by Linda Howard
He shifted upward, lifting his weight from her. She gulped in a deep breath and tried to gather her strength, then he rolled her over and started yanking again at her jeans.
“Don’t,” she said, sobbing. “Please. Please don’t.” She hated to beg but she couldn’t seem to stop herself, and what did pride matter anyway? She’d do anything to get him to stop. Desperately she searched for some reason she could give him, something that would appeal to him. “I can pay you. I can give you all the money I have.”
He didn’t seem to hear her at all.
The kitchen was dim, with only the scant light from the window, but she could see that he was almost as thin as the woman, most of his teeth were dark with rot, and his eyes … they were strangely wide open and feral, glittering with something that was inhuman.
Drugs. He had to be on drugs, both of them did. There wouldn’t be any reasoning with him, so she stopped trying. He continued jerking at her clothes and she kicked, she screamed, she clawed at any patch of skin on him she could reach, but his coat was heavy and protected him from her nails, so she went for his face. He couldn’t hold both her hands and undress her at the same time, so she punched and clawed at him with every ounce of strength she had, but the blows didn’t seem to affect him at all.
He got her jeans halfway down and reared back to unzip his own pants. Laughing, he clamped one hand around her throat and leaned his weight on it. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t reach him … her vision grayed, and she couldn’t see anything except his grinning face above hers. Tunnel vision, she thought vaguely, and knew she was about to pass out. If she did, she’d be entirely helpless, and his maniacal face with the rotten teeth would be the last thing she ever saw.
Desperate, on the verge of unconsciousness, she tried to jerk her knee up. He shifted, blocking the movement, and laughed.
“Darwin, you son of a bitch!” the woman yelled in a grating tone.
The overhead light came on, the lights shining right in Lolly’s eyes and blinding her. The weight on her throat eased and she coughed, sucking in air. Darwin was very still. “I was just having a little fun,” he said sulkily.
The woman with the stringy hair stood over them both, and with blurred vision Lolly looked up at her. There was no sympathy in the woman’s face, no woman-to-woman empathy, nothing but fury. She had a gun, too, and she had it pointed at Darwin’s head. “Get up.”
“Now, Niki,” he began, belatedly placating as he realized where the pistol was pointing. “Baby, I—”
“Don’t ‘baby’ me, you two-timing son of a bitch.”
Darwin’s gaze shifted from Niki, back to Lolly. She saw the animal in his eyes, saw him weighing his options. He smiled a little, and then he forced Lolly’s thighs farther apart.
Niki swung her pistol and hit Darwin on the side of the head with it. He yelped, and finally … finally … moved off of Lolly. “Fuck, Niki, you could’ve killed me!” he shouted, getting to his feet and pulling up his pants from where they’d drooped over his skinny ass. “Are you fucking crazy?” He grabbed a dish towel and pressed it to the bleeding wound on the side of his head, where the pistol had split the skin.
Lolly struggled to pull her jeans up, scooting across the floor as she did, toward the back door and icy freedom. Maybe these two bags of shit would kill each other. She was dimly shocked by the violence of her own thoughts, but if she could just get away, she didn’t care what happened to them.
Niki’s gaze swiveled from Darwin to Lolly, and so did the pistol barrel. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she spat, then glanced at something in her hand. Lolly froze, blinking. “Lorelei Helton. Portland,” Niki said, and Lolly realized the something was her own driver’s license. Niki had apparently been going through Lolly’s purse while Darwin had been trying to rape her. “What the hell kind of name is ‘Lorelei’? It sounds like a hooker.”
Lolly didn’t bother arguing, just nodded her head in agreement.
“Get up,” Niki said, and Lolly obeyed, using the motion to take another step back, toward the door. Could she beat both of them, and a bullet? They were druggies, they were likely high right now … their eyes were wide, the pupils shrunk down to tiny dots. How clearly could they think?
Clearly enough. Darwin suddenly said, “Whoa there, bitch,” and lunged across the kitchen to place himself between her and the back door. He shoved her forward.
Niki shook her head and stuck the driver’s license in the front pocket of her baggy jeans. “For a woman driving a Mercedes, you don’t have much money on you,” she growled. “Where’s the rest?”
Lolly tried to think, to reason. Her heart was pounding, she was shaking from head to toe and nausea roiled her stomach, but she could still think. Right now, her brain was the only weapon she had. “In the bank. We can go to town and I’ll give it all to you, I swear I will, just … don’t kill me.” She shot a glance toward Darwin. “And don’t let him near me.” If she could actually get to town with these druggies, she’d find a way to escape … to get help.
“They’d be closed now, right?” Niki asked, looking at the last gleam of light that pressed against the windows.
Dear God, she couldn’t spend the night in the house with these two. Her stomach lurched, and she barely controlled the urge to vomit. “Yes, but I know the bank manager,” she lied. She had no idea who the manager was now, and she had never banked here anyway. The first and only account she’d ever opened was in Portland. Would they realize that, if she lived in Portland, she wasn’t likely to have an account here? Desperately she plunged ahead. “He’ll open up for me. We can leave right now.”
Niki considered it, her head tilted to the side and her feral, too-wide gaze locked on Lolly, but after a couple of seconds she shook her head. “No, he’d get suspicious if you did that. We’ll wait until morning.”
Lolly’s heart lurched, just like her stomach. She felt the hard beats hammering inside her chest. The ice was coming; by morning there would be no way down the hill. The road would be a sheet of ice, and she’d be stuck here with these two. She heard what sounded like frozen rain hitting the kitchen windows; maybe it was already too late.
Niki gestured with the gun, waving Lolly forward. Lolly followed the silent direction, passing the woman with the gun more closely than she liked, exiting the kitchen and walking through the dining room with Niki directly behind. When they reached the living room, Lolly saw the contents of her purse scattered across the couch and floor. Her key ring, with the key to the Mercedes between the key to this house and the one to her apartment door, was resting between two cushions. If she could get to the Mercedes, she’d take her chances driving on ice. Even if she slid off the side of the mountain, that was better than being stranded with these two. She needed those keys …
Niki gave Lolly a shove toward the staircase. “Go on,” she said, jabbing the pistol barrel hard into Lolly’s spine. Lolly took the stairs, her knees shaking so badly she half-expected to fall at any moment. Niki led her to the bedroom closest to the head of the stairs, which happened to be Lolly’s own room. “Any guns in the house?” Niki asked brusquely as she switched on the lights and looked around the neat, sparsely furnished room. “And don’t lie, because if you say no and we find some, I’ll shoot you in the face. Got it?”
“No, no guns,” Lolly said, her voice shaking so much her words were barely understandable.
Niki opened all the drawers, gave the contents of the closet a cursory glance, and was satisfied. There wasn’t much here, so searching wasn’t exactly a chore. There was Lolly’s underwear in the top drawer of the chest, some pajamas, and four clean changes of clothing hanging in the closet. Niki looked out the dark window, noting the two-story distance between the window and the ground with some satisfaction. Lolly looked, too, but at the window. Was that a film of ice already forming on the glass?
Niki’s crossed the room, and Lolly stepped out of her way. “I’ll be watching this door from downstairs,” she snarled. �
�If it opens even a crack, I’m going to send Darwin up here to deal with you.” She glanced at the simple lock on the doorknob, and smiled. “And don’t think that flimsy lock will do you any good, not when we have these keys.” She indicated the pistol in her hand and took imaginary aim at the lock, making a shooting noise, then she grinned.
The sight of those rotten teeth made Lolly shudder, but suddenly something she’d heard, or read, clicked in her brain, and she realized what drug these two were likely on:
It was meth—another type of ice, and just as deadly.
Chapter Three
Dazed, Lolly listened to Niki’s footsteps as the woman descended the stairs. Voices drifted up from the living room, angry at first, and then softer. Darwin laughed. The sound sent a shudder rolling through her body, which seemed to be the signal that now her brain could allow her body to feel again because she suddenly felt like one huge, head-to-toe ache.
She began trembling. Her shoulder and side hurt from being shoved into the newel post, her scalp ached from her hair being pulled so viciously, and her cheek and one side of her head throbbed from being slammed into the linoleum. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might yet be sick, and she felt both sweaty and icy cold at the same time.
Shock, she thought, just before her knees wobbled and she collapsed on the side of the bed. That didn’t help much; her vision tilted, as if the world was turning over, and she toppled to the side. She lay there panting, trying to control her breathing, but the raw, ragged sound of her gasps filled the quiet room.
Knowing what was wrong didn’t make her feel any better. If Darwin had come through the door right then, she’d have been completely helpless.
Dear God. What should she do? What could she do?
She didn’t know what she could do, but one thing she did know: she’d rather die than let Darwin touch her again.
The thought propelled her to a sitting position, and though her head swam she forced herself to stay erect. There was a very strong probability she was going to die anyway, but she’d be damned if she’d huddle there, sniveling, waiting for them to do whatever they wanted with her. She’d rather freeze to death in the ice storm than just sit here like a helpless idiot.
One thing she wouldn’t do was make things easy for them. Moving as cautiously as she could, both because she was still dizzy and because she didn’t want them to hear her moving around, she eased over to the door and turned the lock. Niki was right: the lock was too insubstantial to stop them for long, but at least she’d have a moment of warning before they walked in on her.
With any luck she wouldn’t be here when they decided to return, because she’d rather take her chances with the ice than with them. She took a deep breath, willing her head to stop spinning, and went to the window to look out. Yes, there was definitely ice on the window, and very little light left as the pressing clouds brought a premature twilight. She didn’t have much time, because conditions were only going to get worse.
The ground below looked so far away that her instincts screamed she’d kill herself if she jumped, but she didn’t intend to jump. It was a straight drop from her window to the ground below, with no roofline or eave to assist her, but there were sheets and a couple of thin blankets on the bed. The down comforter was probably too thick and bulky to be useful, but if she tied the bottom sheet to the top sheet to the blanket and then tied the makeshift rope off well, she’d be able to get close enough to the ground to drop down safely.
Swiftly she ripped all the covers from the bed and began tying her makeshift rope. The sheets were easiest, because they were the thinnest. She knotted the first corner to the foot of the bed, tugging hard to make certain the knot would hold; she’d never been a Girl Scout, wasn’t a sailor, didn’t know a damn thing about knots beyond tying her shoes. She just hoped a regular old knot would be sufficient.
After the sheets came the two thin wool blankets. She would love to have one of the blankets to huddle in as she made her escape, but she needed both of them for length, since the best place to tie off the rope was the end of the bed and it was eight, maybe ten feet from the window. She had always loved the spaciousness of the house, but now that space was working against her. She couldn’t move the bed, not without attracting more attention than she wanted. She had to get out, and she had to do it quietly.
When that task was finished, she forced herself to sit quietly for a minute, to give her racing heart time to slow. She was sweating a little, and that wasn’t good. One of the first rules of surviving in the cold was not to overexert yourself, because that caused sweating, which would freeze on the body and cause hypothermia to set in even faster.
Then she shook her head at herself. Hell, it was raining; she was going to get wet, anyway. How was a little sweat going to make things worse? She must still be a little shocky, addled but functioning. She just needed to function a little faster, because at any time they might come up those stairs to check on her.
She took every piece of clothing available out of the closet and the chest of drawers, tossing them onto the bed. Before she went out the window, she needed to get as many clothes on her body as possible. Her big, heavy, weatherproof coat and boots were downstairs, so her only chance of surviving the cold rain and ice was to keep dry as long as possible, and that meant layers … a lot of them.
Quickly she kicked off her shoes, then stripped off her jeans and sweatshirt and began pulling on thin layers. She’d brought a pair of insulated long underwear and she put that on first, then began pulling on T-shirts, the thinnest first, the looser ones on top. One flannel shirt, the one she wore while lazing about, she laid aside to tie over her head. There was one pair of old sweats, as well as the sweatshirt she’d been wearing, but before putting on the bulky stuff she stopped to tug on as many pairs of socks as she could fit on her feet.
Her shoes weren’t waterproof; her feet would get wet, no way around it. The only question was whether she’d be able to get down the mountain before hypothermia killed her. If she managed that, then she’d worry about losing her feet to frostbite.
Then an idea occurred to her, and as quietly as possible she hauled her suitcase out of the closet. She had brought a jar of Vaseline, which she used to remove mascara. She hadn’t bothered with any makeup since she’d been here, so she hadn’t even gotten the Vaseline out of the suitcase. Thank goodness she hadn’t, or it would now be in the bathroom down the hall with her other toiletries.
Vaseline was waterproof, wasn’t it? It was at least water resistant, and might be just the edge she needed. It wouldn’t keep out the cold, but every little bit helped.
She pulled off her socks and coated her feet with the Vaseline, especially her toes, then put her socks back on, and another pair on top of that. Two pairs of socks was all she could manage and still get her feet in her shoes, so that would have to do.
Next came her jeans, then a pair of old sweatpants. Once her pants were on, she coated the outside of the socks with Vaseline, put on her shoes, then smeared the remainder of the stuff on the leather. That was as waterproof as she could make her feet; maybe, just maybe, the multiple layers would do the trick. After pulling on the two sweatshirts, she felt like the Michelin Man, but she was as ready as she could get.
Lolly tiptoed to the door, pressing her ear to the wood, holding her breath as she listened. The intruders seemed to be right at the foot of the stairs, but from years of living in this house she knew that sounds from both the living room on one side and the dining room on the other carried right up the stairs, because when she was young she’d often listened to the parties downstairs.
The argument over Darwin’s attack hadn’t lasted long. The voices were lower now, and the occasional bout of laughter sent chills down her spine. She didn’t think for one minute she’d survive until morning. Right now Niki planned to take her to the bank tomorrow morning for a big withdrawal, but that plan wasn’t going to last. One of them would come to their senses and realize it wasn’t goin
g to work, or they’d realize they were iced in. One of them would get carried away, and Lolly would end up dead long before morning.
The voices and laughter stopped. She strained her ears and after a moment she caught some grunting and the occasional moan. Her stomach heaved, but thank God they were otherwise occupied. Now would be the best time to make her escape.
She took one quick look around the room, to see if there was anything else she could use. Only the pillowcases were left, but any covering was better than none, so she stripped them from the pillows and tied them over her head. Her pajama shirt doubled as a muffler. Over that she tied the remaining flannel shirt, and she was as ready as she could get.
Grasping her makeshift rope, once more she tugged on the knot securing it to the bed. Walking backward to the window, she tested the other knots as well. They seemed solid enough; they would have to do.
It was now or never. She unlocked the window and pulled upward on the handle. Nothing happened. She pulled again, putting more muscle into it. Still nothing. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. The stupid damn window was stuck, and if she couldn’t somehow get it open, then she was stuck, too. Desperately she gripped the handle with both hands, bending her knees and putting her leg muscles into the effort too, and with what sounded like a deafening noise the window rose a scant inch before stopping again.
She leaned her head against the cold glass, only vaguely noticing how good the chill felt against her forehead. She could do this. She had to do this. If necessary, she’d break the glass and take her chances that the noise would be heard. One way or another, she was getting out of this house.
Something thunked against the side of the house, just below the window, and she almost jumped out of her skin. She didn’t know what had made the sound, but what if Niki and Darwin had heard it, and came to investigate? She turned her head to stare in frozen agony at the door, trying to hear if they were coming up the stairs, but this far from the door she couldn’t hear anything. Frantic, almost sobbing, she grabbed the window handle and began tugging viciously.