Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) (29 page)

After grabbing something to eat at the
drive-through of a fast food restaurant, I found a motel to settle into for the
night. Carrying my suitcase, purse, food, and drink, I walked to room 8 while
constantly checking my surroundings for anything that seemed wrong. I knew from
experience that evil showed up when you least expected it and it came in all
shapes and sizes, so I was wary of everyone and ready to flee at a moment’s
notice.

Without incident, I made it to my room and locked the
door behind me. I placed the food on the nightstand, tossed the purse and
suitcase onto the bed, and grabbed the only chair in the room, wedging it
tightly underneath the door knob. No one was coming through that door. If they
wanted in, they’d have to break the window next to it, a noisy job that would
alert me to their presence.

Once the curtains were drawn tightly, I took off
my shoes and settled onto the bed. I used the remote control to turn on the
television and find a mindless program to watch while I ate. It had been a long
time since I’d had an appetite, but I knew that I needed strength and energy,
both of which came from food. To not eat was to die, and I’d come too damn far
and survived too many things to die now from something as stupid as starvation.

After I’d finished the meal, I tried to continue
watching television, wanting nothing more than to keep my mind occupied. It
wasn’t to be however. I found the constant droning of the voices and the phony
laughter of the audience to be abrasive to my ears, an annoyance that I
couldn’t tolerate. So I turned it off and leaned back, resting my head against
the marred wooden headboard that looked as if it had been there since the
seventies.

In the silence of the room, I did what I’d spent
so much time trying not to do. I thought.

My first thoughts were of Mason and Wade. My heart
ached to hold them both and to hear their voices. I loved them dearly and it
ripped me to shreds to be without them. I considered calling them, but it was
late.
Maybe tomorrow.

Then I thought of what I’d say when—and if—I
called them. It seemed I never had the right words to say to express how I felt
about them, how much I loved them, or how sorry I was that things had turned
out as they did. Wade always told me it wasn’t my fault, but I knew it was. If
I was a stronger person, I could’ve dealt with everything and got my life back.
Instead, it had come to this.

I had escaped from Ron’s house, but in no way had
I rid myself of him. He was very much a part of me now and I hated it. I hated
that he was all I could think about. I hated that I still feared him after all
this time, still looked over my shoulder for him, expecting him to be there. I
hated that the life I’d built—the life I loved—had been stripped away, taken from
me forever by the murdering son of a bitch who claimed to love me. And more
than anything, I hated him. Ron. The man who kept me awake at night out of fear
and who haunted my nightmares when my eyes finally closed. The man who’d ruined
my life. The man who’d forced me to watch as he ended the lives of so many
others.

That familiar feeling crept up on me, the feeling
of being trapped and helpless.

I curled into the fetal position on the bed,
wrapped my arms around my legs and hugged them tightly to my chest, and then I
cried.

∞

When I opened my eyes the next morning, it was
after a restless two-hour sleep, from which I woke feeling like crap. My eyes
were swollen and gritty, and my head was pounding.

I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling,
considering not getting up at all. What was the point? What did I have to do or
to look forward to?
Nothing.
The answer was always
nothing. Just another twenty-four hours of pain and misery.

At the insistence of my bladder, I finally sat up
and scooted to the edge of the bed, where I tried to talk myself into starting
the day. I arched my back and lifted my arms above my head, stretching my stiff
muscles, which made the pounding in my head intensify. Then I began my day with
about as much enthusiasm as a death row inmate had on his way to the electric
chair. But it was all I could muster.

After showering and dressing in jeans and a
t-shirt, the rumbling of my stomach forced me out of the motel room and down
the street, where I stopped at a small diner for breakfast. I sat in my car for
thirty minutes before summoning enough courage to go inside where there were
other people, strangers that I didn’t know.

In my mind, I heard Dr.
Loyd’s
voice telling me to rationalize the situation. Think it through with
objectivity. Remain calm. Use common sense and good judgment.

Those were easy things to say for a man who’d
never been traumatized
or
had any reason to fear the
world around him.

Still, he was the expert, so I forced myself to do
as the doctor advised.

I told myself that no one in the diner wanted to
hurt me. The people inside were just other hungry people grabbing a bite to eat
before heading off to work or school or wherever it was they went to fill the
hours of their day. Nothing sinister was going to happen. Even if one of them
did happen to be a serial killer who’d set their sights on me, it was still
safe to go inside. There were other people in there.
Witnesses.
This wasn’t an isolated parking lot. This was a bustling diner. I would be
fine.
Just fine.

Taking a deep breath, I grabbed my purse from the
passenger seat, clutched it in my hand, and pushed open the car door. I got
out, looked around the small parking lot to make sure no one was approaching
me, and then I headed for the door of the diner.

By the time I sat down in the back corner booth
with my back against the wall so I could face the door, my heart was racing and
my palms were sweaty.

Fighting to keep calm, I quickly looked to each
patron, wondering if any of them were keeping dismembered corpses in their
basement.

Maybe it was the two road crew workers who sat
across the table from each other, laughing and joking.

Or perhaps it was the elderly man who sat alone at
the counter sipping coffee.

It could be the pregnant woman who sat in a booth
across from the heavily-tattooed man wearing a sock hat low on his forehead.

It was also possible that it was the two
middle-aged men dressed in flannel who sat across from each other in a booth
near the front corner of the diner, speaking little as they devoured fried eggs
and bacon.

Any of them could be a killer.

Or all of them.

“What can I get you today?” the waitress asked.

“I’ll have a western omelet, white toast, and a
Pepsi.”

“Coming right up.”

Minutes later, she placed the drink, a napkin, and
the utensils on the table in front of me and left with a smile.

As I watched her walk away, the pink skirt of her
uniform swishing back and forth as she moved, I wondered if it was her. Maybe
she was the one with bodies buried in the back yard.

With nothing else to do until she returned with my
omelet, I watched the other diners as they ate breakfast, unaware they were
being scrutinized.

The elderly man at the counter continued to sip
his coffee and read the newspaper. His movements were slow and deliberate,
making him the least interesting of the diners to watch.

At a table near the door, the road workers chatted
casually as they ate their meal. Both were burly men with big hands and feet,
faces covered in bristly hair, both wearing utility belts and neon orange
vests. They were more interesting to watch than the old man, but still not too
suspicious.

The middle-aged men in flannel said virtually
nothing to each other. They gobbled down their eggs and left, throwing a few
dollars on the table before heading out the door. With them gone, the only
other people to watch were the pregnant woman and the tattooed man who
accompanied her.

Sitting in front of the large window at the front
of the building, the two were almost nothing more than black silhouettes
against the bright sunlight. They seemed to be angry with one another. Though
they tried to speak in low tones, their voices sometimes rose to a pitch loud
enough to be heard throughout the diner. They realized what happened each time
and quickly lowered their voices again, but the anger was still there.

I watched as the man leaned in to be better heard
by the pregnant woman. He held a fork in one hand and a knife in the other,
waving them around animatedly as he talked.

I glanced at the woman and saw that she had her
head held low as she pushed the food around on her plate. I then turned my
attention back to the man, whose hands had stopped moving now. His wrists
rested on the edge of the table, silverware clenched in his fists. The sunlight
gleamed off the blade of the butter knife, glaring into my eyes.

Mesmerized, I could only stare. I no longer saw
the arguing couple. Instead I saw the inside of a dank basement. I saw the
light of a dim bulb shining off the blade of an ax that was raised high above
the head of a madman. I knew what was coming, what was about to happen. I knew
that he was going to swing that ax. There would be a
whack
as the thick metal blade tore through flesh and bone. It
would be immediately followed by the sound of metal striking the concrete
beneath the woman who now lay dead and bleeding at his feet. I’d heard it
before. I’d hear it again. And maybe the next time I heard it, or perhaps the
time after that, it’d be the sound of the ax slicing through my body as he
chopped me into pieces.

The clatter of a dropped plate suddenly rang out
through the small diner.

I jumped and nearly screamed, but at the last
second, just before the sound erupted from my mouth, I clenched my throat and
bit my lower lip, cutting it off before it escaped.

When the waitress brought my omelet, I was still
tense and sweating, heart racing as I struggled to remain focused on the
present.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she set the plate on
the table.

Unable to speak for fear that if I opened my mouth
that scream would escape, I nodded.

“Well if you need anything else, let me know.”

She placed the ticket face-down on the edge of the
table and walked away, leaving me to wrestle with my demons on my own.

My appetite was all but gone but I ate anyway,
choking down what would’ve ordinarily been a delicious omelet and toast.
Instead, in my present condition, it was tasteless and weighed heavy on my
stomach.

I kept my eyes on my plate, blinking rapidly to
clear away the image of the rotting finger that lay amidst my food. I knew it
wasn’t really there. It had been there once, not that long ago when I was
trapped in a house with a monster who saw fit to punish me by placing a severed
digit on each plate of food he brought me until I’d learned my lesson. But it
wasn’t there now. I told myself this, though it was hard to believe that the
gray-skinned appendage wasn’t really laying there in the middle of the plate,
nestled among the gooey eggs and cheese.

Somehow I managed to force down the omelet, pay
for the food and a copy of the
St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, and leave the diner without making a scene or getting
killed.

I considered that progress.

Since I had nowhere else to be or nothing else to
do, I went back to the motel. At the front desk, I paid for the rest of the
week using the fake name I’d given when I checked in the night before, and then
I went back to my room.

After wedging the chair under the door knob, I
checked the bathroom to make sure no one was hiding in there, maybe having
slipped inside while I was out having breakfast.

The room was empty.

Satisfied that I was alone, I kicked off my shoes
and sat on the bed, where I read the newspaper.

Until a month ago, I’d refrained from watching or
reading any sort of news. I knew deep down that Ron was still out there and
still killing women, but I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t want to see
or hear the details of his crimes. There was nothing I could do to help, so
knowing for sure what was happening would only make things worse for me. It
would probably be the end of the two hours of sleep a night I managed to get.

Then one day I realized that I didn’t need the
news to tell me what was happening. I didn’t need to see it in print or hear a
news anchor relay the story. I knew it was happening because I knew Ron. I knew
he’d never stop. He enjoyed what he did too much to ever quit.

Since there was no way to avoid seeing the damage
done by that psychopath, I decided to embrace it. I began to watch the news and
read the papers. It was difficult at best, but I kept watching and reading,
searching for signs that he was still killing women.

Know your enemy.

So far during the month I’d once again been
submersed in the news, I’d found only two reports of missing women that I
thought to be the work of Ron
Redwine
.

In the first case, Rosie Menendez, a forty-nine
year-old divorcee and mother of four grown children, had gone drinking with her
friends at a local bar and never returned home. Police assumed she’d simply run
off with a man since she’d done that very thing on two other occasions.
Authorities weren’t taking the matter seriously because she was an adult and
had every right to disappear if she wanted to.

I didn’t get the feeling that she’d wanted to
disappear.

In the other case, a twenty year-old woman named
Carly
Brenner had vanished from the local
laundromat
. When she didn’t come home, her roommate went to
the
laundromat
and found her clothes still in the
washer, her car still in the parking lot. She hadn’t been seen or heard from
since.