Don't Get in the Car (Kit Tolliver #9) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (4 page)

She never knew how long she was out. The darkness carried her away, and at some point another wave brought her back. She opened her eyes to darkness, listened to silence, and wondered for a moment if she was dead. But dead people didn’t feel pain, and she had pain in her head and neck and shoulders, and she sat up and confirmed that she was alive.

And he was dead. She remembered stabbing him in the groin, then in the chest, but she’d evidently stabbed him more times than she’d realized, and the whole front of him was a lake of blood from multiple wounds in the chest and abdomen. Her hands were bloody, and her face, and her hair. Blood everywhere, and it smelled, everything smelled. She had to get out of there but she couldn’t because the doors were locked and she was trapped with his rotting corpse and—

She breathed against the panic, stuffed it down, willed herself to rise above it. She figured out how to work the locks, opened the door on the passenger side, stepped out into the middle of a field. The car had continued some fifty yards after it left the road, and whether she’d been unconscious for three minutes or as many hours, no one had yet taken any notice of it.

She put a hand on the car for balance, drew in deep breaths. She listened intently but couldn’t hear anything. No traffic, no human sounds. The sky was dark overhead. He’d said something about a full moon, but if the moon was indeed full it was no match for the clouds. No moon, no stars, and she was stuck in the middle of nowhere, and soaked in blood in the bargain.

All right. You’re alive and he’s dead, which wasn’t the way he planned it. You can get out of this. One step at a time and you can get out of this just fine.

The first thing she got out of was the bloody sweatshirt. She had a plain T-shirt underneath, and there was likely to be blood on it, but it wasn’t soaked and sticky the way the outer garment was. She found a clean portion of the sweatshirt and used it to wipe her hands and face, then tossed it aside. It would be crime scene evidence, but of what? The blood on it was his. As for her own DNA and fingerprints, she couldn’t worry about that, not now.

She returned to the car, found the button to open the trunk. There was a suitcase, locked, but there was also a tire iron, and she picked it up and smacked the locks until they popped open. She did some more cleanup with one of his T-shirts, then drew out a white button-down shirt still in its wrapper from the laundry. It was much too big for her, but with the sleeves rolled up and the tails overhanging her jeans, it didn’t look too ridiculous.

She went through the suitcase, not sure what she was looking for, and had just about decided she was wasting precious time when she found the little drawstring pouch. She weighed it in her hands. Pennies? Gold coins?

She opened it, and poured its contents into the open suitcase. Rings, a bracelet, a wristwatch, some earrings. Souvenirs.

Well, why should she be surprised? It was hardly news that the son of a bitch had done this before.

His name was Rodney Casselhart, and he was a long way from home. He was in Ohio, driving a car with Pennsylvania plates, and he had an Iowa driver’s license in his wallet, and other ID that showed an address in Michigan.

She hadn’t wanted to search him, but forced herself, and his wallet was in the first place she looked, his left front pants pocket. The bills compartment held $145, and she found a folded hundred dollar bill tucked behind his license.

Not enough. Driving all around the country, picking up women and killing them? That would take cash. He had a couple of cards, Visa and MasterCard, both in his name, but he wouldn’t want to use them unless he had to.

God, did she really have to do this?

She decided she did, and in his right hip pocket she found a roll of hundreds secured with a thick rubber band. She didn’t waste time counting, just transferred the roll to her own pocket.

Now what?

Just leave everything, she thought.

And the knife? Just leave it in his chest?

They wouldn’t need the knife to know he’d been stabbed. You really couldn’t miss the wounds. And the knife in her possession would tie her to him. She could boil the thing for an hour and not get all his blood out of it.

But suppose she needed it?

Oh, please. You’re wasting time. Just go.

She was a few yards from the road when she heard a car approaching, the first traffic she’d heard since she came to. A ride, she thought, and then she thought, No, don’t be an idiot. She hunkered down where she was, and the car turned out to be a truck, running its high beams, rolling on down the road.

And it was going away from the town, not toward it. She had her bearings now, remembered that they’d spun left when they went off the road, so the town was to her right. She couldn’t guess how far it was, or if there were any turns along the way, but that was the direction she had to take. Because she had to get back to her room, there were things she couldn’t just walk away from.

She waited until the truck’s taillights were out of sight. Then she started walking.

She’d been walking ten or fifteen minutes when she heard a vehicle behind her. She stepped off the road before the headlights could find her, concealed herself in the darkness. This time it was a car, a squareback sedan, with a man driving and a woman seated beside him. She watched them sweep on by and wished she’d been where they could see her. They’d have given her a ride, and they’d certainly have been safe.

But if they noticed the blood—

She probably could have explained it to their satisfaction. Still, she was probably better off walking. How much farther could it be?

She must have heard the motorcycle well before it registered on her. She’d gotten into the rhythm of walking, and her mind found things to think about. She was thinking how Rita had slept with something like a hundred and fifty men just by fucking that whacko Mormon.

Suppose it had been her? Would she have been killing a hundred and fifty men when she took Kellen out of the game?

Then she became aware of the engine noise, even as the pavement brightened in front of her from the bike’s high beams. Too late, she thought, and stepped off onto the shoulder, and turned toward the sound, even as it changed pitch. Whoever he was, he was slowing down. If it was a cop—oh, Jesus, if it was a cop she was screwed.

No point in trying to run. She stood there, waiting, and he braked to a stop. Her eyes registered that he wasn’t a cop, but she was only relieved for an instant.

A big man, clad entirely in black leather. Black leather pants, a black leather jacket with a lot of metal studs and zippers. Black leather gloves. Mirrored biker goggles covered his eyes, and a full dark beard obscured the rest of his face.

She’d have been better off with a cop. She wished she’d kept the knife, then knew it wouldn’t do her any good. This man would snap the blade between his fingers, then fuck her and kill her and eat her. He’d crack her bones for the marrow, floss his teeth with her hair.

“Rough night?”

His voice was low in pitch. Well, no surprise there. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel them taking in the blood, the general disarray.

“Kind of,” she said. “I got a ride with a guy and the car got wrecked.”

“I saw where somebody went off the road about two miles back. That you?”

She nodded.

“You looking to get help?”

She shook her head. “He’s dead.”

“Died in the wreck. I got a phone, if you want to call it in.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Oh, what the hell. “He was going to kill me,” she said. “Rape me and kill me. I wouldn’t have been the first, either. I went through his bag afterward to find out who he was. There were these rings and bracelets and stuff. You know, women’s personal items.”

“Souvenirs.”

“Yeah.”

“A serial killer, sounds like. You don’t want to report it?”

“No.” He just stood there, waiting for more, so she said, “Going off the road didn’t kill him. It didn’t even knock him out. I had a knife. I—”

“Stabbed him.”

“It was self-defense, but—”

“You don’t want to have to lay that all out for the law.”

“No.”

“I can dig it. You live around here?”

She pointed in the direction she’d been walking, the direction he’d been heading himself. “I have a hotel room. I need to get my stuff. But once I do—”

“You want to get out of Dodge.” He patted the seat behind him. “Hop on.”

She didn’t pass out during the ride, or fall asleep, but it was almost as if she did. The bike sent the rest of the world away. All she heard was its engine, all she felt was the rush of the wind. She had her eyes closed, her arms around his broad back, her face pressed against the black jacket. She breathed in its old leather smell. Her mind took a break, and the next thing she knew the bike had stopped across the street from her hotel.

She said, “Can you wait? I’ll be like two minutes, I just have to grab one or two things.”

“Okay.”

“Or . . .”

“What?”

“Well, if you could wait, like, ten minutes, I could clean up and change my clothes. But if you’re in a hurry—”

“You ought to do that,” he said. “No rush. I’ll be here.”