Mind Games (24 page)

“Wow,” he says. “What a surprise. I didn’t know you shopped here.” A bag of apples dangles from his fingers.

“Connor. My goodness.”

“Got yourself a big night in the works.” There’s something weird about the way he says this, and maybe my face shows it because he nods at my cart.

“Oh,” I say. “Neighborly function.” I think about trying to zing him—I have enough fear stoked for it—but I don’t dare. The waves of nervousness coming off him scare me.

“Going to sheepshead tomorrow night?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I smile blandly. “You?”

“I certainly am.”

Awkward silence. I inspect the front of the
Midcity Eagle
, which is all about Mayor Templeton’s funeral, and lower my voice. “The cashier is going slow.”

“Maybe she has aplastic spindler neuroma. Ever consider that?” His tone is accusatory.

My heart’s nearly pounding out of my chest because I just now realized that Connor has only one item, and the express lane is open, but he chose my line instead, then acted surprised to see me. And that wired energy coming off him. I continue my newspaper inspection, praying for the line to move. Finally I get up to the front. The cashier takes forever to ring me up.

“See ya,” I say to Connor as I’m stuffing my change into my purse. The bagger repositions my crackers and things. “It’s fine.” I grab both bags and head off.

“Hold up!” Connor’s next to me. Without his apples. “Need some help?”

“I got it.” I focus on the exit. “See you tomorrow.”

“I insist. You’ve got some heavy stuff in there.”

“No thanks,” I say firmly as the doors squeech open.

“Well at least let me walk you to your car. This isn’t the best of neighborhoods.”

I see I won’t be getting rid of him.

“Well, okay then.” I hand him both bags of groceries. He looks surprised. “Thanks,” I say.

The point here is that my hands are free and his aren’t. More to the point, one of my hands is in my purse on my stun gun. We get to my Jetta and I open the back door and stand away, watching him place the bags. It’s weird, the line between politeness and protection. Am I paranoid to have my hand on my stun gun? Or am I crazy not to have zapped him by now? I’m tending toward the latter when he turns around and grips my upper arms; I feel this pinprick on my right triceps, followed by the sensation of spreading sourness.

“Hey!” I pull out my weapon, but I can’t work my fingers, like they’re not attached to my brain.

“Fuck!” Connor twists it out of my grasp. “Where’d you get this? Fuck, I thought it would be pepper spray.” He slaps it onto the top of the Hummer next to my little car as this bright, lazy feeling engulfs me. After that, I recollect only sounds. A door clicking. The throaty pull and rip of tape.

          Twenty-one

I
REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS
, if you can call it that, when I realize somebody’s twisting my arm in a way it’s not supposed to go. My mind is sluggish, and my eyelids feel too heavy to open, but I realize two things: I’m naked, and somebody is dressing me. And that somebody doesn’t have a lot of experience with dolls. Because when you grow up dressing dolls, you understand that arms only go a certain way, and no amount of swearing or muttering will change that. This thought amuses me greatly.

I experience bouts of fuzzy awareness after that. Musty smell. Later, painful wrists. Still later, cold legs and toes.

I have no idea if these moments occur minutes or hours apart, but eventually I come to enough to actually open my eyes. I see a pine-paneled ceiling and knotty pine walls with snowshoes and rifles as decorations. I establish that I’m alone in a bedroom, but everything seems distant and pleasant. Even just staring at the ceiling is vaguely delightful. At least it is until it comes to my attention that I’ve been drugged by the Alchemist and tied to a bed. I tilt back my head and observe that my wrists are bound with a combination of duct tape and rope, and connected to a metal bed frame above my head. My ankles are tied together in the same fashion, and connected to the frame at the foot.

This is bad, I think, but it actually seems more surreal than bad. I lift my head, commanding myself to make serious observations. A room, dimly lit by a floor lamp. A long pine dresser and mirror across from the bed. A window above the dresser, which provides a view of a black sky with unusually bright stars. A thought comes, but I lose its trail. I relax, hoping the thought will come back. There’s a sound of crunching in the next room.

Get with it!
I force my mind back into pursuit of the thought, but it’s difficult, like fighting my way through a pool full of lotion. Yes, dark sky with more bright stars than I usually see. I’m not near Midcity; I’m in the far suburbs, or possibly even the country. I smile, proud to have reached a conclusion, and I take a break just to lie there and float. I jerk my head up when I remember I’m missing Cubby’s dinner party, and I was the one in charge of the dinner. And then it comes to me again that the Alchemist drugged me. He changed my clothes, too.

I inspect my new outfit. It’s some sort of minidress, white with a red stripe around the bottom of the skirt and the sleeves. I realize here that I’m in an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform, or more like nurse getup from a sexy costume shop. The thing on my head would be a nurse’s hat. Is this guy kidding? It’s such a fucked-up thing to do I just start laughing. I press my lips together to stop myself, but that makes me snort really loud.

What’s wrong with me? I think about what Enrique said, that the Alchemist makes his own drug cocktails. Is it possible he accidentally went too heavy on some hilarity-producing ingredient? Surely this couldn’t be the effect he was going for. It certainly isn’t the effect I’d prefer in this situation. Of everything I have read on dealing with sexual predators, none mentioned laughter as an intelligent defense.

This is serious, I think, trying to pull myself together.
Obviously he has more in mind than a fashion makeover.

“About time.” The Alchemist is in the doorway eating Ruffles. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” I say quickly.

He narrows his eyes, twisting a rubber band around the bag for freshness; then he tosses it onto the bureau and comes over.

“Nothing at all,” I whisper, trying not to laugh. The fact that I shouldn’t laugh makes it downright hilarious.

“Yeah, well I’m gonna wipe that smile off your face.”

I so wish he hadn’t said that. I bite the inside of my lip in an effort not to crack up. My eyes are actually tearing. The Alchemist seems satisfied with this.

“My hunting cabin. What d’ya think?”

I don’t trust myself to answer this question.

He smiles. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like being put in that outfit?”

I clear my throat and furrow my forehead. “You need to untie me.”

“No can do.”

I try hard to look serious. He commences, slowly, to unbutton his shirt. This is disturbing enough that my hilarity fades, and I’m just in a drug haze. I watch, dully, the way I’d imagine a starfish on the ocean floor might watch a swimmer up above. The mysterious mechanics of the world. Everything soft and unreal.

The next moment I’m disgusted with myself.
Pull it together!
I decide on a plan: I’ll get my phone out of my purse and hit the panic sequence. And somehow ward Connor off until the closest disillusionist rescues me. Strongarm Francis has said he and the nearest disillusionists would come running anytime I punched in the sequence. Okay.

Next, I fix on my disillusionist training: concentrate, observe, think. I multiply the number fourteen by random
factors: 14 × 9 = 126; 14 × 11 = 154; 14 × 8 = 112. I’m surprised how this kicks me into a mode of concentration, how my focusing power comes online like a strong, lean muscle.

Connor has stripped down to colorful nylon workout pants with pink and green tiger stripes.
The pants are not funny
, I tell myself.
They are not funny at all
. The next thing I know, he’s turning a large knife in the light, seemingly fascinated by his ability to make a mirror spot move around on the wall. Thanks to the drugs, I, too, find this fascinating. Though probably not in the way he wants me to.

“Where is my purse?” I ask.

He goes to the corner of the room and lifts it high so I can see it. “This? You want this?”

Yes, I think. Yes, indeed I do.

“Or maybe you just want me to give this back to you.” He pulls out my stun gun.

That would be ideal, I think.

He puts the stun gun down, and suddenly he has a hammer. I’m expecting him to smash it, but instead he pounds some nails into the wall under where the rifles hang. Is he changing the decor now? The activity seems inappropriate, given our current situation. Then he rests the stun gun on the nails under two rifles. Rifle, rifle, stun gun. He steps back and laughs at his visual joke. I laugh, too—perhaps too long and hard, because suddenly Connor’s on top of me, straddling my hips, him and his crazy pants and his hunting knife. “Shut up!”

His weight makes my shoulders practically stretch out of their sockets. “I’m sorry.” I reduce my laughter to snorkles, and then snuffles, and then I just hold my breath. I don’t want to be laughing. I focus on the little crusties at the inner edges of his eyes.

“I’m telling you, I’ll wipe that smile right off your face.”

It’s with a Herculean effort that I hold my breath. “I
swear, I’m trying not to laugh,” I say. “God, what did you give me?”

He glares. Jolliness was clearly not the effect he was after. “What I gave you is something that worked just fine. Because you’re down there, and I’m up here, and I guarantee you this—you won’t be laughing when you discover what I have in store for you.”

This statement baffles me, because it seems so obvious what he has in store. I try my best to look bewildered.

“You think this is funny?” He presses the tip of the big knife on the center of my chest, above the top button. It feels like a pin, piercing my skin, and everything is far away, as though I’m looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

“No! I don’t think it’s funny.” This becomes all the more true when I notice the grime and dried blood on the blade. It’s a hunting knife—the kind he would use for skinning dead animals. No doubt it’s full of bacteria. And he’s so heavy on me, it’s hard to breathe. Is he collapsing my lungs? And what about my head? The pain in my temple is back. Shit!

Focus
, I tell myself.

“First, we’re going to talk about ASN,” he announces.

Aplastic spindlers neuroma? He wants to talk about
aplastic spindlers neuroma?
I tilt my head and try to look serious. Focusing on the bacteria-laden knife helps me.

He continues. “They say a neurologist can tell a case of muscular weakness associated with ASN the minute an ASN patient walks through the door.” I tense as he turns the knife. “Was that why you were talking about it so much at the game? Was it something about how I walk that triggered it?” He presses the knife down harder on my breastbone.

I feel a tickle of blood heading sideways over my rib cage.

“And don’t you fuck with me.”

I close my eyes. There’s a smart way to answer, but I’m too muzzy-minded to figure it out. My stomach knots up as I realize I won’t be getting to my phone.

“Are you experiencing muscle weakness?” I ask. Muscle weakness is a major sign of ASN. He would know this.

“I’m asking the questions here. Yes or no? Did something about my walking make you think of ASN?”

This must be his plan, I think. Some interaction with me as a nurse, and then rape and murder, or murder and rape. “I was just making conversation.”

I can’t stop thinking about that bacteria-laden knife. He’s already scratched my skin with it, which is enough to transmit most any pathogen directly into my bloodstream. It comes to me that some deer carry encephalitis, which causes an acute inflammation of the brain. I can’t think of a worse disease to combine with vein star syndrome. Feverishly, I picture the pathogens entering my veins. Already I feel a weird warmth in my chest under where the knife pricked. My wildly beating heart could be spreading the pathogens through my body this very moment, setting up the perfect storm of cranial maladies.

“You weren’t just making conversation,” he says. “I don’t know what you were doing, but that wasn’t conversation.”

How long does it take for the virus to engage? Encephalitis starts with a headache, and probably head sensations, too, which means I won’t even be able to tell if I have it.

I take a breath. This is not the time for a hypochondria freak-out. I focus, instead, on the one silver lining here: I have more than enough of the right kind of fear stoked to zing him into oblivion. But it doesn’t matter, because I would need my arm free to zing him. And I can’t touch his energy dimension anyway.

Connor leans forward, resting his free hand on the bed next to my rib cage. He has chosen this moment to pose a crazy, potato chip–breath question: “My feet are very sore today. Can you guess why?”

I gape at him with what hopefully looks like shock and horror. I concentrate on my legs, now prickly from sleep, and my shoulders, which are beyond pain, and the fact that a pathogen-laden knife is piercing my skin. “Hold on, okay?” I clear my throat. “My guess would be meaningless without more information.”