Just what she needed.
She had been ready to climb behind the Ford’s steering wheel when the idea occurred to her. Her abductor was sure to hear the engine as soon as she started it. He would give chase in his van.
Unless the van had been sabotaged.
He couldn’t drive it on four flat tires.
Fumbling blindly, wishing he hadn’t shut the barn doors when he left, she touched the side panel of her Ford. Its smooth surface guided her as she crept forward in a half crouch, one hand patting the car, the other upraised before her, searching for obstructions.
Deprived of sight, she found her other senses temporarily heightened. She could hear the faint creaks of the barn walls, aged wood shifting under the wind’s caress. The smells of rot and fecal decay blended with the closer, more pungent odor of her own sweat.
The car ended, giving way to empty space. Memory directed her to the Chevy Astro, dead ahead in the blackness.
Something skittered past her right foot. Involuntarily she kicked at it with a gasp and heard a small, outraged squeak. Patter of rodent feet, diminishing, gone.
Just a mouse, Erin. Don’t start getting hysterical on me, okay?
Oddly, the reassuring voice in her head was Annie’s. Erin was irrationally glad to hear it, grateful for even the illusory comfort it provided.
Her probing hand found the van’s hood. She searched lower and discovered a flat metal disk. Hubcap. The front wheel on the passenger side.
All right, then. First deflate this tire, then the others. Shouldn’t take longer than two minutes, and she would buy herself infinitely more time to make her getaway.
If she could do it at all. Having never tried to puncture a tire, she had no idea how thick the rubber might be, how difficult to penetrate.
Only one way to find out.
Clutching the nail in her fist, the point extending from between two fingers, she tensed her arm, took a breath, and struck.
The nail slammed into the tire and punched through. She had time to congratulate herself on the successful execution of the first phase of her plan, and then an alarm went off.
For a startled second she couldn’t identify the source of the sudden noise and glare. All she knew was that the darkness was banished, the barn abruptly lit by a yellow stroboscopic light, the silence shattered by a foghorn’s furious blatting that went on and on.
Then she understood that the van was equipped with a burglar alarm, and by attacking the tire she had tripped the system.
“Jesus,” she hissed, the word lost in the insane racket howling and whooping around her.
That bedlam would be audible for a thousand yards in any direction. It was as good as a searchlight pinpointing her position.
She left the nail imbedded in the tire and sprang to her feet.
Ran for her car, now clearly visible in beats of yellow radiance from the van’s parking lights, flashing in distress.
Misjudged the distance, banged her thigh on the Ford’s bumper—sparkle of pain down her leg.
Reached the driver’s door. Locked?
No, not locked. She flung herself behind the wheel, fumbled the key out of her pocket, fingers sweaty and trembling.
The key slipped from her grasp, fell somewhere on the floor of the car.
Find it, find it.
Frantically she searched the car’s dark interior, running her hands over the floor mat.
The key was gone. Had disappeared. But that wasn’t possible.
“It has to be here!” she heard herself scream over the alarm’s continuing squall.
Under the seat, maybe. It could have bounced under the seat.
She thrust her hand into the narrow space between the floor and the seat assembly, scraping her knuckles on the rough metal framework, and there it was, the key, almost out of reach. With two fingers she snagged it, slid it forward, then closed her fist over the key and raised it into the light.
Shaking, she jabbed the key at the ignition cylinder, missed the slot twice, found it on the third try.
The engine coughed, coughed again, refusing to turn over.
She wrenched the key clockwise, floored the gas—an ugly screeching sound—and finally the motor caught.
It chugged fitfully for a moment, then ran smooth.
Headlights on, gear selector thrown into reverse, she was set to go. But with the van blocking her, she had less room to maneuver than she’d thought.
Had to back and fill, back and fill, turn the car at an angle. Now she was in the lane between the van and the barn wall, a narrow lane, just enough clearance.
Her foot on the gas, the Ford reversing.
Crunch of impact.
She’d plowed into the van’s fender. Not enough clearance, after all, but there was no time to straighten out, not with the alarm still shrieking, its banshee cries pulsing in sync with the heartbeats shaking her like spasms.
She floored the gas and forced the car to continue in reverse. Nails-on-chalkboard screech as she scraped the Chevy’s side, the two vehicles grinding against each other like shifting jaws, the Ford shuddering, bucking, retreating in fits and starts, then popping free of the van and skidding backward.
The barn doors, still closed. She rammed them with her rear bumper. They exploded open, and she was outside.
Spin of the wheel, a clumsy U-turn, her headlights sweeping toward the barbed-wire fence yards away.
In the rearview mirror, a man with a flashlight, sprinting toward her.
Gunshot. The rear window blew apart in a shower of tempered glass.
She gunned the engine. The Ford plowed over weeds, over gravel, and slammed into the fence.
The impact uprooted the posts on either side, snapped the wires. The Ford fishtailed onto the road, straightened out. She sped away from the ranch as her speedometer needle climbed.
Looking back, she saw her abductor disappear inside the barn.
The road was narrow and rough. Pebbles clicked and pinged against the chassis, making tuneless music.
She kept pushing her speed—fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty. Dangerously fast for a pitted desert road lit only by her high beams, a road that at any second might coil into a cul-de-sac or dive into a flood-control depression.
Dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as caution would be.
Behind her, headlights.
The van.
Her high beams splashed across a dotted yellow line perpendicular to the road she was traveling. Intersection.
She spun the wheel, veering to the left.
Now she was on a major thoroughfare, smooth and well maintained, but empty of traffic at this hour. No lights of houses or stores were visible along the roadside, only bleak miles of desert and, in the distance, the jagged humps of mountains, a dark, broken line against the blue-black sky.
She thought she could identify the mountains to her right as the Sierrita range, west of the city. If so, she was heading south.
Flare of headlights behind her. The van again, swinging onto the main road, frighteningly close.
Ahead ... the interstate.
She saw the elevated roadway rippling with distant lights.
Get on there, and she would be safe. With other people around, her abductor couldn’t do anything.
But the highway was at least a half mile away. And the van was pulling close to her tail.
In the rearview mirror she saw him at the wheel. Blurred face, hairless scalp. No beard—the red one he’d worn in the lobby must have been fake.
Her speedometer needle was pinned to eighty-five. She might be traveling faster; the gauge only went that high.
His headlights flooded the Ford’s interior with their harsh white glare, brightening steadily. The car rocked with an impact from behind.
He had rammed her. The car wobbled drunkenly. She gripped the wheel to steady it, and then he butted her again.
“Stop,” she muttered, teeth clenched, knuckles bloodless.
The twin globes of hi
s lights expanded as he punched the gas pedal a third time. She manhandled the wheel, and with a scream of tires the Ford veered into the other lane.
The van accelerated, trying to pull alongside her. If it did, the driver could shoot out the side windows, kill her in a hail of ammunition.
She ground her foot down on the gas pedal, straining for every increment of speed the motor could deliver. The road dipped, descending at a steep grade, and at the bottom of the hill a service station came into view.
An Exxon station, near the interstate’s on-ramp, its illuminated sign bright against the night sky, the service court floodlit, fuel islands gleaming.
Open for business. Had to be.
The van hooked sideways, crunching her rear passenger door, chewing metal like a hungry mouth.
The pavement slid out from under her. The Ford skidded onto the shoulder, plowing up a spray of gravelly earth as the steering wheel jerked and ticked under her hands.
She had almost regained control of the car when the van mashed her again, its fender gnawing at the front door on the passenger side, the door buckling in its frame, the window shattering as the frame bent, and for a wild hysterical moment she was a diver in a shark cage, and a great white was chomping insatiably at the steel bars, crushing them out of shape, forcing its huge head deeper inside—
Rows of mesquite bushes flew past on her left, branches whacking the windshield, scraping the doors. She was screaming—she couldn’t help it—screaming as the van plowed her sedan off the shoulder into an untended stretch of cacti and weeds.
The car bucked like a skittish horse, her seat lurching wildly forward and back, her hands slapping the horn.
Should have worn your seat belt, a voice in her head admonished irrelevantly. Most accidents occur on trips of less than one mile.
A massive columnar shape materialized in her high beams. Saguaro cactus, huge, multi-armed like Shiva, armored in needles and leather-tough skin.
She had time for one more scream before the Ford slammed head-on into the saguaro at full speed.
26
The windshield exploded. The hood popped open as the Ford’s front end caved in. That hideous grinding noise was the sound of the van punching into the passenger side like a mailed fist.
Erin was conscious of none of it. Her sole awareness was of white, a field of white, endless white, expanding before her, swallowing her up with a lover’s sigh.
The airbag, erupting out of the steering wheel to cushion the collision’s impact.
It caught and held her. Dazed, she lay in its soft folds, a captured insect in a napkin.
A heartbeat later the bag automatically deflated. She fell back against the headrest, blinking at a whirl of stars.
She wasn’t dead. Didn’t think she was even hurt. The airbag had saved her.
Did the van have an airbag?
Her gaze ticked to the rearview mirror.
The van’s front end loomed impossibly close. A zigzag crack bisected the windshield. Behind the glass, movement. Her abductor, pulling himself upright.
He’d been thrown sideways in the crash, but he wasn’t dead, wasn’t even unconscious.
Why couldn’t he have cracked open his head on the dashboard, flown through the windshield, broken his neck? Something, anything, it didn’t matter what, just so he’d been stopped and she could be safe.
No time to dwell on that. He’d survived, and now he was groping on the floor of the van for some item he’d dropped.
The gun, of course.
Couldn’t miss her at this range.
She fumbled at the door handle, wrenched the door ajar, pulled herself out. Light-headedness made her stumble.
Loose desert soil sank under her boots. She staggered forward, slipping and sliding on scattered rocks strewn like ball bearings in her path.
Steam hissed from under the sedan’s folded hood. She nearly fell again, caught herself by grabbing the car’s front panel, then jerked her hands away. Hot.
Behind her, movement in the front seat of the van. He was leaning out the side window, the pistol in his hand.
Down.
She flung herself on hands and knees at the front of the car, then froze, waiting tensely for the pistol’s report.
Nothing happened. She’d ducked in time. He couldn’t hit her with the wreckage of the car blocking his aim.
Gasping, she clambered over the saguaro, prone in the glare of the Ford’s one remaining headlight, its arms outstretched as if in a silent plea. The hundreds of spiny needles encrusting the fallen giant poked and jabbed her, spotting her legs with pinprick dabs of blood.
Then she was half running, half crawling toward the road, afraid to rise fully for fear of making herself a target, afraid to stay on all fours because her progress that way was too slow.
At the edge of the road she dared a backward glance, expecting to see the man with the gun racing after her out of the gloom.
Astonishingly, he was still in the van. She saw him pushing on the driver’s door with no response. The frame must have buckled slightly, wedging the door shut.
He gave up on trying to open it and began to slide over to the passenger side.
For the moment he was distracted, and she was probably out of his range.
Run.
She sprinted across the empty road, toward the Exxon station two hundred yards ahead.
Whoever was in there must have heard the crash. Might be on the phone already, requesting an ambulance.
She didn’t need an ambulance. She needed cops.
“Help!” Her lungs strained to find the air necessary for a shout. “Police! Call the police!”
When she glanced over her shoulder once more, the van’s passenger door was swinging open.
Where was the attendant? How long did it take to phone 911, anyway? A man on the night shift ought to have a gun behind the counter, ought to be out here now, protecting her.
She reached the asphalt court of the service station. The office was straight ahead, separated from her by two floodlit fuel islands.
One of her boots trod on a cable near the full-service island. Inside the building, a bell rang.
She cut between two of the gas pumps, avoiding a tangle of hoses that threatened to trip her up. As she sprinted for the self-service island, she risked another look over her shoulder.
He was sprinting after her now, the gun in his hand. She glimpsed a flash of metal in the waistband of his pants—another pistol? How many guns did he have?
Across the second island. Glass door ahead, framing a lighted snack shop.
She nearly flew into the door, slammed her palms against the glass at the last second to stop herself, then grabbed the pull-bar and jerked it violently.
The door didn’t open.
Locked.
No, not again, not another locked door.
Her fists hammered the door. The ghost image of her reflection, caught in the glass and staring wild-eyed at her, was a mask of frenzy and terror and despair.
“Let me in, he’s going to kill me, let me in!”
But no one let her in, and abruptly she realized that no one would.
The station was closed. Despite appearances, it had been shut down for the night.
Through the glass she could see the self-contained world of the snack shop, invitingly safe and friendly. Candy carousels, magazine racks, maps and map books, microwave oven, coffee maker—everything neat and orderly and heartbreakingly normal, but not a human being on duty anywhere.
Nobody had heard the crash, and nobody had called for an ambulance, and nobody would open the door, because nobody was here. The lights had been left on by mistake or activated by some timer mechanism’s glitch.
The reason didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was alone, utterly alone, and her abductor had reached the edge of the service court.
She ran.
There was no place to go, nowhere to hide, but she ran anyway, thinking wildly that she could give him the
slip somehow, duck into a rest room or huddle behind a trash bin—crazy thoughts, hopeless, everything was hopeless and she was certain to die.
She rounded the corner of the building, then stopped short, staring in amazement at what was simultaneously the most unexpected and the most obvious thing in the world.
A pay phone. Well, of course. Every gas station had one.
For a moment, shock made her stupid. She dug in her pants pockets for some change, knowing she didn’t have any. Then she remembered that a 911 call required no deposit.
She yanked the handset off the plungers, heard a dial tone—it worked, actually worked—then stabbed the push buttons with a shaking finger.
Even as she dialed, she wondered what the hell she was doing. Response time to her call would be a minimum of four minutes.
Ringing on the line.
True, the police couldn’t arrive fast enough to save her. But perhaps they didn’t have to. If she gave her name, said she’d been kidnapped, described the van and the approximate location of the ranch, then her abductor couldn’t hope to avoid identification and arrest.
A second ring. Still no answer.
Was he sufficiently rational to refrain from killing her merely because he couldn’t hope to get away with it? Only one way to find out.
Third ring.
“Come on, answer!”
Scuff of shoes nearby. He was closing in.
By all logic she should abandon the phone and run.
But she couldn’t hope to outdistance him, and somebody had to answer soon.
Fourth ring.
He turned the corner. His silhouetted figure, looming huge against the starry sky, expanded to fill up her world.
The pistol—at least she thought it was the pistol—came up fast, the muzzle thrust at her face.
She spun away, nearly dropping the phone, and a coolly dispassionate female voice spoke into her ear. “Pima County Emergency Services.”
“I’ve been kidnapped, my name is—”
Agony in her neck. Blinding pain. Her mouth wouldn’t work. Her breath was frozen.
Shot. She’d been shot. Oh, Christ, he’d shot her in the neck—
Then she heard the sizzle of electricity, felt the pinch of metal, voltage singing in every muscle and nerve.
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