Out of Control

by Shannon McKenna

  “Give it over.” The guy scooped up the twenties, shoved a key back at her. He turned away and shuffled back toward his dark den, where the eerie blue light of a TV flickered fitfully.

  She drove the length of the long, L-shaped building. Her room overlooked a Dumpster and what appeared to be a gravel pit. Dismal, blighted, perfect for her mood. The interior wasn’t much better, dusty and reeking of cigarettes, but she wasn’t disposed to criticize.

  She almost collapsed onto the bed, but she wanted to shower the burning grit out of her eyes. Then she would lie down and close her eyes. And that was as far into the future as she was willing to project.

  She stayed under the pounding water until she was squeaky clean, her fingers wrinkled and pruney. She never wanted it to end. Neither the past nor the future could intrude upon a good hot shower.

  She turned it off regretfully, dried off, and wrapped the clammy, skimpy towel around her body, hoping that the bed didn’t sag or lump. She exited in a billowing cloud of steam, all ready to fall right into the—

  “Hello, Margaret.”

  She screamed and stumbled back into the bathroom.

  She had never seen the guy who sat on the bed facing her. He was a hideous apparition, dressed in a suit that was ripped and torn, his shirt bloodstained. Short dark hair. His gray eyes were wide, full of broken capillaries which made him look as if he were weeping blood. His lips were swollen and scabbed, his skin clammy. Dotted with sweat.

  She clutched the door frame. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  His distorted mouth stretched wide. “You know me. You’re my red angel. Marcus told me to kill you with Caruso and Whitlow. It was supposed to be a murder-suicide, but when I saw you, I knew you were mine. You were too special to waste. I didn’t kill you. I couldn’t.”

  She could think of nothing to say. What was there to say? Gee, thanks? The one frantic thought rattling around in her mind was how naive she’d been to think she’d burned out fear. Hah. She was vibrating with it, her backside pressed painfully against the sink.

  Her eyes swept the bathroom. One tiny louvred window high on the wall. Nothing in the bathroom that would serve as a weapon. Thin hand towels. Cheap soap. Oh, Davy. What in God’s name had she done?

  “It was you who left me in that hotel room?” she asked cautiously.

  A muscle began to twitch in his cheek. “You should have waited, Margaret.” His voice quivered with tension. “You shouldn’t have run away. You caused a lot of problems for me. You hurt me.”

  A self-control she had never known she possessed quenched the sharp replies that flashed through her mind. She forced the meek, soft words out. “I’m sorry. I…I didn’t know.”

  It was the right response. His expression softened. “I know you didn’t,” he crooned. “You didn’t mean to betray me. And we’ll fix it now.”

  Tenderness on this man’s face was almost more frightening than anger. “How could I betray you?” The words burst out, propelled by months of desperate confusion. “I don’t even know who you are!”

  His mouth stretched into a ghastly smile. His teeth were bloody, one of his eyeteeth missing. “You know me,” he said. “I knew it when I found this.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded scrap of paper. He unfolded it. It was a drawing from one of her own stolen sketchbooks. A coiled snake, rising up out of the darkness. An image from her recurring nightmares. One morning in a fit of self-help zeal, she’d tried to exorcise it by drawing it. Acknowledging her feelings, yada yada, etc. It hadn’t helped the nightmares one bit.

  Looking into Snakey’s pale, mad eyes, she could see why. Her subconscious mind had known how scarily deep the shit she was in actually was, even if the rest of her had not. “I drew that,” she said.

  “It’s me.” His voice was hideously gentle. “I am the snake. It’s my Order. My symbol. I knew when I saw this that you can feel me, Margaret. You’re the only woman who could truly understand me.”

  Her gorge rose. She swallowed it down. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt the guy’s feelings by urping all over his declaration of love. “This is, um, kind of a lot to take in all at once,” she said. “So it was you who killed the dog who attacked Mikey?”

  “I am your champion,” he said, in soulful tones. “Forever.”

  “And…” She swallowed again. “Joe Pantani?”

  “That worm.” His face twisted, muscles spasming. “You should have heard him. I made him scream like a pig for what he did to you.”

  Margot held her breath, and blew it out slowly as she tried to keep her face calm and placid. Oh, poor, poor Joe.

  “He learned what happens to anyone who hurts my angel,” Snakey said hoarsely. “I’ll show McCloud, too. I’ll show them all.”

  “No!” she burst out.

  Snakey’s smile faded, replaced by that mad, twitching tension.

  Margot backpedaled, her stomach fluttering. “All I meant was that McCloud never hurt me. He’s so insignificant. Don’t waste your time on him. He’s nothing to us, really. Less than nothing.”

  Snakey folded the snake picture up and tucked it back in his pocket. “You’re very brave, Margaret. But I know the truth. I saw you escape. He kidnapped you. He violated you.”

  “But he—”

  “Never think about him again.” Snakey’s voice cracked with strain. “You’re mine, now. I’ll protect you. And I’ll take care of him.”

  Margot had no idea what might set him off. She tried to keep her shaking voice gentle and soft. “What do you want from me?”

  “Now we fix what you wrecked eight months ago.” Snakey rose to his feet and grabbed her hands. He lifted them to his lips.

  The hot, moist contact almost made her retch. Her towel began to slip. She tried to catch it with her armpits, but Snakey pried her arms up high. The towel dropped, leaving her stark naked and shivering.

  “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “Don’t be shy. You’re beautiful.”

  She tried to pull her hands away, cowering into the space between the sink and toilet. A sick wave of faintness was rolling over her, but she could not faint. Not an option. “Please,” she whispered.

  “Oh, no. It’s too soon to make love,” he crooned. “That will be your reward when you tell me where you hid the mold. If I bring Marcus the mold, he won’t have to torture you. You don’t want Marcus to torture you. He doesn’t love you like I do. He wouldn’t be careful, like me.”

  The word “torture” had the effect of scrambling her stressed brain so completely, she barely understood the rest of what he’d said.

  “The—the mold? I’ve never heard of any—”

  “Don’t.” His face twitched. “Don’t make me hurt you. I love you. I don’t want to hurt you. But I will if I have to. I will, Margaret.”

  “How?” she asked desperately. “Why should you hurt me? Do you mean mold like on bread, or mold like a cake pan? I don’t—”

  “I didn’t want to.” His voice broke, almost as if he were in tears. “I love you. Remember that afterwards. Promise me you’ll remember.”

  He reached up to her throat, and pinched her with his thumb and forefinger, quick as a snake. The pain was huge. She shrieked.

  Davy scanned the lot of the Six Oaks Hotel for the white rental car. The beacon said she’d been here for twenty minutes, but Davy’s skin crawled like a nest of ants had invaded his clothes. Snakey had caught up with her. He could feel the guy. That, or he was going nuts.

  Neither possibility would surprise him much today.

  He would have arrived with her, if not for the cop who’d ticketed him for going 98 in a 60 mile an hour zone. He would have paid ten times the sum to get those lost twenty minutes back.

  His heart leaped when he turned the corner. White Taurus, Washington plates, and his instincts screaming louder every fraction of a second that passed. He jerked to a stop, killed the engine and hit the pavement running, gun in hand. The lock was engaged, but the flimsy door yielded to t
he battering ram of his shoulder with one blow.

  Margot was naked on the bed, arms stretched up high, plastic cuffs fastening her wrists to the wooden knobs on the cheap headboard. She was gagged with a strip of white cloth, eyes wide with terror, but she was alive. Snakey spun around, sinking into guard. A case lay open on the bed, full of things that glinted evilly in the overhead light.

  Davy took aim and shot at the sick son of a bitch, but Snakey was quick, whirling in an acrobatic blur over Margot’s body. He took cover on the other side of the bed, snatching up the bedside table to shield him from Davy’s next shot. An explosion of splinters, and Snakey hurled the thing across the bed. Davy ducked, and the heavy thing bounced across the same shoulder that had knocked the door open.

  Pain blossomed, the gun dropped to the floor from his numb fingers, and Snakey hurtled like a cannonball across the bed, fingers poised to stab and gouge.

  Davy parried the blows, but Snakey’s momentum drove him back against the wall with a force that knocked his wind out. The next split second of timeless, airless infinity was a flurry of blocks, blows and gasping for breath. His reflexes were slowed by twelve hours of driving with his heart in his mouth. Snakey should have been in the same boat, but the sick fuck didn’t show it. Davy’s back to the wall left him barely enough space to block a jab that should have driven his facial bones into his brain. Blood squirted. He was too busy to care.

  Snakey wiped blood from his face from a wound Davy didn’t remember inflicting. He screamed something incomprehensible as he knocked the TV stand over towards Davy, toppling it off its perch.

  Davy danced back to avoid the explosion of broken glass. A pale swirl of movement caught the corner of his eye, and Snakey stumbled forward with a grunt of surprise. Margot had swung both legs up and kicked him in the back of the head. Yay, panther woman. He used that precious fraction of a second to dive for the fallen gun.

  Snakey came at him again with a bellow of rage, reeling to the side with a furious hiss as Davy took aim. He bolted out the open door.

  Davy lurched to his feet and gave chase. He got off two more shots as Snakey sprinted across the parking lot. He slowed down his mad dash to squeeze off another shot, hoping anyone listening to this fight had the good sense to stay huddled in bed. Snakey jerked, but recovered and kept running, disappearing around the side of an SUV.

  The motor roared to life. Davy sprinted faster, peering for the license number. Snakey reversed and speeded back towards him, forcing Davy to fling himself to the side, tuck and roll. Same fucking shoulder. He bounded to his feet and aimed for the tires.

  No luck. The vehicle screeched away. Davy stared after it, panting. Dark liquid gleamed on the asphalt. He’d wounded the guy, who knew how badly. If he ran for the Chevy and floored it, he might catch up—or he might not. In any case, a car chase lasted as long as it lasted, and Margot was bound and gagged in a shot-up hotel room in the middle of nowhere with the door hanging open to the night.

  He couldn’t leave her like that. Hell, he couldn’t leave her at all, even when she took him for a crazy murderer.

  And now that Snakey was gone, anger was roaring back into the raw, inflamed place where terror had so recently been.

  It was a really bad combination.

  Chapter

  22

  The door creaked open.

  It was Davy who walked in. She sagged, every muscle in her body slack with the intensity of her relief. Tears spilled onto her cheeks and into her nose. She was already struggling hard to breathe with the wad of torn sheet in her mouth.

  Davy stood in front of her. His nose was bleeding, and he was holding his left side, breathing heavily. She expected him to take out her gag, but he stumbled into the bathroom, turned on the faucet.

  He came out, sponging his face with a damp hand towel. He held it to his nose as his eyes traveled the length of her naked body.

  “I didn’t get him this time, either,” he said. “I just wounded him. I don’t know how badly. But I lost him again. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone. He could come back any time.”

  She pleaded with her eyes for him to take out the gag.

  “Of course, this could all just be an elaborate trick. I could have hired that guy to play out a charade just for your benefit. What do you think, Margot? A guy who’s capable of scratching his face to fool you into thinking he’d been fighting? He’d be capable of anything, right?”

  She shook her head desperately.

  “Like murder, for instance. Beating innocent people to death? Slaughtering animals to freak you out? Is that what you think of me?”

  She shook her head, made a high-pitched mewling sound. He leaned forward and plucked the gag out of her mouth, letting it dangle under her chin. She spat the rest of the cloth out and gasped hoarsely for breath, coughing. “Untie my hands,” she begged.

  He didn’t respond. It was as if he didn’t hear her words at all. “Davy,” she said, more sharply. “Untie me. This minute.”

  He shook his head. “No. I’ll leave you just like that for now. It’s the only way I can be sure you’ll stay in one place long enough for me to say every last thing I want to say to you.”

  “Davy—”

  “Shut up and listen for once in your life, or I’ll gag you again.”

  She tried to swallow, but her throat was scratchy. “I’m listening.”

  “Truth is, I like the scenery, just like this. It suits my mood to have you tied up naked. It underscores the point I want to make.”

  A chill went through her as she stared into his eyes. She looked down. He had an erection. Her legs clenched around a shiver of primitive fear. He followed her eyes, and let out a bitter laugh.

  “So I’m capable of rape, too, right? Wow. The sky’s the limit.”

  “Davy, don’t do this,” she pleaded.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that seeing you tied up would make me hard,” he said. “But then again, I’ve never been this angry before.”

  “Stop it right now. You’re deliberately trying to intimidate me.”

  “Yeah, I am. Check me out, Margot. You bring out the absolute worst in me. I’ve been more of a dickhead with you over the past three days than I’ve been to the rest of the world in the past thirty-eight years combined. What does this tell you?”

  “That you should stop it right now and untie me.” Her voice was too broken and hoarse to sound authoritative.

  His eyes had a feral glow. “Weird, that I never fantasized about this. It would be fun to go down on you when you’re tied up. I always have to hold you down, but if you were restrained, I could fingerfuck you at the same time. Make you come until you fainted.”

  She struggled to swallow again, but her voice was strangely steady when she spoke. “You wouldn’t do anything to me that I didn’t want,” she said. “So go ahead. Let it all hang out. Talk as nasty as you like. You don’t scare me, Davy. You might as well skip this part.”

  His shoulders slumped. He looked exhausted.

  “Untie me,” she said again, more quietly.

  Calm seemed to work, where anger and pleading had failed. Davy knelt down and pulled a long, black-bladed knife out of an ankle sheath on his boot. He hesitated. “You trust me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then don’t flinch. This thing is sharp.”

  Two sharp snicks and the cuffs gave way. Margot sagged onto the bed and rolled onto her side, rubbing life into her numbed hands.

  “Why did you run from me?” Davy asked her.

  “Why were your fingerprints on the snake?” Margot countered.

  Davy crouched to replace the knife in his boot. “I picked your lock,” he said. “I went into your house after you went to work, the morning that Snakey dumped blood on you.”

  “You sneaked into my house? And went through my stuff?” She sat up on the bed, open-mouthed.

  He nodded.

  She waited for an explanation. He just looked grim and obdurate.

 
“Why?” she demanded.

  “Because I was frustrated,” he said. “I was curious, and you wouldn’t tell me anything. I wanted to help and you wouldn’t let me.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “Yeah. I knew it was wrong when I did it, but the rules just fall apart when it comes to you.”

  Margot’s dry, scornful laugh turned into a cough. “Oh, great. The story of my life. The whole world has that attitude towards me.”

  His shrug was angry and defensive. “So? I snooped through your stuff. It was dumb, it was wrong, and I’m sorry. Can we leave it?

  “That’s stalker behavior, Davy,” she said.

  His face tightened. “Yeah, sure. Slap my hand and put me in the corner. I would never hurt you. I didn’t kill anybody, human or animal.”

  “What do you want now, a medal for comparative good behavior?”

  He turned away, sponging at his face with the towel.

  Margot slid off the bed and picked her way through the devastated room towards the plastic bag on the floor that held all her current worldly possessions. She pulled out the slip and yanked it onto herself. When she turned back, Davy was staring into the case that lay open on the bed. His face looked grim. She picked her way through the bits of broken TV and peered at it.

  “What is that stuff? It looks like…what are those, needles?”

  “I think you were about to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the dark side of acupuncture,” Davy said.

  It made her think of Craig. She turned away and forced herself to breathe. “I’m glad you came for me,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Davy’s eyes were bleak. “I’m glad I did, too,” he said. “No matter what you think of me.”

  She shook her head. “Davy, I don’t think you’re—”

  “You judged and convicted me without even giving me a chance.”

  She searched for a way to explain the tangle of feelings to him, but words fell terribly short. “You don’t get it,” she said softly. “I don’t have the luxury of giving people chances. What would I have done if I’d bet on you, and lost? How could I have dealt with you?”