“All right,” I murmured aloud. “Keep it together.”
I straightened with a breath, stiffened my back with a breath. Slipped the phone into my pocket with one hand, still holding my Glock with the other, feeling the pebbled butt of the gun against my sweating palm.
I had to get away from this place. Somewhere safe where I could think. The crazy killer’s threats were repeating themselves in my mind, as mocking and insistent as a bully’s schoolyard taunts. An agony beyond anything imaginable forever . . . hell won’t be the half of it . . . count the minutes till it begins . . . I could barely think with all that interior noise, could hardly consider what I’d found here—what the Starks or their employer had been looking for, but only I had found.
Samantha Pryor—whoever the hell she was—had been onto the Fat Woman. That had to be it. She had known it was Aunt Jane who’d been supplying Martin Emory, selling him the children he’d buried in the woods. What else had Samantha known? What else was in that sheaf of papers? Who was she, for Christ’s sake? Just a librarian?
I took one last glance around the shambles of the apartment. Then I turned to the door, holding my gun low, keeping it pressed against my pants leg. I unlocked the door and began to draw it open.
Suddenly, the door was kicked in, throwing me back. A giant of a man charged into the apartment as I staggered. He was massive—towering—massive in the middle, broad in the shoulders. Muscles stuffed into his jeans and baseball jacket. He was young, in his twenties, with styled, sandy hair and a sandy goatee. Nothing in his expression but businesslike professionalism as in one swift, unbroken motion, he pushed the door shut behind him and came at me.
I tried to bring the gun to bear. He was too fast. He was on me. Grabbed my arm with his left, brought his right up into my center. I never saw the Taser. I just felt the blast. My body went rigid, a tremor of muscle-clenching pain fanning out from the gun through all of me in a flash. The thug held the weapon against me and went on holding it. Then he snapped it off, pulled it back, and let me fall.
I collapsed into myself and crumpled down, dropped to the floor like a dead weight. I heard a curse come out of me without my even thinking to curse. What I was thinking was: Hold on to the gun. I tried, but I couldn’t. My spasming hand wouldn’t respond to my brain. The Glock dropped from my slack fingers as I toppled down.
I lay on the floor now, still clenched and shuddering. Unable to move but fully conscious. I could see the big thug swooping down to snap up my Glock. I could see him stick the gun into his belt. Then, trembling, helpless, I watched him unzip his baseball jacket. He had a T-shirt on beneath, his muscles bulging through it. With another quick, calm, professional motion, he pulled a roll of canvas from an inside pocket, tossed it onto the floor next to me. I saw it start to unroll. A canvas sack. I knew he was going to stuff me in there.
Now—still swift, still calm—he unzipped another pocket. Brought a leather pouch out of it. Opened the pouch, fished inside it with his fingers.
Terror wildfired through me as I lay watching him bring out a syringe.
An agony beyond anything imaginable forever . . . hell won’t be the half of it . . .
I had to move. I had to move but I couldn’t. I fought for control of my body but it was a thing apart, a shivering, unresponsive corpse with me trapped inside.
The thug held the syringe needle up and pushed the plunger just enough to clear the air from the canister. All the while his demeanor was bland, blank, serious, professional.
I let out a strangled noise through my frozen jaws as he dropped down onto one knee beside me.
Count the minutes till it begins, Champion.
I had to move. Had to fight. Had to get away or Stark would have me.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move.
The thug plunged the syringe’s needle into my neck. I was thinking, No, no, no! as I lost consciousness.
8
The Road to Hell
I STARTED TO WAKE slowly and then the memory of what had happened came back to me and the terror came back to me and I jolted awake fast.
I was in total darkness. I didn’t know how long I’d been under. I found I had control of my muscles again, but I still couldn’t move, I could only struggle. My hands were pinioned behind me. I was in a close space and couldn’t extend my legs. I thrashed for a second in blind panic, trying to tear my way free by main strength. Then I stopped. Lay sweating and breathless, my heart pounding. I fought to keep still, to take stock.
My gut burned from the Taser. My neck ached from the shot. My mind was still slow and sluggish from whatever the thug had drugged me with. The effect got worse as the adrenaline of panic seeped away. I began to feel like a great, strong hand was wrapped around me, trying to drag me back down into unconsciousness. My eyes began to flutter shut . . .
But that voice—Stark’s hash rasping skeleton voice was alive in my mind again. Hell won’t be the half of it . . . count the minutes till it begins . . . And that laugh: a sound like a snake slithering and rattling inside my head. Fear and desperation rose up in me again and overcame everything—the sluggishness, the pain . . . everything. I forced myself to think. I had to get free. I had to get free before it was too late. If it wasn’t too late already.
I took two long deliberate breaths to fight down the panic, to slow my racing thoughts and clear my head. Where was I? Inside the trunk of a car. Yes, I could feel the motion, hear the noise of the engine, the noise of other cars passing outside. I was on a highway. Traveling somewhere. Traveling to Stark. Traveling to hell.
Two more deep breaths. Don’t panic. Fight the panic.
My hands—what about my hands? Handcuffs? No. Twisting my fingers around, I could feel the extended plastic tab of a nylon zip-tie pulled tight around my wrists.
I drew another breath. It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t enough air in here. The air was hot and close. Not a lot of room to move, either. Like being in a coffin—which added to the frenzy of dread inside me. At least I wasn’t inside that canvas sack. That was something anyway.
I shifted my body so that my fingertips could brush the bottom of the trunk, so I could get a sense of my surroundings. The trunk was carpeted. Empty too, as far as I could make out—kicking around with my feet, turning my body. Nothing in here but me.
All right, at least I was thinking now. Empty trunk. Locked. Me inside, hands tied up. What do you do? It’s no simple thing to open a car trunk from the inside. That’s why new cars sometimes have emergency tabs in them: phosphorescent plastic pull-tabs you can see in the dark so you can grab them and pop the trunk open if you get trapped somehow. If I could find a tab, maybe I could pull it . . .
I twisted around some more. Every motion brought back to me how restricted I was. Stuffed in that small space, my hands bound. Every time I tried to move I had to breathe down another fresh gout of panic.
Still—grunting, straining—I managed to twine my body over far enough so that I could get a broad look at the darkness surrounding me. No phosphorescent tab that I could see. No simple way to get the trunk open.
The failure brought a fresh wash of sweat down the front of my face. I had to blink the sting of it out of my eyes. But I forced myself not to go crazy over it. Just a setback, that’s all. You had to keep trying, right? You had to go on thinking: There was no emergency tab, so what else could I find in the trunk of a car? What else?
Tools.
The idea lit a faint glow of hope in me. If I could find something—anything—to use as a saw or a lever, I might be able to break through the zip-tie, free my hands, give myself at least a fighting chance when Stark and his thugs came to get me. Even a sharp edge somewhere might help me cut through the plastic.
The hope glowed—and then the glow dimmed almost to nothing. In a lot of trunks, the tools for changing tires are kept with the tire beneath the trunk floor. No way for me to lift the trunk floor while I was lying on top of it as I was.
In some cars though, it’s di
fferent . . .
I began to shuffle and hump my body across the small space. It was hard. Hard. Moving first one half of me, then the other, like a snake. I writhed to one side of the trunk. Got myself in a position where I could run my fingers over the trunk wall.
I felt nothing there. Just more of the same, more of the smooth carpeting. No sharp edges—not a one. Had to move up a little. Every inch a strain. The sweat pouring out of me, the breath breaking from me in little grunts and gasps. But now—yes—my fingertips brushed over a ridge in the surface. What was it? Something. My eyes filled with tears of frustration as I tried to work my restricted fingers under the edge of it, tried to test if there was a break there, something that could be pulled away from the rest.
Then something budged. Just a little. I felt a break in the carpet. One fingernail—one sliver of one fingernail—worked its way under the ridge in the trunk wall. I worked to get a better grip.
Please, God, I prayed. Squeezing my eyes shut so that the tears fell from them, mixing with the sweat.
The car hit a bump. My fingernail slipped out of the ridge.
I let out a broken cry of frustration. I could’ve sworn I heard Stark’s skeletal laugh. Count the minutes till it begins, Champion . . .
With a growl, I hurried to twist back into position. To find the ridge, to get my fingernail back under it. There it was. I wedged the nail in. Curled my finger. I felt the ridge shift, pulling away from the rest of the wall.
Please . . .
Now I could work my fingers into the space. Now I could pull again. A piece of the wall came loose. The space widened. I struggled to shift my body. Worked my hands in deeper. Pulled again.
A small square section of the wall fell free. I felt as if my heart was about to leap out of my chest. What was it? What had I pulled out? I couldn’t turn to look. I wouldn’t have been able to see it in the dark anyway. But I prayed I had opened the tool compartment. It had to be. It had to.
Before I could find out, the motion around me changed. I felt the car turn. I felt it slow. I lay very still, trying to hear over the noise of my hammering heart, trying to get a sense of what was happening in the big, free world outside this smothering darkness.
The car was leaving the highway. It slowed some more. It rolled to a stop. My breathing stopped as well. Had we reached our destination? No, not so close to the exit ramp. We’d just stopped for a moment. A stop sign at the end of the ramp—that had to be it. But maybe the driver had left the highway because he heard me moving back here. Maybe he was going to come back around to check on me. Maybe he’d see that I’d worked the tool compartment open and hit me with the Taser or the syringe again, or maybe . . .
No. The car started up. Moving now on a slower road. A local road.
I licked my dry lips. We must be getting close, I thought. Nearing our destination. Where Stark was waiting for me . . . I felt my heart, my hopes sinking. Not much time left.
But some time. Some.
I opened my mouth wide and pulled as deep a breath as I could. Prying the cover off the wall compartment had given me some hope. Now the sense that time was running out gave me fresh urgency. I needed the energy from both. The muscles in my shoulders were strained and burning, sore from the effort of moving my fingers with my wrists bound behind me. Every movement in that coffin of a place made me draw my lips back, bare my teeth in pain. Only hope, and the fear of what was coming—what was coming fast, coming soon—pushed me on, mind against body, mind forcing the body to try again.
I had to work the separated section of the trunk out of my way. Then I pressed close to the wall. Found the opened compartment. Forced my restricted hands into it.
My fingers touched cold metal right away. I hardly dared to feel the thrill of it. I scrabbled desperately to get a grip on the metal. A cylinder of iron. The car’s tire iron. Wedged into some sort of holder in the wall.
Fresh tears sprang to my eyes—tears of desperate desire now. The hope that I could get that tool brought fresh fears with it: fear that time would run out before I got the thing, fear that the nylon of the zip-tie would be too strong, fear that my movements were so restricted I wouldn’t be able to use the iron at all.
I strained back, wrapped the fingers of one hand around the cool cylinder. I arched my body. Kicked with my feet, grunting. I came away from the wall—and, yes, pulled the tire iron free.
I fell slack. Panting from the effort, gulping in lungfuls of the hot air. My shirt was soaked through with sweat, clammy on me, heavy on me. And my arms hurt so much I had to lie still another moment to let the muscles rest, let the pain subside.
As I paused like that, blinking through sweat, staring into almost pitch blackness, the car’s movements once more forced themselves on my attention. We were traveling slower than before but our progression was just as steady. I figured we must be on a smaller highway now, maybe a two-lane. Traveling through open country, I imagined. Sure: traveling to someplace secluded. Someplace where Stark could go to work on me in private, without interruption, for as long as he wanted . . .
Stark’s voice started to whisper in my mind again: With the right tools, you can go straight into the brain . . . But I chased him off with a fierce shake of the head, a silent curse, my teeth gritted against his hissing, skeletal presence.
All the while, I kept hold of the tire iron in one hand. Now I tightened my grip, began to try to twist it around so I could wedge it between my wrist and the plastic, get it inside the loop of the twist tie. Oh, man, it was slow work. Slow, hard, so frustrating. So many failures. So many times I lost my grip and then—then I dropped it, and dropped it again—and each time I heard the clunk of the iron on the trunk floor, I made a noise in answer like a beast whimpering in the jaws of a trap. I got hold of the iron again. I got the wedge under the plastic of the zip-tie—then it snapped away again. I had to stop to rest my shoulder, gasping for breath. But almost at once, I tried again. Got the wedge in a second time, scraping my skin, making it burn—and bump: The car turned, went off the road, went bounding and rumbling over a new, rough surface.
I knew where we were—or at least I thought I knew. We were on a broken road now, maybe a dirt road. The sort of road that leads into the middle of nowhere, to a place where no one would hear me screaming, where I would never be found until Stark’s long vengeance was over.
My heart sped up and my breath grew shallow. Exhausted, sick, hurting, gasping, I felt a fear beyond fear, a scarlet mindful of fear that almost torched my panic again. But the wedge was in this time, in beneath the zip-tie well and truly. I worked it in deeper with one hand. Then deeper, bit by bit. Then I began to try to wrap the fingers of my other hand around the shaft.
The car juddered over the broken road, dropping into a deep hole with a jarring jolt. But I still had the tire iron gripped in both hands. I started to twist it against the zip-tie, using it as a lever to stretch the plastic, to pull the bonds away from my wrists, farther away, and farther, trying to get it to break.
It wouldn’t break. I couldn’t get enough leverage. I relaxed the pressure, gasping. No choice. My shoulders were burning with pain. My wrists were aching, my hands weak.
The car bounced and slowed and my heart seized in me. I thought we’d reached the end of the line. But no, we were only working our way more slowly over the broken road, edging forward, maneuvering past the potholes.
I didn’t try to stretch the tie again; I knew it wouldn’t break. Instead, I shifted my grip on the metal bar. I worked my hands into position. I drew breath. Held it. Then all at once, I let the air burst out of me as with a single concerted motion—a single effort of strength that tore the sinews in my arms and sent a sparkling burst of agony through the darkness behind my eyes, I twisted the tire iron in the zip-tie sharply—one hand pushing one way, one pulling in the other—and the plastic snapped.
My hands were free.
The shock of the release, the joy of fresh hope, the relief to my arms—all of it sent a new bu
rst of strength through me. Quickly, I tore the zip-tie off me completely. I curled around in the cramped space. I ran my fingers over the metal of the trunk cover, trying to find a spot where I might wedge the tire iron in, break the lock, and pry the lid open.
But the damn thing seemed built to thwart me. The trunk lid overlapped with the body of the car in such a way I didn’t think I’d be able to get the iron in between them—and even if I did, I wasn’t certain I’d be able to get the leverage I needed to snap the latch.
I cursed, my heart falling as quickly as it had risen. I had to steel myself against breaking—because I was breaking, my spirit was breaking and I had to fight to keep it alive. I told myself I had a chance now—I had a weapon now, free hands, the element of surprise—I could do battle if I had to. But I remembered the calm, professional, expert demeanor of the young muscleman who’d put me in here. He had a Taser. He surely had a gun. He probably had allies—even Stark himself—waiting for him wherever we were going. If I was still stuck in this rolling coffin when we reached the end of the line, I was a dead man, and worse than dead.
“All right, all right,” I whispered. My voice was barely audible above the noise of the tires banging over the rough road.
I had to think again, had to go back to the beginning. What did I have? What could I use? What could I find that would help me get out?
The jack.
I started moving at once. Twisting around. Gasping, puling with the effort. Working my body into position to get my hands in the compartment, to get the jack. I grabbed it, pulled it out of its holder. It was a good one. A heavy, solid scissor jack. I set it on the trunk floor. Feeling my way, I worked the iron into its slot. I lay curled on my side next to it. I started to pump the bar.
The jack cranked up inch by inch. I could hardly see it in the dark and had to keep putting my hands on top of it to find out how high it was. I wasn’t sure it was tall enough to reach the lid, but there was no sense worrying about it. I didn’t have any other ideas. I tried not to think. I just kept pumping.