Willing Hostage

by Marlys Millhiser

  By the time Leah left the bathroom he had dressed in clean clothes, made the bed, set coffee to perk, had crisp bacon draining, and was cracking eggs into hot grease.

  “If you’ll just let me go, I won’t—”

  “Make some toast.”

  They consumed an enormous breakfast, wordlessly, sitting side by side on stools at the kitchen bar. He set her to washing dishes while he shaved with the bathroom door open. A sweet domestic scene—except for the gun resting on the edge of the sink in front of him.

  He found thick socks in a drawer, brought a pair of ugly boots from a closet, and made her try them on. “They’ll do if you wear two pairs of socks.” He put additional socks and her tennis shoes in the duffel bag.

  Everything was tidy when they left, Leah in the ugly boots, the key on the bar. They crossed the road in front of the cabin and walked downhill, stopping to bury his dirty clothes under a rock.

  “Glade, please—”

  He caught her up short, swinging her around. “Welker even told you my name?”

  The thunder on his face, the suspicion in his voice told Leah she’d made a mistake. “Just Glade, not the rest. If you’re running away from someone, I’ll just slow you down. I won’t tell anyone I saw you if you let me go.”

  “I either take you with me or shoot you here. You have a choice.”

  They started down again.

  “Tell me everything he said.” The hand on her arm squeezed mercilessly but they didn’t slow. “Everything.”

  She would have a bruise on her arm to match those on her wrists. She told him all she could remember because she sensed that he’d begun again to believe she wasn’t Sheila … until she’d used his name. It wasn’t healthy to be Sheila.

  They had walked miles in what Leah thought to be the direction of Oak Creek, and she was dragging, when a woman’s scream brought them up short.

  “Quietly,” Glade warned and they climbed through trees to the top of a ridge. He pushed her down behind a boulder and lifted himself to peer over it.

  A car started somewhere and drove away. The hand on her back lifted. “Stay here.” Leah was alone. His bundle lay beside her.

  She couldn’t believe she was free. She raised herself over the boulder to see him slither down a weedy slope. Beyond the slope was a meadow of wild flowers and at the far side of it a narrow dirt road … and a yellow Volkswagen. Someone slumped over the wheel.

  Leah turned to run in the other direction but a muffled explosion stopped her. The front of the Volks burst into flame. The hood flew back over the bug’s body just before Glade reached it.

  A dark smoke ball enveloped the scene and she stood undecided. Something round, with feet, burst from the smoke and raced across the meadow toward her. Glade followed with a woman draped across his arms. They reached the bottom of the slope as another explosion disintegrated the Volkswagen. Burning pieces flew across the meadow and a smoking ball of fur cleared the ridge, raced past Leah, and bounced off a tree trunk.

  Leah drew off her sweat shirt and wrapped the stunned animal in it. The end of his tail was singed and smoking, the back of his hind legs blackened. “Poor Goodyear, poor thing.” She cradled him, crooning. He lay trembling in her arms, his eyes dilated with shock.

  There were dark smudges on Glade’s face when he stumbled over the ridge. Long flaxen hair rippled over his arm as he laid his burden on the ground. Sheila was naked below the waist, her legs blackened from the knee down. Angry red patches mottled her face.

  “Sheila?” he bent over her. “Sheila?” Had he saved her because there was a humane instinct in him, or just to get information?

  The poor creature moved her lips and answered him in a whisper. Tears crept from sightless, staring eyes. He studied her a long moment, rubbed his forehead, then stood.

  Smoke billowed from the meadow.

  “We’d better get out of here.” He reached for his bundle.

  “You can’t leave her.…”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Are you sure?” Leah found a tree to lean against She’d seen too much death lately.

  “Yes.” His shoulders drooped as he stared at the woman at his feet and then at Leah. “That could just as well have been you, Leah Harper. Your friend Joseph Welker sent you straight back into this mess. The damn fool.”

  “Was it … goons?”

  He touched the woman’s bare thigh with his toe. “Looks like it.”

  Sheila’s empty eyes still stared at Leah. Leah moved away.

  “She’s been tortured. They probably thought she knew where I was.” He picked up her duffel. “I’m getting out of here. Coming?”

  “Why should I? You’ve put your gun away.”

  He sighed and ran his hand over dark curls. “Listen, damn it! She was in your car, had your cat … she’s blond … They probably thought they had you—not Sheila.” Glade walked off.

  Leah looked again at the disfigured body and shuddered. Had Sheila taken Leah’s place? Cradling the singed cat in her arms, she ran after him. “Wait.”

  He stopped but didn’t turn.

  “What did she say to you? I saw her speak.”

  “She said she didn’t want to die.” He started off at an angle to the meadow, almost at a run, as if to escape the woman on the hill.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Now let me get this straight.” Leah drank from the canteen and passed it to Glade. “If I go with you I’m in danger because you are in danger. If I don’t, I am in danger because I’m alone.” She rubbed her arms, sore from carrying Goodyear. “I know I’m tired but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense … somewhere.”

  Glade poured water into his cupped hand for the cat. Except for a singed tail and hind legs, the Siamese seemed in good shape. He’d condescended to let Leah carry him uphill and down for two hours like a litter bearer.

  “Your cat’s got a lump on his head.”

  “He ran into a tree and you’re changing the subject.”

  He looked at her directly for the first time since they’d left Sheila’s body. “It’s your decision.”

  “I can’t make a decision without any information and why should I trust you?”

  “You trusted Welker.”

  “And look where it got me. When I saw you at Ted’s Place with those two men … were they goons?”

  “No.” A deep tan fitted his face like a hood, but stopped where he had shaved that morning. Had he been bearded until recently?

  “But you said before you jumped out of my car that you were dead, anyway. If you didn’t know about the goons till I told you in Oak Creek … were Charlie and friend going to kill you, too?”

  “I think after they got what they wanted I would have had an accident—fatal.” Shadowed eyes didn’t blink.

  “What will the goons do if they catch you?”

  “Kill me.”

  “This is getting pretty hard to believe … what you’ve told me. And what you haven’t makes it hard to understand.”

  “I don’t really know you are who you say you are, do I?” Hard suspicion in his voice. He fingered a small rock, turning it over in his hand. He seemed to be turning something over in his mind as well. “I can’t tell you any more,” he said finally.

  “Then I can’t go with you willingly.”

  “Suit yourself. I guess it’s your neck.” Glade started up the treeless slope. When he reached the top he looked back.

  Leah cringed. Would he shoot her as he’d threatened to that morning? But he just threw the rock to the ground, shrugged, and disappeared down the other side.

  Leah stared at the cat lounging gracefully on her sweat shirt and saw instead Sheila’s body. She’d tried not to think about it when following Glade but now the savage horror of what had happened to Sheila was beginning to sink through the protective numbness that followed shock. Tortured, he’d said. Had she been raped, too? Leah wanted to forget Sheila but she felt so alone and exposed on the rocky hillside.…

  T
he sun was high and hot. She shed the wool sweater and tried to feel relieved that he had left her.

  Surely her decision had been the right one. There couldn’t be any safety with the dangerous Glade.

  The goons had been after Sheila, not Leah. How could they have known about Leah anyway? From Welker? Or the newscast … they couldn’t have missed that.

  Strange scenery loomed around her and it all looked the same. Bees hovered over tiny flowers almost lost in the grass. A clear, sun-drenched world. No roads, no signs, no people to give direction. How long might she and Goodyear wander to find a way out, with no food or water? Even carrying a gun, Glade had been company.

  Had the goons flown the plane that had tried to force her off the road? But that had been before the newscast.

  Leah drew up her knees, wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her chin, and tried to ignore her surroundings … just as she used to do when she was small and her younger sisters seemed to be getting all the attention. She would love to have had a phone handy at that moment, to call Annette, to reassure herself that the real world still existed.

  To go back to the Vega, providing she could find it, might be dangerous if “they” really connected her with Glade and Sheila. If she were one of the hunted now, where could she go and to whom? She didn’t know who the hunters were.

  Leah hadn’t wanted to believe she was numbered among the hunted when she’d talked to Glade. Now that he was gone, she perversely feared she was. She decided to cut her losses, leave the Vega and belongings, and catch the first flight east. Checking her wallet in the duffel bag, she found the FBI money still there. She’d certainly earned it.

  “The first order of business, cat, is to get us to civilization and hope we don’t meet up with any bad guys along the way.” She picked up the duffel and pulled her sweat shirt from under the cat. “You can walk this time.”

  Goodyear turned his back, then humped with racking spasms that rippled under his fur along his sides to his throat. He vomited, coughed, vomited again, and gave her a nasty look over his shoulder that said, “Now see what you’ve done?”

  Leah scooped him up and started downhill. “The trouble with you is you’re male. Males are behind all the problems I’ve ever had. Because of men I haven’t been able to get anywhere and because of you I might not even get out of—”

  The sound that interrupted Leah turned her insides to water. She ran down the hill with the twisting cat trying to claw her and the duffel flopping under the other arm. The enormous boots tried to trip her.

  The sound of a small plane drew closer. And while she chided herself for fearing every motorized vehicle aloft—they couldn’t all be looking for her—she felt truly among the hunted now. The hill was too open, but a thicket of scrubby bushes ran along the gully at the bottom. Before she reached them, there were other feet pounding behind her. But she ran faster toward the thicket without turning, almost losing the struggling animal in her haste.

  Goodyear would be a dead giveaway.

  An arm and heavy breathing loomed behind her, the arm propelling her even faster until her feet seemed to paw the air. “Don’t let go of the cat,” Glade warned and pushed them all under the prickly bushes.

  They lay on their stomachs, watching through brambles as the plane cleared the crest of the hill. Glade gagged for breath, his face dripping. He’d run a long way to get back to her.

  “Cover your hair.” He pulled Goodyear under his chest. Leah reached for her sweat shirt and couldn’t find it. She pulled the green wool sweater from the duffel to cover her head and slid the white duffel under her.

  “Lie still,” he ordered, but his own body shuddered as he struggled to breathe. She was afraid he was moving the bushes.

  “Is it the same plane?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It flew in very tight circles around the hill. Leah could see two men in the cockpit. One of them had binoculars. The circle began to widen. It was the same plane.

  “Put your head down so they can’t see your face.”

  Her eyes snapped an automatic picture of the hill as she lowered her face to the damp smell of earth. But the picture of the hill remained. Because there was something there that shouldn’t have been. And it lay like a dark calling card not twenty yards from their hiding place.

  “My sweat shirt,” Leah whispered under the sweater. “It’s out there. It’s navy blue but very obvious.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said in the same flat, hopeless way he’d said, “I’m dead anyway.”

  Goodyear complained with a warning and she could feel Glade struggling to keep the cat beneath him.

  The sound of the widening circles roared closer until it was directly over them.

  “Will you tell me now what all this is for?” she said without moving her head. “What if I get killed for something I know nothing about? It’s not fair.” There had been a not too subtle change in their relationship. She was now on the same side of the hunt as he. The wrong side. The next time the plane made a pass over her sweat shirt she knew she’d be sick.

  At first she thought he hadn’t heard her but finally he answered in a strangely muffled voice, “It’s all about oil shale.”

  “Is the property Welker offered you money for some land with oil shale?”

  “No. It’s … information. Get ready to move.” The muscles of his leg tensed next to her.

  She raised her head. The circle was taking the plane over the crest of the hill.

  “Now.” He lifted her by the arm.

  “My sweat shirt.”

  “Leave it. They’ve seen it. Don’t drop anything else.”

  They ran along the gully full of bushes until the sound of the plane indicated it was turning. He pushed her down again. One of her legs lay in water as they hid under bushes. Goodyear laid his ears back, slanted his eyes, and moaned murder as he was tucked under Glade.

  “Why should the FBI be interested in oil?”

  “Everybody’s interested in oil. Come on.”

  They moved every time the plane turned its tail. Leah, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment, had a light, floating feeling until she slammed safely to earth again. They gradually left the plane’s circle behind. Maybe it was staying with her sweat shirt.

  “What if we run out of bushes?”

  “We’re dead.”

  By the time they emerged the plane was only a sound behind them. “Can’t we hide here till they run out of gas?”

  “They’ve radioed for men and dogs by now. Let’s hope we don’t meet them on our way out.” They ran upright through trees. Leah could still hear the plane.

  Keeping to any cover available, they came finally to a surfaced road. He checked the sun and headed them to the right along the road, but back in the trees.

  “We’re going in the direction of the plane, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, and in the direction of the truck, I hope.”

  “What truck?”

  “My … our ticket out of here.” His beard was growing out already. Goodyear had added scratches to those she’d left on his face.

  One of her ugly boots squeaked as she ran, soaking from her periodic sojourns near water. He kept her moving at a killing pace.

  “How many people … or groups of them are after you?”

  “Your goons make three.”

  “I reported you to the local police in Walden.”

  His look made her shudder. “That makes four. Can’t you run faster?”

  “No.” She’d seen that look before … at Ted’s Place.

  A gray pickup was parked at the edge of the road ahead. “Stay here.” He thrust the cat at her and moved cautiously toward the truck.

  Leah glanced back down the road. He was neither a “nice” nor a safe ally. If she wasn’t so tired she could escape him now. Was she safer with or without him? Goodyear ran a set of claws down her neck. She slapped him and glanced toward the truck.

  Glade peeked under a tarpaulin that covered the
truck bed and gestured.

  She hesitated, looking back down the road. At least he wasn’t pointing a gun at her.

  She could hear the sound of the plane again. It came from ahead.

  Sheila’s tortured body shimmered behind her eyes.

  Leah pushed the struggling cat’s paws from her face and ran toward the sound of the enemy plane and the dark man crawling into the cab of the pickup.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “See what’s in the box.” Glade drove sedately. The plane appeared to their right, still making its circles.

  “Cold chicken.”

  Another pickup approached, a car behind it.

  “Get down,” he ordered.

  Leah folded herself over the chicken. She heard dogs barking as the vehicles passed. So did Goodyear. He climbed the back of the seat.

  “Were those the dogs I saw at Ted’s Place?”

  “Probably.” He took a chicken breast. “See if that thermos on the floor has coffee in it.”

  It did. Goodyear slithered down between them. With the smell of chicken he’d forgiven all.

  “Give him the wing if there is one.”

  “Why are you so nice to cats and so mean to people?” Leah handed Goodyear a wing.

  Glade’s teeth showed white between dark stubble in the first smile she’d seen. “That’s a good question, Leah Harper.” The truck no longer moved sedately. “Is it just chicken?”

  “There’re rolls and packets of honey.” She took a closer look at the side of the box. A helpless, disbelieving mood made her laugh until she feared she’d choke on the chicken in her mouth. “It’s Colonel Sanders!” A gift from the normal world. It must still be out there.

  “Civilization is a creeping disease.” He laughed with her, but his laugh was hollow, like his voice. “Spread me some honey and have some coffee. Good old Ben is a civilized beast.”

  “Who’s Ben?”

  “A friend who … provided all this.” But again suspicion tinged his voice.

  The chicken vanished between the three of them. Goodyear ate bread and honey but showed no interest in coffee.

  Leah dozed and slept. She remembered passing through a small town but aching muscles and a satisfied stomach succumbed even as she fought sleep. The next she knew, they were on a narrow dirt road sweeping endlessly through more scenery.