Her heart thundering against her ribs, she watched the pickup turn left at the crossroads, but she didn’t disobey his order. Not here, not yet. Instinct warned her that this deserted stretch of road was too isolated to succeed in anything but getting killed.
“Get moving!” He took her arm and headed her to the open door on the driver’s side. Cloaked in the deepening dusk of a snowy winter evening, Julie Mathison walked unsteadily beside a convicted murderer who was holding a gun on her. She had the chilling sensation they were both living a scene from one of his own movies—the one where the hostage got killed.
18
HER HANDS SHOOK SO VIOLENTLY she had to grope for the keys in the ignition, and when she tried to start the car she nearly flooded the engine because even her legs were jerking with fright. He watched her unemotionally from the passenger seat. “Drive,” he snapped when the engine was started. Julie managed to turn the car around and guide it to the end of the parking lot, but she stopped at the main road, her mind so paralyzed with terror that she couldn’t think of the words to ask the obvious question.
“I said drive!”
“Which way?” she cried, hating the timid, pleading sound of her voice and loathing the animal beside her for making her experience this uncontrollable terror.
“Back the way we came.”
“B-back?”
“You heard me.”
Rush hour traffic on the snowbound interstate near the city limits was moving at a crawl. Inside the car, the tension and silence were suffocating. Trying desperately to calm her rampaging nerves while she watched for some chance to escape, Julie lifted her shaking hand to change the radio station, fully expecting him to order her not to do it. When he said nothing, she turned the dial and heard a disk jockey’s voice exuberantly introducing the next country/ western song. A moment later the car was filled with the cheerful sounds of “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.”
While George Strait sang, Julie looked around at the occupants of the other cars, homeward bound after a long day. The man in the Explorer beside her was listening to the same radio station, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel, keeping time with the melody. He glanced her way, saw her looking at him, and nodded sociably, then he returned his gaze to the front. She knew he hadn’t seen anything abnormal. Everything looked perfectly normal to him, and if he were sitting where she was in the Blazer, it would have seemed perfectly normal. George Strait was singing, just like normal, and the expressway was crowded with motorists who were eager to get home, just like normal, and the snow was beautiful, just like normal. Everything was normal.
Except for one thing.
An escaped murderer was sitting in the seat beside her, holding a gun on her. It was the cozy normalcy of appearances juxtaposed against the demented reality of her situation that suddenly shoved Julie from paralysis to action. Traffic began to move, and her desperation gave birth to inspiration: They’d already passed several cars in ditches on both sides of the road. If she could fake a skid toward the ditch on the right and if she could throw the steering wheel to the left just as they went into the ditch, her door should remain usable while his might very well be trapped. It would work in her own car, but she wasn’t sure how the Blazer’s four-wheel drive would respond.
Beside her, Zack saw her gaze flick repeatedly to the side of the road. He sensed her mounting panic and knew that fear was going to drive her to try something desperate at any moment. “Relax!” he ordered.
Julie’s capacity for fear suddenly reached its limits and her emotions veered crazily from terror to fury. “Relax!” she exploded in a shaking voice, whipping her head around and glaring at him. “How in God’s name do you expect me to relax when you’re sitting there with a gun aimed at me? You tell me that!”
She had a point, Zack thought, and before she attempted something else that might actually get him captured, he decided that helping her to relax was in both of their best interests. “Just stay calm,” he instructed.
Julie stared straight ahead. Traffic was thinning out slightly, picking up some speed, and she began to calculate the feasibility of ramming the Blazer into the cars around her in an attempt to cause a major pileup. Such an action would cause the police to be summoned. That would be very good.
But she and the other innocent motorists involved in the collision would likely end up being shot by Zachary Benedict.
That would be very bad.
She was wondering if his gun had a full clip of nine shells in it and whether he would actually massacre helpless people, when he said in a calm, condescending voice that adults use on hysterical children, “Nothing is going to happen to you, Julie. If you do as you’re told, you’ll be fine. I need transportation to the state line, and you have a car, it’s as simple as that. Unless this car is so important to you that you want to risk your life to get me out of it, all you have to do is drive and not attract anyone’s attention. If a cop spots us, there’s going to be shooting, and you’ll be in the middle of it. So just be a good girl and relax.”
“If you want me to relax,” she retorted, goaded past all endurance by his patronizing tone and her strained nerves, “then you let me hold that gun, and I’ll show you relaxed!” She saw his brows snap together, but when he didn’t make a retaliatory move, she almost believed that he truly didn’t intend to harm her—so long as she didn’t jeopardize his escape. That possibility had the perverse effect of subduing her fears and simultaneously unleashing her frustrated fury at the torment he’d already put her through. “Furthermore,” she continued wrathfully, “don’t speak to me like I’m a child and don’t call me Julie! I was Ms. Mathison to you when I thought you were a nice, decent man who needed a job and who’d bought those d-damned jeans to impress your em-employer. If it hadn’t been for those damned j-jeans, I wouldn’t be in this mess—” To Julie’s horror, she felt the sudden sting of tears, so she shot him what she hoped was a disdainful look and then glared fixedly out the windshield.
Zack lifted his brows and regarded her in impassive silence, but inwardly he was stunned and reluctantly impressed by her unexpected show of courage. Turning his head, he looked at the traffic opening up ahead of them and at the thick, falling snow that had seemed like a curse a few hours ago but had actually diverted the attention of the police who had to deal with stranded motorists before they could begin to search for him. Last, he considered the stroke of luck that had put him not in the small rented car that had been towed away while he watched, but in a heavy four-wheel-drive vehicle that could easily navigate in the snow without getting bogged down on the less traveled route he intended to take up into the Colorado mountains. All of the delays and complications that had infuriated him for the last two days had turned out to be bonuses, he realized. He was going to make it to Colorado—thanks to Julie Mathison. Ms. Mathison, he corrected himself with an inner grin as he relaxed back in his seat. His flash of amusement vanished as quickly as it had come, because there was something about that newscast he’d heard earlier that was belatedly beginning to worry him: Dominic Sandini had been referred to as “another escaped convict” who “was apprehended and taken into custody.” If Sandini had stuck to the plan, then Warden Hadley should have been crowing to the press about the loyalty of one of his trustees rather than referring to Sandini as an apprehended convict.
Zack told himself that the information on the newscast had simply been jumbled, which accounted for the mistake about Sandini, and he forced himself to concentrate on the irate young teacher beside him instead. Although he desperately needed her and her car right now, she was also a serious complication to his plans. She probably knew he was heading for Colorado; moreover, she might have seen enough of that map and the directions with it to be able to tell the police the vicinity of Zack’s hideaway. If he left her at the Texas-Oklahoma border or a little further north at the Oklahoma-Colorado border, she’d be able to tell the authorities where he was going and exactly what kind of car he was driving as well. By now, his f
ace was already plastered all over every television screen in the country, so he couldn’t possibly hope to rent or buy another car without being recognized. Furthermore, he wanted the police to believe he’d managed to fly to Detroit and cross into Canada.
Julie Mathison seemed to be both a godsend and a disastrous kink in his plans. Rather than curse fate for saddling him with her and the deadly threat to his freedom that she represented, he decided to give fate an opportunity to work out this problem and to try to help them both relax. Reaching behind him for the thermos of coffee, he thought back to her last remarks and came up with what seemed like a good conversational opening. In a carefully offhand, nonthreatening tone, he inquired sociably, “What’s wrong with my jeans?”
She gaped at him in blank confusion. “What?”
“You said something about my ‘damned jeans’ being the only reason you offered me a ride,” he explained, filling the top of the thermos with coffee. “What’s wrong with my jeans?”
Julie swallowed an hysterical surge of angry laughter. She was concerned about her life, and he was concerned about making a fashion statement!
“What,” he repeated determinedly, “did you mean?”
She was on the verge of an angry retort when two things occurred to her at once—that it was insane to deliberately antagonize an armed man and that if she could make him relax his guard by indulging in small talk with him, her chances to either escape or get out of this alive would be vastly improved. Trying to inject a polite, neutral tone into her voice, she drew a long breath and said without taking her eyes from the road, “I noticed your jeans were new.”
“What did that have to do with your deciding to offer me a ride?”
Bitterness at her own gullibility filled Julie’s voice. “Since you didn’t have a car and you implied you didn’t have a job, I assumed you must be having a hard time financially. Then you said you were hoping to get a new job, and I noticed the crease in your jeans . . .” Her voice trailed off when she realized with a disgusted jolt that instead of the nearly destitute man she’d thought him to be he was actually a megamillionaire movie star.
“Go on,” he prodded, his voice tinged with puzzlement.
“I leapt to the obvious conclusion, for heaven’s sake! I figured you’d bought new jeans so you could make a good impression on your employer, and I imagined how important that must have been to you while you were buying them in the store and how much hope you must have been feeling when you bought them, and I-I couldn’t bear the thought that your hope was going to be trashed if I didn’t offer you a ride. So even though I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker in my life, I couldn’t stand to see you miss having your chance.”
Zack was not only stunned, he was unwillingly touched. Kindness like hers, a kindness that also required some kind of personal risk or sacrifice, had been absent from his existence for all the years he’d spent in prison. And even before that, he realized. Shoving the unsettling thought aside, he said, “You envisioned all that from a crease in a pair of jeans? You’ve got one hell of an imagination,” he added with a sardonic shake of his head.
“I’m obviously a bad judge of character, too,” Julie said bitterly. From the corner of her eye, she saw his left arm swing toward her and she jumped, muffling a scream before she realized he was only holding out a cup of coffee from the thermos. In a quiet tone that almost seemed to carry an apology for adding to her fright, he said, “I thought this might help.”
“I’m not in the slightest danger of falling asleep at the wheel, thanks to you.”
“Drink some anyway,” Zack ordered, determined to ease her terror even while he knew his presence was the source of it. “It will—” he hesitated, feeling at a loss for words, and added, “It will make things seem more normal.”
Julie turned her head and gaped at him, her expression making it eloquently clear she found his “concern” for her not only completely revolting, but insane. She was on the verge of telling him that, but she remembered the gun in his pocket, so she took the coffee in a shaking hand and turned away from him, sipping it and staring at the road ahead.
Beside her, Zack watched the telltale trembling of the coffee cup as she raised it to her lips, and he felt a ridiculous urge to apologize for terrifying her like this. She had a lovely profile he thought, studying her face in the light of the dashboard, with a small nose and stubborn chin and high cheekbones. She also had magnificent eyes, he decided, thinking of the way they’d shot sparks at him a few minutes ago. Spectacular eyes. He felt a sharp stab of guilty shame for using and frightening this innocent girl who’d been trying to be a good Samaritan—and because he had every intention of continuing to use her, he felt like the animal everybody believed he was. To silence his conscience, he resolved to make things as easy on her as he possibly could, which led him to decide to engage her in further conversation.
He’d noticed she wore no wedding ring, which meant she wasn’t married. He tried to remember what people—civilized people on the “outside”—talked about for idle conversation, and he finally said, “Do you like teaching?”
She turned again, her incredible eyes wide with suppressed antagonism. “Do you expect me,” she uttered in disbelief, “to engage in polite small talk with you?”
“Yes!” he snapped, irrationally angry at her reluctance to let him make amends. “I do. Start talking!”
“I love teaching,” Julie shot back shakily, hating how easily he could intimidate her. “How far do you intend for me to drive you?” she demanded as they passed a sign that said the Oklahoma border was twenty miles away.
“Oklahoma,” Zack said, half-truthfully.
19
WE’RE IN OKLAHOMA,” JULIE POINTED out the instant they drove past the sign announcing they were there.
He shot her a look of grim amusement. “I see that.”
“Well? Where do you want to get out?”
“Keep driving.”
“Keep driving?” she cried in nervous fury. “Now look, you miserable—I’m not driving you all the way to Colorado!”
Zack had his answer, she knew where he was going.
“I won’t do it!” Julie warned shakily, unaware that she had just sealed her fate. “I can’t.”
With an inner sigh at the battle she was bound to wage, he said, “Yes, Ms. Mathison, you can. And you will.”
His unflappable calm was the last straw. “Go to hell!” Julie cried, swinging the steering wheel hard to the right before he could stop her and sending the vehicle careening onto the shoulder as she slammed on the brakes and brought it to a lurching stop. “Take the car!” she pleaded. “Take it and leave me here. I won’t tell anyone I’ve seen you or where you’re going. I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
Zack reined in his temper and tried to soothe her with an attempt at levity. “In the movies, people always promise that same thing,” he remarked conversationally, glancing over his shoulder at the cars flying past. “I’ve always thought it sounded asinine.”
“This isn’t the movies!”
“But you do agree that it is an absurd promise,” he argued with a slight smile. “You know it is. Admit it, Julie.”
Shocked that he was apparently trying to tease her as if they were friends, Julie stared at him in furious silence, knowing he was right about the promise being ridiculous, but refusing to admit it.
“You can’t really expect me to believe,” he continued, his voice softening a little, “that you’d let me get away with kidnapping you and stealing your car and then be so grateful to me for doing both that you’d keep a promise to me you made under extreme duress? Doesn’t that sound a little insane to you?”
“Do you expect me to debate psychology with you when my whole life is at stake!” she burst out.
“I realize you’re afraid, but your life isn’t at stake unless you put it there. You aren’t in any danger unless you create it.”
Perhaps it was exhaustion or the low timbre of his voice or the steadiness
of his gaze, but as Julie looked at his solemn features, she found herself almost believing him.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he continued, “and you won’t, as long as you don’t do anything that attracts attention to me and alerts the law—”
“In which case,” Julie interrupted bitterly, snapping out of her trance, “you will blow my brains out with your gun. That’s very comforting, Mr. Benedict. Thank you.”
Zack held his temper in check and explained, “If the cops catch up with me, they’ll have to kill me, because I’m not going to surrender. Given the vigilante mentality of most cops, there’s a good chance you’ll be hurt or killed in the fray. I don’t want that to happen. Can you understand that?”
Furious with herself for being subdued by empty gentle words from a ruthless murderer, Julie jerked her gaze from his and stared out the front window. “Do you actually think you can convince me you’re Sir Galahad and not a depraved monster?”
“Evidently not,” he said irritably.
When she refused to look at him again, Zack gave an impatient sign and said curtly, “Stop sulking and start driving. I need to find a roadside telephone at one of these exits.”
The moment his voice chilled, Julie realized how foolish she’d been to ignore his “friendly” overture and antagonize him. What she probably ought to be doing, she belatedly decided as she pulled back out onto the highway, was fooling him into believing she was resigned to going along with him. As the snowflakes danced in front of her headlights, her mind began to calm and she thought carefully about possible ways out of her predicament, because it now seemed horribly likely that he was going to force her to drive him through Colorado as well as Oklahoma. Finding a means to foil his plan and get away became not only a necessity, but a downright challenge. To do that, she knew she had to be objective and to keep all traces of fright and fury from clouding her thoughts. She should be able to do that, Julie reminded herself bracingly. After all, she was no sheltered, unworldly, pampered hothouse flower. She’d spent the first eleven years of her life on the streets of Chicago and done just fine! Chewing on her lower lip, she decided to try to think of her ordeal as if it were merely a plot in one of the mystery novels she loved to read. She’d always felt some of the heroines in those novels behaved with sublime stupidity, which was what she’d been doing by antagonizing her captor, she decided. A clever heroine would do the opposite, she’d be devious and find ways to make Benedict relax his guard completely. If he did that, her chances to escape—and get him returned to prison where he belonged—would be dramatically increased. To accomplish that goal, she could try to pretend she was coming to think of this nightmare as an adventure, maybe she could even pretend to be on the side of her captor, which would require a stellar performance, but she was willing to try.