Serena was flooded by memories. Images she had locked away long ago in a dark corner of her brain broke free like rats bolting from their cages. She was in Blue Dog’s apartment in Phoenix again. Fifteen years old. The summer heat was an inferno, her skin so chapped it bled when she scratched it. Cockroaches watched her from the walls. So did her mother, no better than a cockroach herself, her eyes hungry and wild from the coke. Blue Dog’s eyes were black and clear; he never used drugs, he just sold. He was grinning as he took her, splitting her open like a nail violating wood. The same grin he had now.
He saw her remember. “We had some good times, huh?”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s the plan. I’ve spent the last ten years thinking about you. The thought of paying you back was about the only thing that kept me alive inside.”
“I’ve paid the price my whole life for what you did to me,” Serena told him. “That should make us even.”
“Maybe, but you should have left it alone, and you didn’t,” Blue Dog said. “You came after me.”
That was true. Serena remembered that summer ten years ago. She had to go to Phoenix to get background on a case she was working in Vegas. While she was there, her teenage memories all came back, and she wound up drinking for three days in a dive south of the city and waking up in a motel near the airport with a man she didn’t know. Cockroaches were on the wall there, too. She went to a shrink who said she had unresolved issues about her mother and Blue Dog, which was like paying a hundred bucks to hear that you get wet when you walk out in the rain. That was the same therapist who asked if she ever had an orgasm with Blue Dog. The bastard.
So she did her own kind of therapy. She took a month’s leave and followed Blue Dog’s trail from Arizona to Texas and then to Alabama, where she found him up to his old tricks, running a crack and extortion empire in Birmingham and sleeping with a black girl who couldn’t be more than sixteen. She hooked up with the Alabama police, and they watched Blue Dog blow away a street pusher who was keeping some of the product for himself. He shot him in the head, right there on camera, before they could clamber out of the stakeout vehicles and arrest him.
Serena studied him. He was older; you could see it in his face and in the gray streaks in his long hair. He was the same, though. Tall, almost six feet six, and broad like a grizzly. The same ego, too. He still had the need to control the world, the need to make women get on their knees, the need to prove he was smarter and tougher than anyone else.
That was the only advantage she had. She knew him and how he thought. He wasn’t a stranger.
Her first job was to stall him. Keep him talking. Serena knew that half the city had to be on alert now, and Jonny would be looking for her everywhere. The more time she gave him to find her, the more her chances increased of escaping alive. She was a realist, though. She knew that she was probably about to die.
“Where are we?” she asked.
She could see that the small enclosure was some kind of shanty with one overhead bulb casting shadows. She saw cheap wood paneling, a sink, a minirefrigerator, and empty beer bottles littering the space. It was narrow, maybe seven feet wide and about twelve feet in length. She saw two windows on the far wall, taped over with gray duct tape. The door on her left had a diamond-shaped window, also taped over. When the wind gusted, the entire frame shuddered.
“Still hoping someone will find you? Don’t count on it.”
His eyes danced. He was becoming aroused by her naked body. He pulled a chair next to the bed and leaned over her and began playing with his knife on her skin again. Her flesh rippled, having him close to her. She was still freezing, and she hated that the cold kept her nipples hard, which made him leer and smile. He flicked at them with his blade and then leaned over and suckled her, licking off the blood.
Keep him talking, Serena thought.
“If this was between you and me, why did you put so many other people in the middle of it?”
Blue Dog shrugged. “Who, fuckers like Dan Erickson and Mitch Brandt? I told you before, these people are no different than me. They all have secrets.”
“How did you find out about them?”
She assessed how she was bound. She was on a low cot, no more than a foot off the ground. Her legs were spread, draped off the bed and tied with duct tape to the steel legs of the frame. Her body stretched two thirds of the way up the length of the cot. Her arms hung down on either side of the bed, and when she pulled on them, she realized that they were tied with cloth, not tape. A stretchy fabric, like a cotton T-shirt, was wrapped around her wrists and knotted tightly, and then pulled back to the other legs of the frame about a foot behind her and knotted again. She had some play in her arms. When she put her hand down, she could rest her palm on the floor. She felt ice-cold metal.
“There was this young computer hacker in Holman,” Blue Dog told her. “He was in for molesting boys, a real sick fuck.”
He said this without a trace of irony.
“A guy like that’s not going to last long without protection,” he continued. “I made sure nobody messed with him.”
“Yeah, you’re a saint,” Serena said.
Blue Dog laughed. “Fuck, he was going to wind up giving blow jobs anyway, so it might as well be my cock he sucked.”
“I didn’t realize you were queer.”
Blue Dog’s grin evaporated, and he turned his knife on its point and jabbed it an inch deep into the flesh of Serena’s right shoulder. She screamed and jerked back. The bed frame rocked. He yanked the knife out and wiped the blood on the mattress. Waves of pain washed over her.
“You better learn to be polite, or this is going to be a long night.”
“Like it’s not going to be anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But there’s long and then there’s long.”
Serena closed her eyes. She laid her left hand down on the floor again. The bed had moved. She explored the floor with her hand, looking for anything sharp that she could use to attack the strip of fabric that connected her wrist to the frame of the bed. She felt crumbs and puddles of frigid water that had dripped through the ceiling, but nothing that could cut.
“So what did this guy do?” she asked. Keep him talking.
“He taught me everything he knew about computers. I realized there was a lot more money to be made online than I ever did on the street. The real money is in everything people want to keep hidden.”
“Blackmail.”
“Sure. I got to town, and I started keeping an eye on you. But a guy’s got to make a living. I was in no hurry. I found other ways to let off steam.”
“So why come after me now?”
“It’s time to get out of the city,” Blue Dog said. “The cops are getting too close. But you and I have unfinished business.”
Out of sight, under the bed, Serena spread the fingers of her left hand and stretched them as far as she could. She brushed the very edge of a piece of metal, but it nudged out of her reach as she touched it.
Blue Dog reached around behind his back and pulled out a revolver. It was a small-frame, airweight Smith & Wesson that looked like a toy in his hands. Serena mentally took stock of the gun. Light and easy to conceal. Five rounds. She wondered if she would be alive to see the last four.
“I’ve thought a lot about how to do this,” he told her. He put the barrel of the gun to the cap of her right knee. “You know what it feels like to get a bullet right here? Makes you want to die. I thought about doing both your knees, and then poling you after that.”
Serena wriggled and tried to move the bed.
“Then I thought, you won’t feel me inside you if I do that. I don’t want you in so much agony that you can’t feel what it’s like.”
He put the gun to her forehead. The barrel was warm where it had been inside his pants. “I also thought about making you suck my dick.”
“You put anything in my mouth, you’re not getting it back,” Serena said.
Blue
Dog laughed. “Yeah, I’m a practical guy.”
“You’ll never get away with this.”
“We’ll see about that. You think we’re still on planet earth? Let me show you how wrong you are.”
He pulled the revolver away from her head and pointed it upward at the ceiling, and without hesitating, he squeezed the trigger. Serena felt the shock waves inside her skull. Dust and paint fell in a cloud, and a stream of water dribbled over her chest like a mountain waterfall from the hole that punctured the roof. The echo screamed in her ears. Her head throbbed as if he had put two live wires to her temples.
No one came running. There were no sounds outside except the constant, whistling roar of the blizzard. Serena shivered as the falling water kept on, soaking her skin.
“See?” he said. “It’s just you and me.”
Blue Dog stood up. He grabbed an out-of-fashion men’s tie from the floor and dangled it in her face. It was wide, with black-and-yellow slanted stripes. “Is this ugly or what? I found it in the farmhouse where I hid during the hurricane.”
He strung it around Serena’s neck and began to pull the ends tighter.
Blue Dog unzipped his pants. “Remember this guy?”
Serena knew she was running out of time. Her hand stretched again for the metal piece on the floor and missed it. She didn’t even know what it was or whether it would help her cut through the fabric that tied her to the bed.
Blue Dog climbed onto the cot at her feet, and the springs beneath them groaned under the weight of their two bodies together. The bed moved a fraction of an inch. He lowered his weight down on her. His shirt dampened as it rubbed against her wet chest. His hands took hold of the two ends of the tie and began pulling them in opposite directions, narrowing the loop that hung around Serena’s neck. Below, between her spread legs, she felt him try to invade her.
“I’m going to love watching your eyes,” he said.
The sand gathered in the bottom of the hourglass.
Her fingers were flat on the floor. She reached again and this time felt the piece of metal slide under her palm, where she scooped it into her hand and prayed.
It was a fish hook. Sharp as hell.
FIFTY-TWO
Maggie grew increasingly desperate as she crisscrossed the streets of Duluth. The weather made it worse. Her windshield wipers sloughed aside snow, but the downpour was so heavy that she could see little more than a swirling sea of white powder through the beams of her headlights. She squinted to see where she was going, and the car veered and fishtailed on the unplowed streets. The glowing clock in her Avalanche told her it was nearly four in the morning. They had several hours of darkness left, and even when the sun rose, it would be behind an impenetrable blanket of black clouds. The storm would still be howling, spilling a foot of snow over the city and then billowing it into house-high drifts with a wind that swept down from the Canadian tundra and blinded everything.
No one else was out on the streets, not at this hour and not in the middle of the storm. The cars were mounds of white, pasted over with snowcaps. When she passed a van that fit the right size and shape, she had to get out of her truck and brush off enough snow with her hands to make sure that it wasn’t the missing vehicle from Byte Patrol.
As she passed along the south end of Portland Square on Fourth Street, she saw windows of light in a house on the opposite side of the park and realized that it was Katrina’s upstairs apartment. She must have had every light in the place turned on, and Maggie knew why. For weeks after it happened, she found herself up in the middle of the night, turning on lights and sitting in the kitchen with her gun in reach on the table. It was irrational, but that was what fear did to you.
She turned left and drove around the square to the north side and parked near Katrina’s building. When she got out of the car, the gales almost knocked her over. She fought through drifts on the sidewalk and then ducked into the protection of Katrina’s doorway. She rang the doorbell.
Katrina’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Who is it?”
“It’s Maggie.”
“Oh. Hi. Come on up.”
Maggie tromped upstairs, leaving wet footprints on the steps. Katrina stood in the doorway with the door open when she reached the second floor. She was wearing an extra-large Minnesota Wild T-shirt that stretched to the middle of her thighs. Her legs were bare.
“Sorry it’s so late,” Maggie said.
“I was up.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
Katrina nodded. “I was watching TV. I know what’s going on with your friend Serena. Sounds bad.”
“It is.”
“Is it the same guy who …?”
“We think so, yeah.”
“You want to come in?”
“For a couple of minutes, sure.”
Maggie took off her coat inside and hung it near the door. She did the same with her hat and gloves. Snow melted and dripped on the carpet. Katrina had the gas fireplace turned on, and it gave off a little heat when Maggie sat near the hearth on the yellow futon. Katrina shuffled to the opposite end, and they stared at each other.
“Look, I suppose I should say I’m sorry,” Maggie said.
“Why?”
“Because I never reported what happened. Maybe we could have caught this guy before he got to you.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“How are you? How do you feel?”
“Like an empty milk carton, nothing inside.”
“It won’t always be like that.”
“Did you feel the same way?”
Maggie shook her head. “I was out of my skull. I couldn’t stop crying.”
“Tell me something. Have you had sex since it happened?”
Maggie shook her head.
“Me neither. Thinking about sex makes me nauseous. I feel like he took that away from me, the bastard.”
“Give it time.” Maggie’s guilt showed in her face again. “I wish I’d said something.”
“Let it go,” Katrina told her. “You don’t owe anybody but yourself.”
“Stride doesn’t get it,” Maggie said.
“He’s a man. It didn’t happen to him. You can’t live your life around what he thinks.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“No? That’s a switch.”
“He’s my safety net. You know that. When things got bad with Eric, I found myself turning to Stride again. It’s safe, because I know he’s not interested in me anyway.”
“Don’t be so sure of that.”
“Please. I’m a kid as far as he’s concerned. And it’s not like I can compete with someone like Serena anyway.”
“So start living in the real world,” Katrina told her. “What do you really want?”
“I have no idea.”
“Bullshit. I think you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, there’s only one thing you’ve wanted for the last two years. And it’s not Stride, and it’s not Eric, either.”
“A kid,” Maggie said.
“Bingo.”
“Well, so much for that dream. Three strikes, and I’m out.”
“You don’t know that.”
Maggie shook her head. “No way. I’m not going through that roller coaster again. Get my hopes up and my hormones up, and then feel like my life is over when I lose it for the fourth time? No, thanks. Besides, I’m missing half the equation now. No husband.”
“A husband is like an optional extra.”
“It’s too soon to think about it,” Maggie said.
“You could adopt.”
“Oh, sure, a single Chinese immigrant, a cop who was suspected in her husband’s murder. I’m going to be tops on everyone’s list.”
“Just think about it.”
“Yeah, I will.”
The truth was, she had thought about it already. She had even made some calls.
“You want a drink?” Katrina asked.
“I could drink a
whole bottle, but no, I can’t.”
“Are you working?”
Maggie nodded. “Unofficially, but yeah. We’ve got most of the force out trying to find this son of a bitch. We just don’t know where to look.”
“Well, I hope you get him. As far as I’m concerned, they can skip the trial and put him in the electric chair. I’ll tell you right where they can attach the electrodes, baby.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have nightmares?” Katrina asked.
Maggie nodded. “All the time.”
“Me too. I keep reliving it, but it’s like I’m watching a movie, you know? Like it happened to someone else.”
“I’ve pretty much blocked it out,” Maggie confessed. “Usually, I remember everything, but I’ve built a wall around that night and what happened.”
“Lucky you.” Katrina added, “Listen, I never should have done the alpha girl thing. I could tell you weren’t comfortable with it.”
“That was me. I wasn’t going to tell you what to do.”
“Yeah, but it was in your eyes, girlie. I should have known how awkward it would be. I mean, I never really figured Eric would be there, you know? Hell, I don’t know what I was thinking. It was stupid.”
Maggie frowned. “I never dreamed you would go through what I went through. After. When it happened to me, I never made the connection to the club. I feel like I let you paint a target on your chest.”
“Big target,” Katrina said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Hey, the worst part for me wasn’t the sex thing or having my face look like rainbow ice cream. It’s losing my appetite for fish and chips.” She laughed sourly.
“What are you talking about?” Maggie asked.
“Come on, I can’t even walk past the fish counter in the supermarket. The smell makes it all come back.”
Maggie’s face was blank. “I don’t get it.”
Katrina’s face scrunched up with surprise. “You telling me you can still eat fish after what happened?”
“Actually, no, you’re right. I haven’t been able to stomach it for weeks. But what does that have to do with anything?”
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