Was there a lake nearby? She hadn’t paid any attention to the local geography, but she supposed there was always a lake in the area, unless you were out in the middle of the desert.
“I hope it’s not too far.”
“Why? You got a train to catch?”
“I was just thinking that I’d like to suck your dick. You know, while you’re driving? But I can’t as long as I’m wearing my seat belt.”
Well, he hadn’t expected that. She was watching his face, and saw his expression change. She couldn’t read it, not looking at him in profile, but something registered.
“Whore.”
It was remarkable how much contempt he could get into a single syllable. He hated her, just plain hated her. But she responded as if oblivious to all that.
“I know,” she said. “I’m just terrible. I’m a bad little girl and I just can’t help myself.”
He was breathing a little faster. And was it her imagination or had his grip tightened on the steering wheel?
“It’s probably the full moon,” she went on. “I get restless and all I can think about is sucking cock.”
“You’re a fucking whore.”
“I know,” she said. “Look, let me suck it now, while you’re driving. Okay? And then when we get to where we’re going, you can punish me for being bad.” She uncoupled her seat belt. “Would you do that? Would you give me a spanking for being so bad? And maybe you could think of other things to do, so I’ll really learn my lesson.”
She swung around, brought her face to his crotch. Unbuttoned his pants, lowered his zipper. No underwear. A suit and a necktie, but no underwear, and no great commitment to personal hygiene, either. His uncircumcised penis, soft and small, did not smell like anything you’d want to put in your mouth, or even be in the same room with.
But if there’d been any question in her mind, this answered it. He’d been out hunting, and he meant to kill her.
She took hold of him with her left hand, reached around with her right hand for the knife in her hip pocket. Her mouth took him in even as her fingers fumbled with the knife, finally got it out of the pocket. She palmed it, held it out of sight, and he didn’t seem to have noticed.
Now if she could only get it open. There were knives you could open readily with one hand, switchblades and gravity knives, but this was your basic Dollar Store jackknife, with fake mother-ofpearl grips and a single four-inch blade. She tried to open it with one hand, couldn’t.
Maybe the blow job would be distraction enough. But he didn’t seem to be responding. He was breathing more rapidly, but he wasn’t getting hard. Well, that almost figured; he was a sadist, a killer, and he’d only get an erection if he was in control and she was in pain.
Just as she had that thought, she felt his hand on her throat.
His right hand, because he was still driving the car, still had his left hand on the steering wheel. His fingers settled on the back of her neck, his thumb at the base of her throat.
His grip tightened.
Don’t panic, she told herself. You can’t strangle a person with one hand. It’s hard enough with both hands.
But was that necessarily true? He was strong, he had big hands, and he was exerting a lot of pressure. Jesus, what a way to die, with a truly disgusting dick in your mouth and one huge hand throttling the life out of you.
And he was saying something. Hard to make out at first because he was muttering, but he was saying the same thing over and over and eventually she got it. “You filthy cunt you’re gonna die you filthy cunt you’re gonna die you filthy cunt…”
She used both hands, fought to get a grip on the knife blade, fought for breath. He was cutting off her air and it made her head swim and turned her hands clumsy. Then she got the knife open.
She bit down on his cock as hard as she could. His grip softened. She gasped for air and sank the knife blade into his balls.
The car was all over the road. He’d let go of the wheel and made fists of both hands, raining blows on the back of her head. She kept stabbing with the knife — his balls, his belly — and when the pain was enough to stop his fists, she reached out blindly and found the key in the ignition, turned it, shut off the engine.
The car was veering off the road, and he grabbed the wheel to right it, but with the engine off the steering was locked. The car powered through a wire farm fence, bounced crazily over uneven ground, and by the time it stopped moving she had managed to get the knife in his chest.
She had to get out. Had to catch her breath, had to unlock the doors, had to get out of the car and find her way back to her hotel.
But she’d been holding the darkness at bay ever since his hand fastened around her throat, and it had taken all her strength. Now she sighed and let go, and a tide of black rolled in and swept her under.
TWENTY-THREE
She didn’t know how long she was out. The darkness carried her away, and at some point another wave brought her back. She opened her eyes to darkness, listened to silence, and wondered for a moment if she was dead. But dead people didn’t feel pain, and she had pain in her head and neck and shoulders, and she sat up and confirmed that she was alive.
And he was dead. She remembered stabbing him in the groin, then in the chest, but she’d evidently stabbed him more times than she’d realized, and the whole front of him was a lake of blood from multiple wounds in the chest and abdomen. Her hands were bloody, and her face, and her hair. Blood everywhere, and it smelled, everything smelled. She had to get out of there but she couldn’t because the doors were locked and she was trapped with his rotting corpse and—
She breathed against the panic, stuffed it down, willed herself to rise above it. She figured out how to work the locks, opened the door on the passenger side, stepped out into the middle of a field. The car had continued some fifty yards after it left the road, and whether she’d been unconscious for three minutes or as many hours, no one had yet taken any notice of it.
She put a hand on the car for balance, drew in deep breaths. She listened intently but couldn’t hear anything. No traffic, no human sounds. The sky was dark overhead. He’d said something about a full moon, but if the moon was indeed full it was no match for the clouds. No moon, no stars, and she was stuck in the middle of nowhere, and soaked in blood in the bargain.
All right. You’re alive and he’s dead, which wasn’t the way he planned it. You can get out of this. One step at a time and you can get out of this just fine.
The first thing she got out of was the bloody sweatshirt. She had a plain T-shirt underneath, and there was likely to be blood on it, but it wasn’t soaked and sticky the way the outer garment was. She found a clean portion of the sweatshirt and used it to wipe her hands and face, then tossed it aside. It would be crime scene evidence, but of what? The blood on it was his. As for her own DNA and fingerprints, she couldn’t worry about that, not now.
She returned to the car, found the button to open the trunk. There was a suitcase, locked, but there was also a tire iron, and she picked it up and smacked the locks until they popped open. She did some more cleanup with one of his Tshirts, then drew out a white button-down shirt still in its wrapper from the laundry. It was much too big for her, but with the sleeves rolled up and the tails overhanging her jeans, it didn’t look too ridiculous.
She went through the suitcase, not sure what she was looking for, and had just about decided she was wasting precious time when she found the little drawstring pouch. She weighed it in her hands. Pennies? Gold coins?
She opened it, and poured its contents into the open suitcase. Rings, a bracelet, a wristwatch, some earrings. Souvenirs.
Well, why should she be surprised? It was hardly news that the son of a bitch had done this before.
His name was Rodney Casselhart, and he was a long way from home. He was in Ohio, driving a car with Pennsylvania plates, and he had an Iowa driver’s license in his wallet, and other ID that showed an address in Michigan.
She hadn’t wanted to search him,
but forced herself, and his wallet was in the first place she looked, his left front pants pocket, with $245 in it.
Not enough. Driving all around the country, picking up women and killing them? That would take cash. He had a couple of cards, Visa and MasterCard, both in his name, but he wouldn’t want to use them unless he had to.
God, did she really have to do this?
She decided she did, and in his right hip pocket she found a roll of hundreds secured with a thick rubber band. She didn’t waste time counting, just transferred the roll to her own pocket.
Now what?
Just leave everything, she thought.
And the knife? Just leave it in his chest?
They wouldn’t need the knife to know he’d been stabbed. You really couldn’t miss the wounds. And the knife in her possession would tie her to him. She could boil the thing for an hour and not get all his blood out of it.
But suppose she needed it?
Oh, please. You’re wasting time. Just go.
She was a few yards from the road when she heard a car approaching, the first traffic she’d heard since she came to. A ride, she thought, and then she thought No, don’t be an idiot. She hunkered down where she was, and the car turned out to be a truck, running its high beams, rolling on down the road.
And it was going away from the town, not toward it. She had her bearings now, remembered that they’d spun left when they went off the road, so the town was to her right. She couldn’t guess how far it was, or if there were any turns along the way, but that was the direction she had to take. Because she had to get back to her room, there were things she couldn’t just walk away from.
She waited until the truck’s taillights were out of sight. Then she started walking.
She’d been walking ten or fifteen minutes when she heard a vehicle behind her. She stepped off the road before the headlights could find her, concealed herself in the darkness. This time it was a car, a squareback sedan, with a man driving and a woman seated beside him. She watched them sweep on by and wished she’d been where they could see her. They’d have given her a ride, and they’d certainly have been safe.
But if they noticed the blood—
She probably could have explained it to their satisfaction. Still, she was probably better off walking. How much farther could it be?
She must have heard the motorcycle well before it registered on her. She’d gotten into the rhythm of walking, and her mind found things to think about. She was thinking how Rita had slept with something like a hundred and fifty men just by fucking that whacko Mormon.
Suppose it had been her?Would she have been killing a hundred and fifty men when she took Kellen out of the game?
Then she became aware of the engine noise, even as the pavement brightened in front of her from the bike’s high beams. Too late, she thought, and stepped off onto the shoulder, and turned toward the sound, even as it changed pitch. Whoever he was, he was slowing down. If it was a cop — oh, Jesus, if it was a cop she was screwed.
No point in trying to run. She stood there, waiting, and he braked to a stop. Her eyes registered that he wasn’t a cop, but she was only relieved for an instant.
A big man, clad entirely in black leather. Black leather pants, a black leather jacket with a lot of metal studs and zippers. Black leather gloves. Mirrored biker goggles covered his eyes, and a full dark beard obscured the rest of his face.
She’d have been better off with a cop. She wished she’d kept the knife, then knew it wouldn’t do her any good. This man would snap the blade between his fingers, then fuck her and kill her and eat her. He’d crack her bones for the marrow, floss his teeth with her hair.
“Rough night?”
His voice was low in pitch. Well, no surprise there. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel them taking in the blood, the general disarray.
“Kind of,” she said. “I got a ride with a guy and the car got wrecked.”
“I saw where somebody went off the road about two miles back. That you?”
She nodded.
“You looking to get help?”
She shook her head. “He’s dead.”
“Died in the wreck. I got a phone, if you want to call it in.”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Oh, what the hell. “He was going to kill me,” she said. “Rape me and kill me. I wouldn’t have been the first, either. I went through his bag afterward to find out who he was. There were these rings and bracelets and stuff. You know, women’s personal items.”
“Souvenirs.”
“Yeah.”
“Guy had a hobby. You don’t want to report it?”
“No.” He just stood there, waiting for more, so she said, “Going off the road didn’t kill him. It didn’t even knock him out. I had a knife. I—”
“Stabbed him.”
“It was self-defense, but—”
“You don’t want to have to lay that all out for the law.”
“No.”
“I can dig it. You live around here?”
She pointed in the direction she’d been walking, the direction he’d been heading himself. “I have a hotel room. I need to get my stuff. But once I do—”
“You want to get out of Dodge.” He patted the seat behind him. “Hop on.”
She didn’t pass out during the ride, or fall asleep, but it was almost as if she did. The bike sent the rest of the world away. All she heard was its engine, all she felt was the rush of the wind. She had her eyes closed, her arms around his broad back, her face pressed against the black jacket. She breathed in its old leather smell. Her mind took a break, and the next thing she knew the bike had stopped across the street from her hotel.
She said, “Can you wait? I’ll be like two minutes, I just have to grab one or two things.”
“Okay.”
“Or…”
“What?”
“Well, if you could wait, like, ten minutes, I could clean up and change my clothes. But if you’re in a hurry—”
“You ought to do that,” he said. “No rush. I’ll be here.”
She stripped, showered, washed her hair. Dressed in clean clothes, spread out Rodney Casselhart’s white button-down shirt on the bed, piled the clothes she’d been wearing on top of it, and folded it to make a bundle, tying the sleeves to secure it. Everything she could use, like her drugs and cash, or that might point them to her, like her cell phone, went in her shoulder bag.
She left the rest, along with her suitcase, locked the room behind her, and walked past the hotel desk with the bag over her shoulder and the bundled clothes under one arm. The clerk barely registered her presence, and her rent was paid for another five days, and by the time they realized she was gone they’d be past connecting her to the car in the field a few miles up the road, or the dead man behind the wheel.
She wasn’t sure he’d be waiting, but there he was, her knight in black leather armor, standing beside his bike. He reached for the bundle of clothes.
“Everything I was wearing,” she said. “And that was his shirt, I got it from his suitcase.”
“I’ll get rid of it for you.”
He stowed the bundle in a saddlebag. She said, “I’m glad you stayed.”
“I said I would.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t know what I’d have done if you didn’t.”
“You’d have thought of something. Where are you headed?”
Her thoughts hadn’t gone that far. “Just…some other city. Which way are you going?”
“South and west. Cincinnati for starters, but you probably want to get clear out of Ohio.”
“Probably, but if you could get me that far…”
“I could cut west now,” he said, “but that’d be Indiana, and I got reason not to go there.”
“Oh.”
“So I’ll run you through Cinci and into Kentucky. Let you off in Lexington or Lou’ville. That be all right?”
“Sure.”
He patted t
he seat behind him.
She said, “I really appreciate this. You’re going to a lot of trouble for me.”
“Not that much trouble.”
“Well, the thing is, if there’s anything I can do—”
“You could kick in ten or twenty bucks for gas. But if you’re short on dough, don’t worry about it.”
“No, that’s easy. And if there’s anything else—”
“You pay for gas and breakfast’s on me. But not until we’re on the other side of the Ohio River. There’s a good place in Covington. Can you hold out until then?”
“Sure. But what I meant—”
He turned to look at her, his eyes invisible behind the glasses.
“Just if there was, you know, anything else you wanted. It’d be okay.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I just—”
“Thing is,” he said, “I’m not really into girls these days.”
“Oh.”
“Girls, women. Or guys either. I’m just, you know, keeping it real simple these days.”
“Me too,” she said. “Real simple.”
She paid for their breakfast in Covington — eggs and grits and link sausage, and coffee that had stayed too long on the hot plate. She gave him twenty dollars for gas, and he took it only after she’d assured him that she was okay for cash. When he dropped her at a Louisville hotel, she still hadn’t told him her name, or learned his.
She dismounted, then remembered the dirty clothes in the saddlebag. He waved a hand dismissively, said he’d toss them once he’d crossed another state line. She wanted to say something, but all she could think of was “Thank you.”
“We’re cool,” he said, and reached out a gloved hand to touch her lightly on the shoulder. Her eyes stayed on him until he and his bike were around the corner and out of sight.
She took a room and paid cash in advance for four days, which was as much time as she figured she needed to spend in Louisville. Two hours later she was back at the hotel with new clothes and a suitcase. She took a long shower and put on some of the clothes she’d just bought, and decided to throw out the ones she’d arrived in.
By now, she thought, he’d probably crossed another state line.
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