The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  Her eyes popped open. Looking beneath the seats, she could see enough of what was happening to realize that Abell was dragging the other guard into the aisle. She sucked in a horrified breath. This guy was short and stocky, with buzzed blond hair. He struggled plenty, screaming and fighting, although given his and Abell’s relative sizes—Abell dwarfed him—and the fact that his hands were cuffed behind him there wasn’t a lot he could do to save himself. With Torres’s help Abell had little difficulty wrestling him toward the door.

  They’re going to kill him, too. Charlie knew it with an icy certainty.

  “I got a wife! Kids!” the guard screamed.

  “There’s eight of them. They’re all armed,” Michael said, talking to her over the commotion. Despite the lingering harshness that was a result of his sojourn in Spookville, his voice was almost back to its normal honeyed drawl. “We’re in a confined space. That makes things tricky. But I’m working on it.” He was trying to distract her from what was happening, Charlie realized. He was actually succeeding, a little. She was listening to him rather than—

  Her eyes widened and her insides seized up as Abell pushed the guard to his knees in the open doorway. She could see the guard now, or most of him, kneeling, cowering, clearly petrified. Behind him, she could see Abell almost to the waist, see his hand holding the gun.

  “Close your eyes,” Michael ordered sharply.

  Of course she didn’t. She couldn’t.

  There’s nothing I can do. Oh, God, I can’t just—

  “Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me,” the guard begged. Abell’s gun hand rose, disappearing from Charlie’s view.

  “Stop,” she cried, leaping to her feet. She knew it was foolish, knew it was probably useless, but she had to try. She could not simply hide and do nothing as another man was murdered in cold blood in front of her eyes.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Michael roared. “Get down!”

  He was instantly on his feet, his big body blocking her view. Even though she knew she could walk right through it if she wanted to, having him standing there like that was enough to keep her from confronting Abell. Stopping short, refusing to look at Michael because she didn’t want to see in his expression the fury and fear for her she could feel coming off him in waves, she summoned the one weapon she had to wield: her knowledge of the serial killers she was studying.

  She was pretty sure it was the only weapon that she and her fellow hostages had.

  Abell was looking at her now. At what she saw in his eyes, Charlie felt the blood drain from her face. His usual mask of ordinary humanity was gone, and the killer he was at his core glared at her, silently promising retribution. As the guard pleaded for his life at Abell’s feet, Charlie shook that threatening look off. Squaring her shoulders, she ignored Michael’s furious “Don’t you dare say another fucking word.”

  “Mr. Abell, you still have Heidi”—Abell’s twelve-year-old only child, part of his seemingly normal life as a married building contractor before his secret existence as the Midnight Rambler was revealed—“to live for. You don’t want to provoke the police into—” Killing you today was what she was going to say, but Abell didn’t let her finish.

  Mouth curling, he pulled his eyes from hers to look back at the cringing guard. His hand jerked up.

  Bang.

  That shut her up. Abell had pulled the trigger, and the guard had been killed, all in a split second. The atmosphere in the bus was suddenly electrified as, shaken, Charlie watched Abell kick the body off the bus. Her throat closed. Her knees went weak. She had to hang on to the seat back to keep from crumpling.

  Michael was livid. “Get down! Get down now! Jesus, are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  Charlie felt the tingle as he grabbed her, which was a waste of time because his hands passed right through. In that single telescopic moment in the aftermath of the shooting, the bus suddenly seemed full of sounds: the rattling of the vehicle, the chaperone’s rustling paper bag, the moans and sobs and heavy breathing from the other hostages, an argument between Fleenor and Ware about how to split up the dead guards’ cash.

  His expression ugly, Abell turned to look at her again even as the knowledge that it was too late, that the second guard had just been murdered, shot through the head right in front of them all like the first, truly hit her. The shock of it took her breath.

  Abell said, “Anything else you want to say, Dr. Stone?”

  Her eyes met his, held.

  “No,” Michael growled. “Hell, no, you don’t have anything else to say.”

  Knowing that calling attention to herself as she had done had been incredibly stupid as well as useless, knowing that Michael was right and had been right all along, Charlie stayed silent.

  “Thing about the death penalty is, it’s like getting a kill-all-the-people-you-want-free card,” Fleenor said, cackling. “I mean, what’re they going to do?”

  Abell broke eye contact with Charlie to give Fleenor a thumbs-up.

  “So how’s about we throw out another roadblock?” Abell said.

  “Get down,” Michael told her in the kind of voice that could have stopped a charging bull in its tracks.

  Shuddering, Charlie dropped to her knees. As the seat blocked her from the view of Abell and the rest of the escapees, Michael loomed protectively over her, cursing a blue streak, his fear for her obvious in every profane word he uttered. Sinking back on her haunches, Charlie looked up at him with mute horror as the bus, slowing, started chugging up a steep incline.

  She couldn’t get the image of that exploding head out of her mind.

  “When this is over, assuming you’re still alive, you need to see a shrink,” Michael said grimly.

  I am a shrink, Charlie didn’t reply, because her throat was still so tight that she wasn’t sure she could talk, and anyway, flippancy was inappropriate at the moment, and also guaranteed to piss him off. But he must have read something in her face he didn’t like, because his jaw hardened and his still-scarily-black eyes flared at her.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “Speed it up, Doyle,” one of the men yelled, while Charlie smiled at Michael, just a little smile because it felt so good to have him there and to have him worrying about her, and, because, really, to have a man who had been hit with diagnoses ranging from charismatic psychopath to borderline personality disorder to homicidal maniac tell her that she needed to see a shrink was kind of rich, not to mention funny.

  Michael’s eyes were still on her face, but his expression had changed. He was looking at her like she was worrying him.

  “Everything’s going to be okay, babe,” Michael said, and from the gentler tone of his words, Charlie knew she’d been right. He was worried about her, and not just about her physical safety.

  Probably the shock of watching those men get killed was still there in her eyes. Maybe her reactions to things were a little bit off because of it. Maybe that’s what had him looking at her with such concern.

  “Can’t,” Doyle called back. “This is as good as it gets until we reach the top of this grade.”

  “Floor it.” Abell barked the order.

  “I am,” Doyle replied, adding, “I got to turn the lights on soon. You know it’s getting on toward six, and with the fog and all, it’s getting dark as shit.”

  Sayers burst out with an angry “Why not just fire off flares telling them where we are while you’re at it?” and strode right through Michael again, heading toward the front this time, grabbing on to random seat backs as he went because of the steepness of the grade.

  “No!” It was a girl’s voice: Charlie wasn’t sure if it was Bree or Paris. The fear-filled cry sent prickles of alarm racing over her skin. Even as her head whipped around in the direction from which it had come, Sayers went charging back through Michael—dragging Paris behind him. Practically sitting on the floor in an effort to resist as Sayers hauled her by one arm, the girl screamed, “Help! Help me!”

  Looking
wild-eyed at Charlie as she was dragged past, Paris thrust her free hand at her.

  “Help! Please!”

  “Paris!” With her heart in her throat, Charlie grabbed for that flailing hand, missed, and lunged for it again, diving right through Michael, who roared “No!” as he tried to stop her.

  Ignoring him, Charlie scrambled down the aisle after Paris, who was looking back at her with her hand outstretched, screaming and crying and doing her best to jerk her arm free of Sayers’s hold. Visions of her teenage best friend Holly Palmer, of Bayley Evans, of all the young girls in all the cases she had worked who had been horribly murdered, flashed through Charlie’s mind, turning her mouth sour with fear. Whatever the risk to herself, she had to do what she could to prevent Paris, prevent any of these kids, from joining their ranks.

  “Don’t let him kill me,” Paris cried, sobbing.

  “Stop!” Charlie and Michael shouted almost simultaneously. Charlie was screaming at Sayers; Michael was yelling at her and at the same time trying to pull her back to safety with hands that were no more substantial than air. The beauty of ectoplasm was that as big and bad as Michael was, he couldn’t actually physically stop her from doing anything. She managed to latch on to Paris’s hand as Sayers tore past Abell and Torres, who were crowded into Hughes’s seat row, attempting to pull a now wide awake, shouting and struggling Hughes from the spot he’d been occupying between the seats. Charlie had no doubt at all that Abell’s intent was to shoot Hughes like he’d shot the guards, and from the way he was fighting, Hughes knew it, too.

  “Damn it, Charlie!” Michael tried to grab her around the waist, with predictable results. Paris’s cold and clammy hand clutched hers desperately. Charlie hung on to it with every bit of strength she had, doing her best to jerk the girl free as Sayers continued to haul her down the aisle. She knew what Sayers was capable of. The thought of him with Paris—it was enough to make Charlie’s blood run cold.

  “What the hell’s up with you?” Abell bellowed, head turning to track Sayers. At the same time, he solved the problem of Hughes’s struggles by slugging him over the head with his gun. The sharp crack of the blow told Charlie just how hard it had been. Hughes grunted and went limp. Abell and Torres pulled his sagging body into the aisle.

  “I’m outa here,” Sayers threw over his shoulder. “How hard do you think it’s going to be for the millions of cops heading our way to find a school bus?”

  “Mr. Sayers! Let her go!” Charlie cried, giving Paris’s hand another frantic jerk as the girl tried digging in her heels one more time. Tightening his grip on her arm so brutally that Paris cried out, Sayers snapped, “Get the bitch.” Charlie found her hair being grabbed from behind by Fleenor as Sayers dragged Paris and, by extension, her past him and Ware. Gasping at the sudden pain of it, Charlie lost her grip on Paris’s hand.

  “No!” Paris screamed, head twisting to look back as she strained toward Charlie. Her hand stretched out beseechingly. “Don’t let go! Please!”

  “Hey, sweet thing, you and me got—” Fleenor began, as Charlie, snarling, whipped around toward him. Without even thinking about it, she doubled up her fist and punched him as hard as she could in the nose. It was like slamming her fist into a rock. Her hand went numb. She felt the impact of the blow all the way up her arm.

  “Bitch!” Fleenor howled.

  Letting go of her hair, he staggered back, clapping a hand to his nose. Ware whooped with amusement.

  There’ll be hell to pay for that, Charlie thought with a fresh stab of fear as she whirled to go to Paris’s assistance. The girl was doing her best to fight free of Sayers, kicking and screaming and trying to grab on to the seats without success. Elsewhere on the bus, pandemonium broke out. Bree screamed. Hughes revived with a roar, causing Abell and Torres to attack him in tandem. Ruben and Creech rushed down the aisle toward the fight—

  “Help!” Paris screamed, looking back at Charlie with panic in her face as she and Sayers reached the open door. The specter of what had happened to the guards in that doorway made Charlie’s heart clutch. The bus was slowing more as it rocked into a curve. A harried glance past Sayers out the door told Charlie that dusk was falling, mist lay everywhere, and the road was empty as far as she could see.

  Not a cop car in sight.

  “You can stay on this death ride if you want to. I’m taking my chances on the mountain,” Sayers yelled, and he jumped, taking Paris with him.

  Charlie watched in shock as the girl and Sayers plummeted to the road, hitting with a thud and rolling over and over.

  Oh, no, no, no—

  Then Fleenor charged up behind her, locked his hand around her wrist, and jumped, too, pulling her out with him.

  Charlie didn’t even have time to scream before she smashed hard onto the unforgiving asphalt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Pain shot through Charlie’s knees and palms. Landing on all fours, then tumbling uncontrollably, she felt the shock of the impact over every inch of her body. The surface of the road was hard and rough enough to tear clothes and skin, bruise muscles, jar bones.

  Sharper even than the pain was the fear.

  Fleenor’s got me. Vivid images of the file pictures on Fleenor’s victims flashed through her head. He liked to hurt them, make them cry and plead. And he would have particular reason to want to hurt her.

  Only he didn’t have her. At least the fall had made him release her wrist. The realization galvanized her. A petrified glance around found him skidding on his side along the shoulder of the road, his orange uniform making him impossible to miss even in the gathering darkness, even through the gray fingers of mist.

  He was perhaps two yards to her left, bouncing along the edge of the pavement. On that side, the road was lined by a ribbon of gravel backed by a forbidding stockade of towering trees. The mountain rose steeply behind him, heavily wooded and dark. There was no sign of Paris, or Sayers, but given the choices, Charlie thought they must be somewhere up in those woods. The last she’d seen of Paris, the girl had been rolling down the middle of the road—but the good news was that Sayers had lost his grip on her just like Fleenor had lost his grip when they hit. Maybe Paris had gotten away. Maybe she was even now fleeing through the woods. Searching for the girl was not an option; Charlie had to get away from Fleenor while she could. He was looking in her direction now, cursing loudly even as his body slowed. At any second his forward momentum would stop, and then he would come after her or go for his gun.

  At the thought of his gun, adrenaline shot through Charlie’s veins like a giant infusion of speed.

  Run. Her brain screamed the command. Despite the injuries she knew she must have suffered in the fall, her body responded. She had to get off the road; it was too open. Getting her feet beneath her, she scrambled toward the edge of the pavement, desperate to get away from Fleenor—and out of the reach of his gun. A splash of yellow amidst all the gray, the bus was already being swallowed up by mist as it rounded another turn, about to be lost from sight. The fading shouts coming from inside it almost covered the labored sound of the engine as it fought to reach the top of the steep incline. The smell of exhaust lingered in its wake, mixing with the damp scent of the mist. Charlie thought of the teens still inside, and felt her heart turn over. But there was nothing she could do for them now.

  Michael. Glancing desperately around, Charlie called to him out loud. But there was no sign of him, no answer, and she couldn’t wait.

  Because Fleenor was on the side of the road with the rising mountain behind him, she darted for the opposite side, the side with the guardrail protecting the dizzying drop-off that, before, she’d thought was a sheer cliff.

  It was a drop-off, but it wasn’t sheer, she discovered. Clambering over the guardrail, plunging into the narrow strip of trees that grew on the other side of it, she glanced desperately down the rock wall that fell away into nothingness a few feet in front of her and discovered that, at least at this point, the angle of the cliff wasn’t so steep that
she couldn’t descend it on foot, and that there was, in fact, a path.

  “I’m coming for you, bitch,” Fleenor yelled.

  A frightened glance over her shoulder found him kneeling in the gravel on the opposite side of the road. As she watched, he rose laboriously to his feet, gun already in hand.

  Charlie didn’t wait to see any more. Heart pounding, she flung herself down that path, ignoring the pain in her knees, praying that her low-heeled shoes wouldn’t slide on the wet leaves and moss that covered parts of the stone and send her plummeting—she dared take a look—hundreds of feet into the ravine below. Islands of gray mist floating below her like clouds made it seem like she was higher up even than she knew she was. All around her, the jagged silhouettes of mountains rose like blackened shark’s teeth against a purpling sky.

  Michael. She no longer dared to call his name out loud. Where he was she didn’t know, but she did know that he would never leave her of his own accord. The fifty-foot rule—did that still apply? Was he gone again, sucked back into Spookville?

  Even as she ran for her life, as she ducked beneath small prickly bushes growing out of the cliff face and prayed that she wouldn’t catch her foot on an uneven place in the rock and go flying off the path, the thought terrified her.

  Fear made her chest tight. Her lungs heaved as she fought to draw in enough air.

  Bang. The bullet smacked into the stone face of the cliff beside her, so close that she felt its passing, so close that a tiny chip of rock flew in front of her eyes.

  A scream tore into her throat. She swallowed it, afraid of pinpointing her location for Sayers, who was out there somewhere and might join with Fleenor to double-team her. And although attracting the cops who had to be out there on the mountain somewhere, too, would be good, she couldn’t be sure that they were close enough even to hear her—so she ducked her head and ran like death was on her heels. Which, in fact, it was.

  The path widened into a narrow, tree-covered ledge.

  “Stop or I’ll put a bullet in your back,” Fleenor shouted after her, his voice echoing eerily.