by West, Dahlia
Rawlins again looked at his blank notebook. “Ayuh. I heard. Five years ago. Ain’t heard from him since, you said.”
Chris surged toward the man, finally having reached his limit, but Caleb reigned him in.
Rawlins feigned surprise. “Whoa, now, son. You sure got a shit temper. I remember that about you, too. Just like your daddy. You sure maybe you two didn’t have a fight, you and, uh, your ol’ lady? Maybe you smacked her around a little. Maybe she took off and-”
“Rawlins,” Caleb said gruffly. “That’s enough. You file a report right now or I’m going to the station, talking with the Chief, and I’ll file the report.”
Rawlins scoffed. “Travel together in packs. Guess it makes sense,” the older man muttered.
“What?” Caleb snapped.
Rawlins squared his shoulders and glared at Caleb. “Seems to me that I heard a story that your daddy killed your mama. And he’s still in San Quentin. Beat her to death with his bare hands.”
The room got instantly glacial and Tex grabbed both Chris and Caleb by the arms and shoved them toward the door. “We’re going to the station,” he announced. “Easy, you stay in case you hear anything. Rawlins,” Tex drawled as he turned after successfully shoving Chris out the door. “It’s time to put down the doughnuts and get off your fat, lazy ass.”
Tex didn’t stay to listen to Rawlins’ reaction. He pushed both men to Chris’ extended cab and demanded they get inside.
“This is bullshit!” Chris shouted.
Caleb slammed the door of the truck. “I’m sorry he’s the one who caught the call. We’ll go over his head. We don’t need that sorry sonofabitch.”
Tex got behind the wheel and drove them to the Police Station for some real help.
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Hayley actually made it to the door before she realized he had let her get that far. He even let her turn the lock before grabbing her from behind and hurling her toward the wall. She crashed into it and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her head swam.
He sighed again. “Get up,” he said impatiently, as though she were a child who couldn’t follow directions.
Hayley was too stunned to move.
“Get up,” he repeated, this time with an edge to his voice.
She steadied herself against the wall and got to her feet.
“You’re mine, Sarah. You’ve always been mine. And you are only going to leave here, with me, if you’re a very, very sweet girl. So you need to start proving to me that you can be sweet. Take off your clothes.”
Hayley hesitated. There was no way she could do that. The thought of him touching her again made her want to vomit.
“Take. off. your. clothes. Sarah.”
When Hayley still didn’t respond, he moved toward her. She fought the rising panic that threatened to consume her. She held out her hands to ward him off.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Okay.” She realized now that she was never leaving this room. No matter what he said. Her only opportunity for survival was to capitalize on a mistake he might make. She closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. Her hands still shook as she grasped the hem of her shirt and pulled it up over her head.
She pushed her shorts and panties down to the floor and stepped out of them. He must have already taken her shoes. She crossed her arms in front of herself in an attempt to shield even a little bit of herself from his gaze. He approached her and she squeezed her eyes shut. His fingers found her belly and traced one of the scars. She refused to open her eyes but she could tell he’d leaned in close. His hot, fetid breath was in her ear. “See these, Sarah? I made these. These are mine. You’re mine.” Hayley said nothing. “Say it,” he demanded. She remained silent. “Say it! Say you’re mine!”
When Hayley still didn’t respond, he grabbed a handful of her hair. “Say that you’re mine,” he growled. He’d apparently had enough of her stubbornness. Without releasing her hair, he grabbed her arm with his other hand and dragged her forward. Hayley’s bare feet crossed the soft area rug to the hardwood floor and then onto the chilled tile of the en suite bathroom. He release her arm long enough to reach into the shower and turn on the water.
With his fingers threaded through her hair, he shoved her into the stall. She cried out from the sting of the freezing water. He let go and stepped back. “Wash yourself,” he commanded. It took Hayley a moment to catch her breath. Apparently not moving fast enough, he grabbed a bar of soap off the ledge and pushed it into her hand. “Clean yourself.”
He watched as Hayley slowly, so very slowly, lathered up the soap in her palms. Her skin was welting from the cold spray.
“I’m taking back what’s mine, Sarah,” he told her. “But not right now,” he informed her. “Right now, you need a good cleaning. Because I don’t want his filth on me.”
Hayley ran the soap down one arm and he, enraged, snatched her wrist. He grabbed the bar from her and lathered up his own hands. “Not like that!” he snapped. He reached out and shoved his hand between her legs. Hayley screamed. He pressed his free arm across her midsection, pinning her to the shower wall and rammed his fingers into her.
“Shut up!” he shouted at her. “Do you let him touch you, Sarah? Do you? Does he fuck you? Do you let him have what’s mine?”
“Go to hell,” Hayley replied, through gritted teeth. He raised his hand and the resounding slap reverberated throughout the bathroom.
He clenched the bar of soap in his fist, and punched her in the stomach. She cried out and doubled over. “Take the fucking soap and start scrubbing, whore.” Hayley took the bar and reluctantly started to wash herself, crying quietly.
“I swear to God, Sarah,” he said. “If any part of you smells like his filth, I will take my knife and carve it out of you. Do you remember my knife, Sarah?” She sobbed in response. “Yeah,” he said, satisfied. “You remember.”
She was shivering uncontrollably while trying to meet her captor’s demands. She fumbled the slippery bar and began retching into the spray. He reached in and grabbed her by the hair again and yanked her out. “You are not listening, Sarah! Do you want me to cut off strips of your skin while you watch? Because I can do that. I can do that, Sarah! Get back in there and scrub yourself clean you filthy, filthy whore!”
Finally Hayley realized her moment might not come. No one knew he had her. No one knew where she was. She could give in to him and still never have the opportunity to try and save herself. She tried to twist out of his hold. “No! You don’t touch me!” she screamed. “You don’t ever touch me!” They both slipped on the wet floor, which caused him to loosen his grip on hair. She seized her moment, the only moment she might ever have. Instead of running she lunged forward, ramming her shoulder into his chest. He fell backwards, she was still moving forward and both of them burst through the glass shower door.
Glass landed everywhere. The force of their momentum sent them straight down onto the floor of the shower stall. He clawed at her trying to gain a hold. She raked her hand through the debris and came up with a shard. She immediately went for his neck. He had to let go of her arm to try and protect himself so she wrapped one hand around the other and clung desperately to her weapon, even though it was slicing into her own hand. She brought it up and slammed it down again, this time it skittered down the neck and caught on the collar bone.
He punched her, his fist catching her face just under her eye. She was thrown against the wall. She lashed out again, but the angle was wrong and instead of landing a serious blow, she only caught his bicep.
They both began screaming.
Chapter 36
The light had started to fade hours ago, darkness was now settling in. Chris hated the feeling of helplessness. True to his word, Caleb had taken them straight to the Rapid City police chief, who after confirming their story about Hayley being the survivor of a serial killer’s attack, he immediately listed her as a missing person.
Chris didn’t particularly like the sensationalism, but g
iven that it was a serial, the local news media began flashing an old photo of Hayley from North Carolina that had run after her first run-in with the psychopath. Getting her picture out there was their only hope, as they had no leads. The local crime scene unit had dusted the state police cruiser for prints. Which Chris knew wouldn’t be helpful. They already had this guy’s prints on file from before and he was not surprised when they declared they were unable to match them, yet again, to anything in any database they had access to.
The fact that he’d had a car waiting to transfer her to was problematic. It meant he’d thought out every last detail of the kidnapping. Chris still couldn’t figure out how he’d known where to find them in the first place. He kept running through the return trip home in his head but knew, without a doubt, that they had not been followed.
He’d fucked up, but he couldn’t for the life of him see how. And if he was feeling guilty, Easy was nearly suicidal at this point, blaming himself for her kidnapping. But Chris didn’t blame Jimmy. Not at all. This guy managed to track a Ranger across state lines. Took down a State Trooper and stole his cruiser and got Hayley to let him into the house. If anything, they’d failed because they’d underestimated the kind of psychopath they were up against. Chris had made the mistake of thinking genuinely crazy people couldn’t be all that intelligent. And now his mistake might cost Hayley her life.
He refused to give up, though. Refused to think of her as dead. If this guy had waited all this time to find her and gone to all this trouble, he wanted her. He wanted her and that kind of desire would only be placated with time spent with her. Chris wouldn’t let himself think about what that time would entail. He told himself it didn’t matter. All that mattered was finding Hayley alive. They could heal anything else.
As half of Rapid City PD filled his living room and his boys were sitting quietly at the dining room table, fresh out of ideas to find the girl they all loved, Chris opened the back door and stepped outside.
Once away from the house and in the relative dark, he stopped in the middle of his yard and looked up at the night sky. “Do whatever you have to,” he said quietly. “Just come home to me.”
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Hayley searched the car one last time for anything she could use. So far she wasn’t finding anything, anywhere. It had taken a very long time to summon the courage to go into the bathroom and check his pockets. She’d held her breath, convinced he would grab at her, but his sightless eyes only stared at the ceiling. She’d turned off the light and locked the bathroom door behind her for good measure. Coming up short, she slammed the door and turned back to the cabin. She had found keys, but the car wouldn’t start. It had been disabled. She’d found her cell phone, no battery though. The cabin itself had no phones that she could find. She hadn’t found a phone on him. He’d left his laptop in the car, which she grabbed on her first search, but it was password protected and she couldn’t use it.
She sighed and sat down on the bottom step of the porch. It was dark now and the night was cloudless. Even though she couldn’t see, she could tell that her hand, though temporarily “bandaged” with a kitchen towel, was bleeding again. The cuts from holding the shard of glass were deep and needed stitches. Her face her where he’d punched her and her knees had bits of glass still embedded in them. She’d tried to clean them up but there were no tweezers and she wasn’t left handed anyway.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d won the battle but not the war, as Chris would say. She didn’t know where she was or how to leave. Or how far it was to get anywhere where there might be help. She’d checked out back. That had been a mistake. She’d found a grave dug fairly deeply at the tree line. Apparently he’d planned for everything.
She looked up at the sky. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “I just want to go home.” No answer came, so she went back inside. She wrapped herself up with a blanket from the couch and settled into a chair that faced outward into the room. All she had to do was wait until morning, she told herself. Her eyes finally became heavy and she fell asleep.
Hayley’s eyes opened some time later. She’d left a lamp on beside the chair an it threw shadows against the walls. Upstairs a floor board creaked. She sat bolt upright in the chair. He was alive. Robert Markham, or so said his driver’s license when she’d gotten up the nerve to search him, was alive and moving around upstairs.
She threw off the blanket and dove for the light, turning it off quickly. The room was plunged into black and she waited, crouched, for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The floor upstairs creaked again and Hayley became light-headed from breathing so hard.
Painstakingly she crept toward the kitchen to retrieve a knife, which was closer that the front door. She edged her way along the wall, feeling for the entrance to the kitchen with her hands, not daring to take her eyes off the closed door to the bedroom that loomed above her.
Once in the kitchen, she quietly slid a knife out of the block and gripped it with her left hand. She wasn’t left handed, but he was injured, badly, and she had the advantage. She took her eyes off the closed door long enough to look at the front door. She’d have to cross the living room to get to it. She looked down at her bare feet. She had a cut on her foot and had taken her shoes off to rest. There wouldn’t be time to get them.
If she could get out quietly, she could run. The bedroom faced a different direction so even if he looked out the window, he wouldn’t spot her. She took a step forward and another creak in the floorboards sounded from the second floor. Hayley swallowed hard. She gripped the knife in her good hand and crept silently across the living room toward the front door. When she reached it, she had to look away from the bedroom door and the stairs to the lock, which she had thrown. Her bad hand trembled as her her fingers, wet with her blood, slipped on the metal. Heart pounding, she tried again as another creak sounded over head. She twisted the lock, the sound of the bolt sliding back was impossibly loud.
She gripped the doorknob and twisted. Suddenly, a hand clamped down over her shoulder. “FILTHY WHORE!” he shouted, spitting blood into her face. Hayley screamed and dropped the knife.
Hayley’s eyes flew open and the sound of her own screaming filled the small cabin. The knife really did fall. That much was real. She’d taken it with her to the chair to rest and she’d dropped it during her nightmare. She scooped it up, sobbing all the while. Her feet were bare, that was real too. She winced as she slid her shoes on in spite of the cut on the sole of her foot. She was done taking chances. Unable to sleep anymore, she turned the chair to face the window and waited for the sun to rise. When it did, she shuffled to the front door.
The air was cool outside and the weather was decent. That was something, at least. The cabin was situated at the end of a long, dirt drive, and that was the easiest part to navigate. Unfortunately, she saw no other cabins as she trekked down the hill. She stopped when she came to a crossroads.
There were no signs. No indicators of which way led toward civilization. She might not even be in South Dakota anymore. Wyoming wasn’t that far away and she’d been unconscious for a long time. It would be just a guess. She turned East, for no good reason that she could think of, and just put one injured foot in front of the other. Chris wasn’t dead, she assured herself. Not even injured. It was all lies. Now all she had to do was find him. She had no idea how long it was before she saw the silhouette of a similar cabin up ahead.
As she got closer, a sign out front said “Rental Office” and Hayley had to force herself to keep from sobbing in relief. She shuffled up the wooden steps of the small building and pushed open the door. A man in a John Deere hat was perched on a stool behind a counter. He glanced up from his magazine and blinked at her.
Hayley took a deep breath, about to speak, when the man shouted, “Bert!”
She flinched and took a step back.
“What?” came a loud voice from the closed door behind him. Hayley took another step back toward the front door. Th
e door behind the counter swung open and apparently Bert was a woman, not a man, because a rounded, blonde haired older woman stepped into the lobby. “Now what on Earth-” she began, glaring at the man but then her eyes fixed on Hayley. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
Both of them turned to look at the muted television mounted in the corner of the lobby. Hayley followed their gaze and was perplexed to see a familiar face looking back at her from the screen.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” the woman proclaimed again.
“Well, while you’re calling them,” the man said, “might wanna put a call into Hal Klines. Might get a quicker response.”
The woman fumbled for a phone hanging on the wall behind her. She dialed a number, or attempted to, had to hang up and dial again. “Rose!” she practically shouted into the phone. “Rose, get the Sheriff!”
Hayley turned her attention to the smiling young woman on Channel Five who had her smile but no trace of sadness in her eyes.
