Mean Streak

by Sandra Brown

  He was unsure who had cooled first, her or him. Was he cheating because marital sex had become so infrequent and unexciting, or had it become infrequent and unexciting because Emory intuited that he was finding fun in another woman’s bed?

  Not that he was accepting all the blame for his unfaithfulness. Oh no. A large portion of it lay with Emory. Every day, she was up and out before dawn, never home before dark. She worked endless hours at the clinic, then took calls at all hours of the night from frantic parents asking her what to do about their kid’s runny nose, or fever, or diarrhea.

  Her free time was devoted to training for her damn marathons. She ran. All. The. Time.

  She’d been a runner when they met. Initially he had admired her athleticism, stamina, and self-discipline. As well as, of course, her trim form and shapely legs. For a couple of years they’d run together. But then she’d gone fanatic on him.

  Fine. He had let her indulge in her hobby, while he’d indulged in his, and right now his was clenching her soft thighs against his pumping hips. He gave one last push and came. He wasn’t sure Alice did, but she was better than Emory at faking it.

  Chapter 5

  Almost immediately upon waking, Emory realized that she was alone.

  She sat up. The cabin was empty.

  Throughout the night he had kept vigil. Each time she’d stirred, he’d left the recliner and had come to the bedside, asking if she was all right, did she need anything, was she feeling sick again?

  She’d had no more nausea, so at about two o’clock she’d taken a few sips of Coke. It had stayed down. Two hours later, she’d switched to water. He’d urged her to, telling her what she already knew: that dehydration was a concern. She’d run hard, slept all day without taking fluids, then had vomited what little she’d drunk.

  Now, according to her wristwatch, it was just after nine o’clock, Sunday morning. She’d slept for five hours without waking or without his waking her, and now he was gone.

  Moving tentatively because of the residual dizziness, she got up and went into the bathroom, taking her running tights with her and pulling them on after using the toilet.

  When she returned to the bed, she tested her other clothes. Her shirt, jacket, and bra were still damp and cold. She dragged one of the dining chairs nearer to the fireplace and draped the garments over it to speed up the drying process.

  Now what?

  She took another canned Coke from the refrigerator. It actually tasted good. She used a swallow to wash down two more analgesic tablets because the headache, like the dizziness, had hung on. It wasn’t as blinding as before, but it was definitely still there and impossible to ignore.

  She pushed aside a muslin curtain and was disheartened to see nothing except cottony fog beyond the windowpanes. She opened the door and called out a hello, but the fog absorbed her voice. She took a few steps forward and when she’d covered about a yard, the planks dropped off to a step six inches below, and that to another. Beyond the lowest step was a large, flat rock embedded in the soil.

  She couldn’t possibly feel her way like this for fifteen miles without either dropping off a cliff or becoming hopelessly lost in the mountain wilderness. Retracing her steps back through the door and into the cabin, she took a thorough look around.

  There was a wall hook adjacent to the door. The set of ignition keys that she’d noticed hanging on the hook last night weren’t there now. Even if she were able to find his pickup in the fog, she wouldn’t be able to start it. And if by some miracle she could figure out how to hot-wire it, she wouldn’t know in which direction to go. She’d probably drive herself right over an edge and down a mountainside.

  Which meant that her solution to getting back to civilization must be found inside the cabin.

  She started her search in the most logical place, the bureau from which he’d taken the shirt she was wearing. She found socks, underwear, T-shirts, flannels. One drawer contained nothing except folded blue jeans.

  The closet had a rickety door made of what looked like barn wood. In their earlier life, the planks had been painted a dull red. It was no larger than a telephone booth, with a single rod from which hung jackets and coats and a pair of coveralls like a hunter would wear.

  Lined up on the floor were several pairs of boots of varying kinds, from scuffed hiking boots similar to those he’d had on yesterday to a pair of fleece-lined rubber lace-ups. She moved them aside to search for a hidey-hole underneath the floorboards, but there was none.

  The shelf above the rod held folded blankets, bulky sweaters, and a shoe box in which were several pairs of gloves. She aligned her fingers to the palm side of one. The glove outsized her hand by an intimidating degree.

  She replaced everything and slammed the closet door in agitation. Dammit, he had guns stored somewhere.

  She discovered the locker underneath the bed.

  Jeff had never served in the military, but she’d seen enough movies to recognize a foot locker for what it was. The metal trunk had reinforced corners and substantial brass fastenings. Fortunately they appeared to be unlocked. If she could manage to slide the locker from beneath the bed, she’d be able to open it.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. She was weak from not having eaten for over twenty-four hours and spending most of that time in bed. Simply the act of bending down to inspect under the bed had brought on a surge of dizziness and rockets of headache pain. She took deep breaths to stave off both, and when they decreased to a tolerable level, she grasped the handle at one end of the locker and pulled on it with all her might.

  She was able to move it no more than an inch or two at a time before having to rest. By the time she got it clear of the bed, she was damp with perspiration and her arms and legs were aching from the effort.

  She flipped open the fastenings and raised the lid.

  * * *

  The moment he cleared the door, she launched herself at his back, leaping onto it piggyback, reaching around his head to dig her fingers into his face.

  She got a thrill from hearing his grunt of surprise and pain when one of her fingernails peeled a good two inches of skin off his cheek. But her success was short-lived, lasting all of ten or fifteen seconds.

  Then his gloved hands closed around her wrists and forced her hands away from his face. While before, she’d been holding on with fierce determination, she was now fighting just as hard to free her wrists from his iron grip. She kicked against the backs of his legs but that was a waste of valuable energy.

  She acknowledged the futility of trying to work herself free at the same time her reservoir of strength ran dry. She sagged against him, draped over his back like the flag of the vanquished.

  “You done?” he asked.

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “I’m going to let you down. No more nonsense, all right?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “In due time, Doc. It’s a sure thing.”

  Stretching his arms behind him over his shoulders, he dangled her until she could touch the floor, then he let go.

  She’d planned for this. Before he was fully turned around to face her, she jerked free the butcher knife she’d stuck into one of the wall logs and made a swipe with it across his middle. He bowed his back and sucked in his belly just in time. She missed completely. The second swipe nicked the material of his coat but did negligible damage to the tough fabric.

  “Damn you!”

  She raised the knife high and arced it downward toward his neck. The tip of the blade caught in the wool of his scarf, but never found flesh before he grabbed her hand and, with humiliating ease, unarmed her. He tossed the knife across the room, where it skidded across the hardwood floor before banging into the baseboard.

  “Now are you done?”

  She stumbled back against the wall, fearing retribution. He looked huge and indomitable. Blood trickled from the deep scratch on his face. He brushed it with the back of his hand, leaving a red smear on the chamois leather glove.


  He looked at the fresh bloodstain, then at her. “I guess you’re feeling better.”

  She pulled herself up to her full height and glared at him, despising her own weakness and infuriated by his composure.

  “Want to tell me what the hell that was about?” he asked.

  He followed the direction of her angry gesture and looked over his shoulder toward the dining table where she’d placed the incriminating laptop and its charger, which she’d found in the locker beneath the bed. “You lied to me.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You said you didn’t have a charger.”

  “I said I didn’t have a phone. Which I don’t.”

  “Well I found the charger, and it’s been plugged into my cell phone for two hours, and the phone is still dead. What did you do to it?”

  “I took the battery out.”

  His calm admission rendered her speechless. As she stood there gaping, he clamped the end of his middle finger between his front teeth and used them to pull off his right glove, then began unbuttoning his coat.

  “Why?” she wheezed.

  “So it couldn’t emit a signal.”

  She’d been entertaining a sliver of hope that she’d let her imagination get the best of her, that she’d seen too many TV shows, read too many books, fiction as well as true accounts, about women who were captured, tortured, abused, murdered. She’d held on to the diminishing hope that he wasn’t actually keeping her in this isolated place against her will and with evil intent.

  But he’d just dashed that slender hope all to hell. He’d disabled her phone. On purpose. Her location couldn’t be tracked using GPS, which is one of the first things the authorities would try to do when Jeff reported her missing.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Haven’t we already established that?”

  “We haven’t established a damn thing except that you’re a kidnapper and a—” She broke off, not wanting to plant ideas in his head.

  He seemed to read her mind, however, because he arched one dark brow inquisitively. “And a what?”

  She’d had a slim-to-none chance of incapacitating him, either by gouging his eyes out or plunging the knife into him. Since both attempts had failed, the only weapon left to her was reason.

  “Listen, I don’t care what you’ve done in the past. You haven’t hurt me yet. In fact, you’ve been exceptionally kind. Which I appreciate. Things could have gone a lot worse for me if you hadn’t been there to…to find me and bring me here.”

  He waited several beats. “But?”

  “But I need to leave now and go home. You must let me go.”

  He raised his shoulders slightly and motioned toward the door. “It’s unlocked. But I warn you, I don’t believe you’ll get very far. I walked a couple of miles down the road, thinking that the fog might not be so thick at a lower elevation. I never walked out of it.”

  “You walked.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you drive?”

  “For the same reason I wouldn’t drive you last night. There are dozens of switchbacks. I could miss a curve and go over a three-hundred-foot drop.”

  “But you took the keys to your truck.”

  “Because I didn’t want you driving it.”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “I figured. I didn’t want you wrecking it and possibly killing yourself in the process. Which is why I took the keys.”

  He stuffed his gloves, bloodstain and all, into the pocket of his coat and hung it on a wall peg. He unwound the scarf from around his neck. Static raised his hair when he pulled off his watch cap. It and the scarf were added to the peg.

  He went to the fireplace, hunkered down in front of it, stirred the embers with a poker, and then added several logs. Coming to his feet and dusting his hands on his seat, he asked if she’d eaten anything.

  “No.”

  He went over to the refrigerator and opened it. She marched up to it and pushed the door shut with enough force to rock the appliance and rattle bottles inside. He turned, looking like he might kill her then and there, but she didn’t let his murderous glower intimidate her.

  “My husband will be frantic to know where I am and what’s happened to me. He’ll have the police out searching.”

  “Well they won’t find you today. Not the way things are socked in.”

  “I can e-mail him. But I need the password for your laptop.”

  He glanced at the laptop, then turned back to the fridge, bumped her hip with his to move her out of the way, and reopened the door. “I don’t do e-mail.”

  “That’s okay. I can contact him through Facebook. Even if Jeff doesn’t see my post, a friend—”

  “Sorry, Doc, no.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  “I won’t mention you. How could I when I don’t even know your name? I’ll just let Jeff know that I’m okay.”

  He shook his head.

  “No details, I promise. You can approve the post before I send it.”

  “No.”

  It was like hitting the dreaded twenty-mile wall of a marathon. One had to press on, power through it, or be defeated. “You’re committing a crime, you know.”

  “I haven’t laid a hand on you.”

  “But you’re keeping me here against my will.”

  “Circumstances are keeping you here.”

  “You could change the circumstances if you wanted to.”

  “I can’t change the weather.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the weather. You’re refusing to let me use your laptop to—”

  “The laptop is off-limits.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Whatever that is, it can’t be good.”

  “I didn’t claim it was good. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Tell me why you’re holding me here.”

  He advanced on her and bent down to bring his face almost on a level with hers. Speaking in a rasp more sinister than a shout, he said, “I’m not keeping you in, Doc.” He hitched his chin toward the door. “I’m keeping them out.”

  Chapter 6

  Jeff let himself in through the garage door and disengaged the house alarm. No lights were on inside. The house was cold and empty.

  Before leaving Alice, she’d again expressed her fear that Emory was onto their affair. “You’re certain that she doesn’t know?”

  “She’s feeling neglected and playing the wounded wife to the hilt,” he assured her. “She’s in a sulk, that’s all.”

  But the fact remained that Emory hadn’t been heard from since Friday evening when she’d called from the motel where she’d spent the night. This was Sunday afternoon, which added up to a significant amount of time not to have heard from one’s wife, even a miffed one.

  There wasn’t a married man in the world who wouldn’t understand his waiting out Emory’s little rebellion and letting her get over her huff in her own good time. But doing nothing made him look like a heel, even to his extramarital lover.

  It’s not like her not to call, Alice had remarked more than once during their weekend. You’re not worried?

  He wasn’t, but he supposed he should be. He called Emory’s cell phone, and before it even rang her voice mail greeting requested the caller to leave a message. “I thought you would be home by now. Call me.”

  She often worked at the clinic after hours and on weekends, using that time to catch up on paperwork. He called the main line and then the private number reserved for family use only. Both were answered by recordings. He left messages asking her to call him. He then phoned the hospital where she practiced and asked to be put through to the pediatric floor.

  The nurse who answered recognized him by name. “How can I help you, Mr. Surrey?”

  “Is Dr. Charbonneau around?”

  “I thought she signed out until tomorrow.”

  “She did. But I was expecting her at home by this afternoon, and
I’ve been unable to reach her on her cell. No one answers at the clinic. I thought she might have stopped there to check on a patient and had gotten tied up.”

  “I just came on duty, so I don’t know, but I’ll ask around.”

  “Thank you. If anyone’s seen her, please ask them to call me. And if she shows up, tell her that her phone is going straight to voice mail. She needs to check the battery.”

  He disconnected, dropped his cell onto his desk, stood up, and began to pace, trying to decide what he should do about this. He debated it for another several minutes, but there was only one logical option.

  Ten minutes later, he was speeding north on I-85.

  * * *

  Emory picked at the grilled cheese sandwich, feeding herself small bites, testing her stomach to see if it would reject solid food. She’d had no more nausea today, only a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that she might not leave this cabin alive.

  After his refusal to let her use his laptop, she’d retreated to the bed, but not before defiantly setting up the folding screen. She lay down on top of the covers, pulling only one corner of the bedspread over her legs.

  She’d lain there, tense and wary, but he ignored her and busied himself around the cabin. She’d smelled the coffee he brewed and the egg he fried. He washed the dishes, then went outside for only a couple of minutes. She’d dropped off to sleep while listening to him moving around in the living area.

  When she woke, hours had passed. It had grown dark. Through the louvers in the screen, she could see that the lamp with the burlap shade was on.

  She’d worried that maybe her lame and unsuccessful attack on him had jostled her brain and left her even more enfeebled. But when she’d sat up, she noted that the dizziness was actually better. Her headache, however, persisted.

  She’d gotten up and used the toilet; then, although she’d sworn that hell would freeze over before she left her flimsy sanctuary, that he would have to drag her out from behind that screen by her hair, she stepped around it.