Blind Pursuit (14 page)

24

The room was large and musty and unfurnished save for a potbelly stove squatting troll-like on the floor. Starlight filtered through dust-coated windows, the panes webbed with cracks. A beamed ceiling, the rafters silvery in the subtle light, hung overhead like rows of leviathan ribs.

Moving cautiously, aware that footsteps could be heard in the cellar, she crossed yards of semidarkness to the front door.

It opened, promptly and fully, as all doors should—no improvised tools, no desperate prayers, simply a twist of the knob.

Air on her face. The oily smell of greasewood. Click and buzz of nocturnal insects.

Quietly she shut the door, then put on her boots and sprinted across a gravel court to the gate.

It was wrapped in multiple coils of chain, secured with a rusty but formidable padlock.

Climb over? No, impossible. Wicked barbed wire was strung across the top. And on both sides of the gate, barbed-wire fence extended along the roadside—five bands of wire, the lowest a foot from the ground, the highest just above her head, knotted to wooden posts driven into the ground at four-foot intervals.

She couldn’t get through that fence or over it, not without slashing herself to tatters and leaving a trail of blood.

She turned and surveyed the area. The place was a ranch of some kind, the main house a one-story wood-frame structure, flanked on the left by a modest barn with a fenced paddock attached. Against a waning crescent moon, the barn’s weathervane and cupola were etched in stark silhouette.

Something was missing from the scene. She looked closer at the house, took note of the carport extending from a side wall.

Empty.

Where was the vehicle she’d heard?

Dimly she made out tire tracks in the gravel at her feet, curving toward the barn. The big double doors were shut to conceal her abductor’s truck or van, parked inside.

And perhaps to conceal her Taurus also.

He had made her write to Annie, saying she’d gone away. The ruse would fool no one if her car was still sitting in its reserved space at Pantano Fountains.

She sprinted for the barn, leaving the gravel behind, crossing yards of stiff, dead grass. The big double door loomed before her, the old wood ragged with strips of peeling paint. The barn must have been green once, with a white roof and orange trim—unusual color scheme for a desert ranch.

One of the doors swung open easily in response to her brief tug. She crept inside and pulled it nearly shut, allowing only a pale fan of starlight to bleed through the crack.

Standing motionless, she waited impatiently for her eyesight to adjust to the gloom.

The place smelled of must and age, and not of hay.

No provender had been stored here for years, for decades.

A central feed passage, trough, and manure gutter bisected the barn. The left side was lined with stalls, the half-doors ajar. Horse stalls. This had been a horse ranch once.

No stalls on the right side, only an open space, filled now with a gray Chevrolet Astro van and, beyond it, faintly visible in the barn’s recesses, her Ford Taurus.

“Oh, baby,” she whispered. “Sweet baby, am I ever glad to see you.”

He had taken the keys from her purse. But unless he was supernaturally prescient, he could not have known about the other car key she carried, the duplicate key reserved for emergencies.

And if her present situation didn’t qualify as an emergency, nothing ever would.

Pulse racing, she ran to the car, then crouched low and frisked the underside of the chassis. A moment of frightened groping, just long enough for her to fear that he’d found it or it had fallen off somehow—and then her hand closed over a small magnetic case.

She detached it, snapped it open, and the spare key dropped like magic into her palm.

Exhilaration at getting this far competed with naked terror at the thought that she wasn’t safe yet; she could still be stopped.

The key in her pocket, she crossed the barn to the main doors, prepared to throw them wide—

Her heart chilled.

The distant thud she had heard was the slam of a door.

Crunch of gravel, then of weeds.

Through the crack she glimpsed a bulky figure covering ground in long strides, a gleam of metal—the handgun—bright at his side.

Coming here. Coming to the barn.

Silently she eased the door shut.

Total darkness now.

She had to find an escape route. Hunt down a side door and use it.

Sightless, she groped her way along the wall, feeling for a door, finding none.

Too late she realized she shouldn’t have closed the main doors so tight. The blackness around her was absolute, impenetrable, making her progress dangerously slow as she crept forward.

Her questing hands brushed the rear of her car. She could hide inside it—lie on the floor, hope he didn’t see her—but the risk of discovery was too great.

Better to keep going, find some way out. There had to be another door somewhere,
had
to be.

Past the car, and now she was at the rear of the barn, under the hayloft, she believed.

He would be here any second. And still there was no exit, only empty space, yards of black void in every direction.

Frantic now, she flailed about wildly, searching for a door or cubbyhole, any sort of hiding place.

With a gasp she blundered into something wooden and rickety.

A ladder.

Propped almost vertically, leading upward to the loft.

If she could get up there, hide in shadows ...

Her best chance. She didn’t hesitate. Already her boots were planted on the lower rungs, and she was gripping the side rails, climbing fast, oblivious of the wood splinters chewing her palms, ignoring the sway of the ladder as it wobbled under her, precariously balanced.

Halfway up. Not far to go. She set her foot on another rung—

Crack
.

Rotten with age, the rung collapsed.

She plunged down, the impact of her descent shattering the next rung in line, and the next, and the next.

Her fists closed over the side rails and broke her fall. She dangled briefly, then found an unbroken rung and stood on it, straining for breath.

She had not screamed. That was something, at least.

But she was still trapped, still hopelessly exposed, and now the ladder was unusable. She couldn’t reach the loft.

An eddy of wind. Brightening glow behind her.

The barn door, opening.

He was here.

She dropped to the ground, hoping the brief storm of dust stirred up by the wind could cover the soft thud of her fall.

Crouching low, she gazed toward the front of the barn.

In the doorway he was silhouetted against a gray sweep of desert and a sprinkling of stars. A large, stoop-shouldered figure in long pants and a short-sleeve shirt, his head oddly bulbous, curvilinear as a bullet.

He hadn’t seen her yet. She was cut off from him by his van and her car and yards of distance; the light from outside hadn’t touched the farthest reaches of the barn.

Sinking to all fours, she scrambled behind the front end of her Ford and huddled there.

His shoes crackled on the dirt floor as he advanced inside.

“Burn you, bitch.” His voice was a sleepwalker’s slurred monotone. “Pour the gas down your lying throat. Choke you with it before I light the match.”

The low chuckling noises that followed were not any human form of laughter.

Soundlessly she stretched out on her stomach and wriggled under the Ford.

The driver’s door of the van canted open. The Chevy rocked on its springs as he swung inside. He climbed out a moment later, and a strong white light winked on, dispelling the barn’s shadows.

Flashlight. Must have gotten it out of the glove compartment.

The beam swept over the car, then explored its interior. She pressed herself snug against the ground, terrified that he would examine the underside of the vehicle next.

He studied the car a moment longer, then directed the beam upward at the hayloft.

Safe for the moment. But would he notice the broken ladder? Her footprints in the dirt?

Apparently not. The flashlight beam passed over the ladder without pausing, the beam seeking out the doorway of a small room at the rear of the barn. A tack room, long unused, empty save for a built-in sink. Had she found that room and tried to hide in it, she would be dead now.

Next, the horse stalls. The flash probed them one by one, looking for any uninvited occupant.

Finally he seemed satisfied. The beam was angling toward the floor at his feet when a gust of wind blew the main door shut.

The sharp slam, like an amplified handclap, startled him.

He dropped the flash.

It hit the ground, intact, the beam shining directly at her from ten feet away.

She stared, paralyzed, into the cone of light. Fear closed her throat. She couldn’t breathe.

“Hell,” he muttered.

He took a sideways step to pick up the flash, and kicked it accidentally.

It rolled—God, no—it rolled
under the car
.

He would have to see her now. The flashlight lay between the Ford’s front wheels, less than a yard from her head. She was impaled in its beam.

Past the haze of light, her abductor grunted as he got down on his knees.

Erin felt wetness in her eyes and a sick, feverish trembling in her lower body. The nightmare was back, more real than ever.

She hoped, despite what he’d said, that he wouldn’t burn her. Death by fire was her worst fear, had been since childhood.

The gun would be better. Easier.

His hand reached for the flash.

He had to see her now. Couldn’t miss her.

Except ... he wasn’t looking.

He hadn’t bothered to lie prostrate and poke his head under the chassis. He was still kneeling, groping blindly.

His fingers brushed the flashlight’s metal casing. The flash rolled again, and for a heart-twisting second Erin was sure it would roll out of his reach, and he would have no choice but to belly-crawl after it.

Then he clamped a firm hand on the flash, pulled it toward him, and rose to his feet.

Rattle, slam, and he was out of the barn, intent on hunting her in the night.

Erin pressed her face to her forearm and lay very still as tension sighed out of her in a hissing stream.

Close one.

Very close.

25

Gund still had no idea how the bitch managed to free herself from the cellar, and he didn’t much care. All he knew, all that mattered to him, was that he would track her down, and then she would pay.

He had never been so angry. She’d
left
him. Wrong of her to do that, so very wrong, unforgivably wrong.

He could have killed her last night, but had he? No. She was special to him—still was, despite her betrayal—and he had treated her accordingly. He’d cleaned up the cellar room, stocked it with food and other necessities, even gone to the trouble of installing a foam pad so she could sleep in comfort. He hadn’t chained her to the wall, as he easily could have. Hadn’t shackled her feet or manacled her hands.

Right from the start he’d been good to her. He’d treated her with consideration and respect. And this was how she’d responded, the ungrateful little whore, the goddamned filth.

His breath came hard, partly from the exertion of frantic activity but mostly from sheer, towering rage.

The good thing was that she couldn’t have gone far. He’d been away for less than a half hour, and it must have taken time for her to defeat the two locked doors.

He was guessing she had left the house only moments before his return.

Her car keys were in his pocket, so unless she could hot-wire an ignition, the Taurus was useless to her. Penned in by barbed wire, she had two options—to hide on the grounds of the ranch, or to circle behind the house in search of another way out.

Pausing at the side of the barn, he beamed his flash into the grain bin and fuel shed. Both were empty.

The flashlight guided him as he loped across yards of scorched, bristly grass. A flattened, S-shaped thing—a dead gopher snake—was briefly visible amid a patch of purple weeds.

Behind the house was a utility shed. He looked inside. Nothing.

He didn’t expect her to hide, anyway. She would run. And he knew where she was likeliest to go.

Two hundred feet beyond the shed, his property ended in a line of barbed wire, silver in the starlight. Just before the fence was an arroyo.

The wide, dry streambed, carved by seasonal flash floods, ran west to Houghton Road, with no gates or fences along the way. Though Erin couldn’t know the wash’s destination, she was sure to see that it offered the only means of exit from the ranch, and like any local resident, she would know that arroyos were the natural roadways of the desert, ideal for easy hiking.

He sprinted for the wash, certain the flashlight would reveal her footprints.

Once he picked up her trail, all he need do was track her, a coyote stalking prey.

* * *

Erin groped in the dirt by the ladder, hunting among the scatter of broken rungs until she found a nail.

In darkness she fingered it. A two-inch nail, slightly rusty but still sharp.

Just what she needed.

She had been ready to climb behind the Ford’s steering wheel when the idea occurred to her. Her abductor was sure to hear the engine as soon as she started it. He would give chase in his van.

Unless the van had been sabotaged.

He couldn’t drive it on four flat tires.

Fumbling blindly, wishing he hadn’t shut the barn doors when he left, she touched the side panel of her Ford. Its smooth surface guided her as she crept forward in a half crouch, one hand patting the car, the other upraised before her, searching for obstructions.

Deprived of sight, she found her other senses temporarily heightened. She could hear the faint creaks of the barn walls, aged wood shifting under the wind’s caress. The smells of rot and fecal decay blended with the closer, more pungent odor of her own sweat.

The car ended, giving way to empty space. Memory directed her to the Chevy Astro, dead ahead in the blackness.

Something skittered past her right foot. Involuntarily she kicked at it with a gasp and heard a small, outraged squeak. Patter of rodent feet, diminishing, gone.

Just a mouse, Erin. Don’t start getting hysterical on me, okay?

Oddly, the reassuring voice in her head was Annie’s. Erin was irrationally glad to hear it, grateful for even the illusory comfort it provided.

Her probing hand found the van’s hood. She searched lower and discovered a flat metal disk. Hubcap. The front wheel on the passenger side.

All right, then. First deflate this tire, then the others. Shouldn’t take longer than two minutes, and she would buy herself infinitely more time to make her getaway.

If she could do it at all. Having never tried to puncture a tire, she had no idea how thick the rubber might be, how difficult to penetrate.

Only one way to find out.

Clutching the nail in her fist, the point extending from between two fingers, she tensed her arm, took a breath, and struck.

The nail slammed into the tire and punched through. She had time to congratulate herself on the successful execution of the first phase of her plan, and then an alarm went off.

For a startled second she couldn’t identify the source of the sudden noise and glare. All she knew was that the darkness was banished, the barn abruptly lit by a yellow stroboscopic light, the silence shattered by a foghorn’s furious blatting that went on and on.

Then she understood that the van was equipped with a burglar alarm, and by attacking the tire she had tripped the system.

“Jesus,” she hissed, the word lost in the insane racket howling and whooping around her.

That bedlam would be audible for a thousand yards in any direction. It was as good as a searchlight pinpointing her position.

She left the nail imbedded in the tire and sprang to her feet.

Ran for her car, now clearly visible in beats of yellow radiance from the van’s parking lights, flashing in distress.

Misjudged the distance, banged her thigh on the Ford’s bumper—sparkle of pain down her leg.

Reached the driver’s door. Locked?

No, not locked. She flung herself behind the wheel, fumbled the key out of her pocket, fingers sweaty and trembling.

The key slipped from her grasp, fell somewhere on the floor of the car.

Find it,
find it
.

Frantically she searched the car’s dark interior, running her hands over the floor mat.

The key was gone. Had disappeared. But that wasn’t possible.

“It
has
to be here!” she heard herself scream over the alarm’s continuing squall.

Under the seat, maybe. It could have bounced under the seat.

She thrust her hand into the narrow space between the floor and the seat assembly, scraping her knuckles on the rough metal framework, and there it was, the key, almost out of reach. With two fingers she snagged it, slid it forward, then closed her fist over the key and raised it into the light.

Shaking, she jabbed the key at the ignition cylinder, missed the slot twice, found it on the third try.

The engine coughed, coughed again, refusing to turn over.

She wrenched the key clockwise, floored the gas—an ugly screeching sound—and finally the motor caught.

It chugged fitfully for a moment, then ran smooth.

Headlights on, gear selector thrown into reverse, she was set to go. But with the van blocking her, she had less room to maneuver than she’d thought.

Had to back and fill, back and fill, turn the car at an angle. Now she was in the lane between the van and the barn wall, a narrow lane, just enough clearance.

Her foot on the gas, the Ford reversing.

Crunch of impact.

She’d plowed into the van’s fender. Not enough clearance, after all, but there was no time to straighten out, not with the alarm still shrieking, its banshee cries pulsing in sync with the heartbeats shaking her like spasms.

She floored the gas and forced the car to continue in reverse. Nails-on-chalkboard screech as she scraped the Chevy’s side, the two vehicles grinding against each other like shifting jaws, the Ford shuddering, bucking, retreating in fits and starts, then popping free of the van and skidding backward.

The barn doors, still closed. She rammed them with her rear bumper. They exploded open, and she was outside.

Spin of the wheel, a clumsy U-turn, her headlights sweeping toward the barbed-wire fence yards away.

In the rearview mirror, a man with a flashlight, sprinting toward her.

Gunshot. The rear window blew apart in a shower of tempered glass.

She gunned the engine. The Ford plowed over weeds, over gravel, and slammed into the fence.

The impact uprooted the posts on either side, snapped the wires. The Ford fishtailed onto the road, straightened out. She sped away from the ranch as her speedometer needle climbed.

Looking back, she saw her abductor disappear inside the barn.

The road was narrow and rough. Pebbles clicked and pinged against the chassis, making tuneless music.

She kept pushing her speed—fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty. Dangerously fast for a pitted desert road lit only by her high beams, a road that at any second might coil into a cul-de-sac or dive into a flood-control depression.

Dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as caution would be.

Behind her, headlights.

The van.

Her high beams splashed across a dotted yellow line perpendicular to the road she was traveling. Intersection.

She spun the wheel, veering to the left.

Now she was on a major thoroughfare, smooth and well maintained, but empty of traffic at this hour. No lights of houses or stores were visible along the roadside, only bleak miles of desert and, in the distance, the jagged humps of mountains, a dark, broken line against the blue-black sky.

She thought she could identify the mountains to her right as the Sierrita range, west of the city. If so, she was heading south.

Flare of headlights behind her. The van again, swinging onto the main road, frighteningly close.

Ahead ... the interstate.

She saw the elevated roadway rippling with distant lights.

Get on there, and she would be safe. With other people around, her abductor couldn’t do anything.

But the highway was at least a half mile away. And the van was pulling close to her tail.

In the rearview mirror she saw him at the wheel. Blurred face, hairless scalp. No beard—the red one he’d worn in the lobby must have been fake.

Her speedometer needle was pinned to eighty-five. She might be traveling faster; the gauge only went that high.

His headlights flooded the Ford’s interior with their harsh white glare, brightening steadily. The car rocked with an impact from behind.

He had rammed her. The car wobbled drunkenly. She gripped the wheel to steady it, and then he butted her again.

“Stop,” she muttered, teeth clenched, knuckles bloodless.

The twin globes of his lights expanded as he punched the gas pedal a third time. She manhandled the wheel, and with a scream of tires the Ford veered into the other lane.

The van accelerated, trying to pull alongside her. If it did, the driver could shoot out the side windows, kill her in a hail of ammunition.

She ground her foot down on the gas pedal, straining for every increment of speed the motor could deliver. The road dipped, descending at a steep grade, and at the bottom of the hill a service station came into view.

An Exxon station, near the interstate’s on-ramp, its illuminated sign bright against the night sky, the service court floodlit, fuel islands gleaming.

Open for business. Had to be.

The van hooked sideways, crunching her rear passenger door, chewing metal like a hungry mouth.

The pavement slid out from under her. The Ford skidded onto the shoulder, plowing up a spray of gravelly earth as the steering wheel jerked and ticked under her hands.

She had almost regained control of the car when the van mashed her again, its fender gnawing at the front door on the passenger side, the door buckling in its frame, the window shattering as the frame bent, and for a wild hysterical moment she was a diver in a shark cage, and a great white was chomping insatiably at the steel bars, crushing them out of shape, forcing its huge head deeper inside—

Rows of mesquite bushes flew past on her left, branches whacking the windshield, scraping the doors. She was screaming—she couldn’t help it—screaming as the van plowed her sedan off the shoulder into an untended stretch of cacti and weeds.

The car bucked like a skittish horse, her seat lurching wildly forward and back, her hands slapping the horn.

Should have worn your seat belt
, a voice in her head admonished irrelevantly.
Most accidents occur on trips of less than one mile
.