I put my keys into the car door, suddenly angry with him, furious with him. Who the hell does he think he is, leaving me like this? What the hell’s his problem? How difficult would it be to leave me some damn way to get into contact with him? At first I think my anger is making the door difficult to open, my anger-shook hand. But even when I calm down and try and turn the key, it gets stuck. It feels like something is wedged in there.
“Lily!” The voice cuts through Betty’s life, cuts it right in half. As soon as Roman shouts my name, I forget Betty, forget this shit car and my shit apartment. I forget everything and I just want to be in his arms. “Lily!” he roars. I turn toward him. He’s at the far end of the street, sprinting toward me, arms pumping. He’s too far away for me to see his face, but it’s definitely Roman: my Roman, not some Darius doppelganger. “Lily, run, now, run!”
I am so happy to see him that I don’t register his words right away. I want to run toward him as he runs toward me, want to sprint as he sprints, full of love and hope and happiness, a beautiful reunion after these long months. But then he roars again, closer now but still horribly faraway. I think anywhere but pressed up close to me would be faraway. “Lily, he’s behind you!”
I’m about to turn when what feels like a length of rope is coiled around my neck, choking me. I stare at Roman, still halfway down the street, seeming to move in slow motion as the rope drags me backward. I claw at the rope, gasping for air, and then realize it’s not a rope but an arm, a solid, immovable arm: a solid, immovable arm with a yin-and-yang tattooed on it. How long have I wished for that arm to be wrapped around me? And now it is . . . the universe is a cruel bitch. I claw with my nails, digging gouges into Darius’ skin, but the man doesn’t make a sound. Then I am flying head over heels, hurled with so much power that I slam into the floor with a thump which rattles my bones. Luckily, I land on my back. I clasp Bump, making sure he is unharmed, terror making it difficult to move. It’s only when Darius—who this close looks nothing like Roman, despite all the surgery—slams the doors that I know I’m in the back of a van.
I shimmy to the doors, heart pounding in fear, mouth full of blood from where I’ve bitten my tongue, ears still ringing with Roman’s voice, nose full of the scent of blood and oil, the van reeking with it. When I get to the doors, I lie on my back and kick them with all my strength. My legs have become weak from so much sitting—no longer the double-shift-honed legs of Lily, but the soft legs of Betty—and so the door moves barely an inch. I kick again, and again, but the door just wobbles pathetically. Then the van growls to life, and we are moving.
“Darius, you fuck, Darius, you fucking monster! Bring her back! Fight me like a fucking man! Bring her the fuck back!”
The back windows of the van are spray-painted black, so I can’t see him, but I know he was close. His voice was loud, but now it is growing quieter, and after a minute of frantic kicking, I can no longer hear him.
“You shouldn’t have logged into your work email,” Darius says from the front of the van, in a calm voice. Too calm. The voice of a man who has done much, much worse than kidnap a pregnant woman. A business-as-usual voice. “I’ve known you were in Carson for a while, but I didn’t know exactly where. Tut-tut, pregnant cunt.”
I don’t want to turn around; I don’t want to face him. This is the man who killed Carol: who did more than kill Carol. This is the man who’s done thousands of unspeakable things. And now I am lying in the back of his van, jostling up and down on the stiff suspension, one hand on Bump and the other clawing uselessly and the oil- and blood-slick floor. I try and take a deep breath, but I can’t. I’m panting, I realize, as though very far away and somebody else is panting, not me. Betty, it is Betty panting. It is Betty is the back of this madman’s car.
“Get a grip,” I whisper, voice quavering.
“What was that?” Darius says, a cheerful note in his voice.
I force myself to turn around, sit up and stare between the seats at the road. Darius is driving us toward the mountain, going way too fast but not seeming to care. He drives through three red lights, but no sirens follow us. I think about just charging at him, tearing his eyes out, gouging them until they go pop . And I would, I’m sure I would, if it were not for Bump. But Bump comes first. Our son comes first. If I were to charge at this man, what would he do? Throw acid in my face? Throw acid at Bump?
As if reading my mind, Darius lifts up a small metal jug from the passenger seat. “You wouldn’t be such a pretty cunt if you tried anything, no way.” He smiles at me in the rear-view. “Do you like what I’ve done? You see, your friend Roman tried chasing me once before. Got quite close, to be fair to the man, but of course he couldn’t manage anything meaningful. But it was a good chase, better even than the Marines and CIA that came after me once upon a time, before I paid the right people. So I decided to play a little dress up just in case he ever decided to come after me again. Roman has a very distinctive look, doesn’t he?”
“You got the eyes wrong.” I spit, draw myself up. I am more scared than I have ever been in my life, but I decide not to show him that. He can’t see it. Men like him thrive on fear. “Your eyes are white. Roman’s are a particular shade of blue.”
Driving over bumpy mountain roads at around eighty miles per hour, so fast and bumpy that I have to grip onto the handrails of the van door and wedge myself into the corner so I don’t go flying and then slamming back down, Darius turns and faces me. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s driving a van over dangerous roads, nor that Roman is chasing us: must be chasing us. Has to be. He grins at me, nothing at all like Roman, a poor imitation. “You ought to be more polite,” he says. “Pretty soon I’m going to be up to my nuts in your guts, so some manners might be a good idea.” Then he turns back to the road.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask, my voice one-hundred times calmer than I feel.
“Somewhere,” he says, “where I can fuck you silly without interruptions. I’ve never fucked a pregnant woman before,” he goes on, in a musing tone of voice, so out of place in this current situation. “A pregnant girl, but never a pregnant woman. Hmm.”
As he speaks these sickening words, my mind begins to cycle through past instances of fear, trying to see if I’ve ever been more scared. I settle on the hospital when I watched Les getting strangled by the metallic man, but even then, at least Roman was beside me. At least I wasn’t visibly pregnant. At least I could run, move. At least I had some sense of hope. Now, it is just me and this madman, with hopefully Roman following somewhere behind us. If Darius really does try and—I almost cannot face the thought, but I have to—if Darius does try and assault me, what exactly can I do to stop him? He is larger, stronger, and if I put up any sort of fight Bump will be in grave danger.
Darius turns off the main road onto a dirt track leading up the mountain, driving recklessly and not giving a damn when I bump up and down in the back.
He grins, glancing in the wing-mirror. “Your knight in shining armor is following us,” he says. “Oh, Roman, you poor little boy. Interesting, isn’t it, how his mommy saved yours and now here he comes to save you? I really do believe that has something to do with yin-and-yang. Yes, I do. Yin-and-yang is real, oh yes.” He giggles. “Just kidding.” Turning violently down another dirt track. “Roman isn’t a very smart man. I think we can all agree on that. He’s a good trier, though, that’s what I’ll say. He tries very hard and he should be commended for that.”
“If he’s behind us, you’re a dead man,” I say, voice fierce, far fiercer than it should be. I growl at him, teeth bared, no idea what’s come over me. I am too scared to be behaving like this, but anger, too, teems within me when I hear this pathetic excuse for a man, Carol’s killer, talk about Roman like that. “He is twice the man you are.”
“Only twice?” Darius answers with an easy smile. “I thought I was much more evil than that.”
We are driving up the steep side of a mountain; we must look like a tiny dot from down in
Carson, an insect climbing up the side of dirt mound.
“I hate you!” I yell, anger exploding from my lips. “I hate you, you evil fuck!”
“Hmm, some fight in you,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “Does that extend to the bedroom, I wonder?”
My teeth begin to chatter, cold, icy, the fear almost too much to take. I want to roll into a ball and bring my face to Bump and rest my cheek against him and feel him kick reassuringly against me. I want to feel him in my arms. I want Roman to look over my shoulder as I cradle our son. I want to kiss our son and have him laugh and smile and be happy. Instead, I will be raped and murdered by a psychopath on Kit Carson.
“When you’re done with me,” I say, “are you going to kill me?”
Darius’ white-blue contacts flit to me through the rear-view. “Do you really want to know?”
I nod, feeling numb with dread.
“Well, then, if you really want to . . . Let me explain what is going to happen.” He smirks, enjoying himself. I remember Roman’s smirk, back at that hotel restaurant, that cocky, confident smirk and how drawn to it I was. Like a moth to a flame: a musclebound, handsome, sexy flame. Darius’ smirk is nothing like that. Darius’ smirk is a joke; Darius’ smirk is like an unskilled actor trying to imitate an Oscar-winner’s performance. “Okay, so I am heading toward one of my mountain hideouts right now, where I have a large machine-gun positioned in the window. I’ll leave the car, mount the gun, and tear Roman apart as he comes to your rescue. With that done, I’ll take you into the cabin, tie you to the bed, and have some fun.” He licks his lips. “I’m hard just thinking about it,” he laughs.
“And when you’re done?” My throat is so dry, too dry. I can barely talk. My voice is a croak.
“Oh, we’ll see,” he says vaguely. “Really, it all depends on your performance. Either you will die or I’ll keep you as my whore.”
“What about my child?” I ask.
The truth is a cruel bitch, because as I ask this question I know, deep down, that if this reality truly became the reality, I would have to find a way to adapt . . . as long as my son was safe. As long as my son was allowed to live a life—perhaps go to a foster family somewhere, though that thought makes me want to add vomit to the oil and the blood on the van floor—I could somehow survive this hell. I am sorry, Roman, I call silently through the van doors.
But then Darius says, “I hate children. Babies, anyway.”
I see it clearly in my mind, what could happen, what will happen unless somebody does something. We will get to the cabin, and Darius will do as he says and kill Roman, my Roman, and after he has used me, if I performed well, I will give birth and he will kill my child. The panic and alarm and terror within me is strong, but there is something stronger, something age-old, as old as the first mother to walk the earth. It’s old and powerful and as I envision this man killing my son, it takes hold of me firmly. I clench my teeth so hard a jagged spike of pain enters my head, obliterating my fear, replacing it with calm vengeance.
I take my hands from the rail, climb onto my knees, and pause for a moment. Is this really the best thing to do? What if I get hurt in the crash? What if Bump gets hurt? But then, if I let him go on, Roman will die, I will be raped, and my child will die. I have to take the risk. My son—I will not let this man do anything to my son.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Darius snaps, swerving as he stares at me through the rear-view. “What the fuck are you doing? Do you want me to pull this thing over and come back there?”
“Yes,” I say, wondering if this can go in that direction instead: wondering if the age-old maternal instinct, the primordial protectiveness, will allow that to happen instead.
Darius shakes his head. “I would, too, if it weren’t for your little boy toy behind me. Listen, just sit down or the first thing I’ll do once Roman is dead is claw that baby out of your cunt with my bare hands.”
Dim, faraway now, I am a small frightened woman. Dim, faraway now, I am a lost, shivering lamb. Dim, faraway now, I am the woman who wept in shock after the incident in the hospital. But at the forefront of my consciousness somebody else has taken the stage. I remember reading about mothers who, when their children were trapped under cars, miraculously gained the strength to lift tons of steel and rubber and plastic. I feel the same strength in me. The jostling of the suspension-less van no longer bothers me; I have turned to steel.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I whisper, hands shaking. Not in fear, no, no, in rage, in rightful fury. “You really shouldn’t have said that.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
He still thinks this is a joke, just a big joke: the pregnant woman kneeling in the back with her tiny fists clenched and her face flushed talking about how this international arms dealer shouldn’t have said something. But what he doesn’t realize is that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past. It doesn’t matter that this man has dealt with North Korea and that all I’ve really dealt with are patients and hallways and fluorescent lights. He is still a person and my nails are still sharp.
I throw myself at him, screeching like a wolf, thinking of nothing but gouging out the eyes of the man who is going to kill my son.
“Die!” I scream, as my nail finds his eye. My fingernail cuts through his contact lens, right through to his eyeball. I dig in as hard as I can, sinking my finger into the flesh. “Die! Die! Die!”
He lets out a roar as blood and sludge oozes from his eye, swerving even more dangerously on the road.
“Psycho bitch!” he snarls, jabbing me in the face. “Psycho cunt!”
My nose pulses blood down my face. I taste it in my mouth, lingering on my upper lip. But I don’t release his eye. My son’s life depends on it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Roman
As I chase the van down the dirt track, I pray. I’ve never been much of a praying man. I believe in yin-and-yang, and I believe in equal forces, and I believe that one thing has to result in another. But I’ve never prayed. Now I do. But I don’t pray to God. Or to heaven. Or to anything like that. I pray to the whole damn universe to make it so Darius doesn’t touch Lily. I try and focus on the job—on following close to the van without bashing into it, just in case I harm her—but I keep thinking of all the things Darius could be doing with one hand whilst holding the steering wheel with the other. It only takes one hand to hold a gun, a jar of acid, a cudgel . . . I remember one lead telling me that the Acid Man sometimes uses a water pistol to burn people’s faces off. Lily could be in the back of the van, faceless, screaming, and I can do shit but follow behind ’em and wait for them to stop. Fuck.
I don’t expect my prayers to be answered, not really. Because by my own beliefs, I’m screwed. I left the mother of my child to fend for herself in a city she does not know, I gave the mother of my child a new name and no hope; that is the yin. This situation is the yang, the answering call to those stupid fuckin’ actions. No, I don’t reckon my prayers are going to be answered.
But then Darius begins to swerve even more dramatically. He’s been swerving like crazy even since I began chasing him, down from the city and up here to the mountain road, but now he’s swerving straight off the road and back again, big S-shaped swerves that make me wonder what the hell’s going on in the van.
I follow on for a few more minutes, the van going wild, when a cabin comes into view. It’s a small box cabin with one door, its paneled wood faded in the sun. For seemingly no reason, the van makes directly for the cabin at full speed. Not as though it means to park there, but as though it means to crash straight into it. It drives with mad purpose and then—wood splinters fly into the air, half the cabin is crunched into shrapnel nothingness as the vans plows through it. I spot a machine gun fly far back to the rear of the cabin, out of view and out of reach, at the impact, and then the van makes a noise like a cat being strangled as the engine dies.
I bring my car to a stop and jump out, mind going into frenzy mode with ima
ges of Lily: on her back, covered in blood; on her front, her bump squashed against her body, bent at an awkward angle and moaning out for me to save her; Darius with his thumbs buried within her neck, choking her to death. But as I get closer to the wreckage, I hear nothing but the chugging of the engine as it dies. I sprint to the back of the van, grab the handle, and pull. It’s locked, but I’m too desperate to see my woman to give a shit about locks, so I just pull harder. Harder. I pull so hard I feel every shred of muscle in my arms strain to breaking point. I must be exerting hundreds of pounds of pressure on that door. The handle bends, the metal compressing, and then finally something clicks and the door flies open.
Lily is in there, on her back, both hands laid over Bump. Her shirt has been torn up around her belly in the crash. Her hair is blonde, and her face is not Lily’s face. It is rounder from the pregnancy, but that is not what marks the difference. It is her bright blonde hair, and the makeup which smears with sweat over her skin, mixed with blood from her nose. And her bare belly . . . blood. “Lily,” I whisper, emotion freezing me for a second. “Lily, you’re bleeding.”
HITMAN’S SURPRISE BABY Page 15
