her brain fired to allow her to run away from it, the man's hand was around her wrist, gripping her fiercely, disallowing any possibility of escape.
She screamed, but the rag was up against her nose and mouth before she'd completed a single note, and her eyes immediately began to water.
Ether...
She kicked and flailed in his arms, struggling to free herself, but she knew it was no use.
He was far too strong, and the ether far too potent, for her to have even the remotest hope in hell of breaking herself free of his grip.
The last thought that flitted through her head as it fell to one side, and faded toward unconsciousness, was that she'd seen that man before.
Somewhere- though she didn't know where. But it had been a long time ago, so long ago that his memory was now little more than a single, glowing light in her brain.
That light was extinguished, along with all others, as she faded into unconsciousness.
6
Julian had managed, somehow, to remain oblivious up until the point when he arrived at Desiree's place that evening. He'd worked his other job, taken a quick nap, and made his way straight here, all without any kind of interaction with the entertainment world beyond his constant thoughts of Desiree herself.
It was upon pulling up to the entrance of her father's gated community that he immediately knew something was wrong...
Red and blue lights could be seen flashing from the road- a plethora of them- and his heart sank, his thoughts immediately turning to the worst.
“Oh my God... Desiree!” he shouted running out of his car and through the front gate, straight up to the house where the officers were standing around, interviewing neighbors as well as the house cleaning staff, who would have just gotten off of their shifts.
He noticed, with the mildest relief, that there was no police tape on the doors and windows of the house. He supposed this meant, at the very least, that Desiree hadn't been murdered in her home- though that didn't discount the very real possibility that she'd been killed elsewhere.
“What the hell is going on?” Julian demanded, as though the ones investigating the matter were the real villains in all of this.
“And just who do you think you are?” said a female cop, giving him the stink eye, clearly not pleased at his intrusion.
“I'm- I'm uh-” he hesitated for a moment. He nearly said that he was her boyfriend, but something stopped him from doing so. Their relationship was such a recent development, he found himself afraid of the accusations they might immediately make against him if he told them the truth. It was stupid, he knew, and he would probably regret it, but he decided to go with what was the generally established truth for now. “I'm her bodyguard,” he said, hoping that he sounded casual enough not to arouse suspicion.
At this, the cop's eyes swiveled toward him, a look of biting sarcasm glowing in her pupils.
“You must not be very good at your job then, are you?”
_____
The blackness slowly dissolved, but didn't immediately give way to anything remotely tangible. At first, everything was all a haze of color, nothing solid or concrete, and Desiree's head felt as though it was on the verge of splitting open whenever she tried to see things more clearly.
At last, though, after several attempts, she managed to piece together the semblance of a picture. She saw, to her reasonable surprise, that she was fully clothed. Her trench coat had been removed, but she was still wearing her blouse and jeans. It might have been a promising sign, except that she then observed that the arm extending from said blouse was hooked via handcuffs to a radiator, and on either side of her sat a jug of water and an empty metal bucket- her toilet facilities, she assumed, for however long she would be remaining in this dinghy, dimly lit room.
Fully awake now, she felt herself gripped by panic. Knowing that it would do her no good whatsoever, she nevertheless began pulling her arm back, trying to free herself from the handcuffs and from the radiator to which she was attached.
“Come on... Come on!” she implored, refusing to give up to the point that the cuffs dug into her wrist and began to draw blood.
“Well, good morning beautiful,” came a voice suddenly, and she jumped with fear, the pain shooting through her shackled arm as she turned to quickly in the direction of the voice.
He'd been sitting there all along, she realized, feeling like a complete idiot. He'd been watching her, waiting for her to wake up, and she'd been too dazed to even realize it.
Her breathing became heavier than it already was, her nostrils flaring wildly. Tears streamed down the sides of her face, and her jaw quivered. She wanted to look tough, unflappable in his presence, but any time she tried to straighten out her expression it only cracked like an egg once again, paralyzed as she was by fear, and by the certainty that her life as she knew it was now over, or at the very least as good as such.
“You slept a lot longer than I'd anticipated,” he said through his ski mask, evidently unwilling to reveal himself to her even in her captivity.
This could be a good thing, she thought- if he didn't want her to see him, then there was a good chance he intended to release her at some point.
A brief spark of hope, followed quickly enough by another plunge into darkness, as she remembered Shade's cut throat, and the gaping void in the center of his chest.
“I suppose I overestimated the amount of ether it would take to get you under, but... Well, no harm no foul, I suppose, eh?”
Desiree found herself slowly shaking her head from side to side, soundlessly mouthing words. Even she didn't know what they were until finally they materialized, the amount of breath they'd needed to complete themselves finally passing from between her lips.
“Please... Please, please don't hurt me...”
“I wouldn't recommend you pulling on that,” he said, ignoring her, and pointing to the handcuffs. “You'll end up doing a whole lot more harm to yourself than any kind of good.”
She wasn't listening to him, but continued to beg.
“Please... Please... Please...”
He let out an exasperated sigh, as though she was majorly inconveniencing and irritating him.
“You know, when all this started, I really had no intention of hurting anyone. It was all so simple, you see? The plan was to kidnap you, exploit you for whatever ransom money I could get out of you, and then throw you back out again, like a goddamn fish. You know, catch and release...”
She perked up at this, again feeling hopeful (though that still didn't keep the tears from welling up in her eyes as he spoke.)
“The only problem was,” he continued, “that you, little missy, weren't where you were supposed to be when I came to get you! Your friend's death, the dope-head I killed out of necessity? That was entirely on you, as far as I'm concerned... If you'd been in your dressing room like you were supposed to be, that wouldn't have had to happen. But nooooo, little miss big shot had to be down the hall at her V.I.P. reception, letting her putrid little fans stroke her ego while her head just kept getting bigger and bigger. Stuck up little bitch... You're just like-” he stopped suddenly in mid-sentence, and this caught Desiree's attention.
Their eyes met, and he shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said, then picked back up, “But that asshole Shade, he was just as responsible for what happened to him as I was. If he hadn't freaked out- hell, if he hadn't been fucked out of his mind on that cocktail of shit in his veins, I wouldn't have had to do what I did to him. God knows I didn't want to kill the little bastard! You think I wanted a murder charge hanging around my neck like an anchor, screwing up my actual plans?”
Hot liquid poured down her face, and she shook her head. She muttered something under her breath, but it was too low for him to hear.
“What's that?” he said, cupping an exaggerated hand to his ear. “You'll have to speak up now... I've gone a bit deaf from listening to so much of your awful music...”
She had to choke down the bile in her throat before she was capable of speaking again.
“You didn't have to kill him...” she managed to get out, loud enough this time for him to be able to hear it.
He threw back his head and laughed.