The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (9 page)

But once she was outside, her skin went clammy at the thought of walking back to campus alone with him. She wouldn’t mention Polk and Nancy, she wouldn’t! She would just pretend it hadn’t happened.

“Did you do it?” she said, the words spilling out of her mouth of their own volition. “Did you push that car off the cliff?”

He grabbed her hand and wouldn’t let go. “What do you think? You know she dumped me, don’t you? I can tell. Someone told you. Deejay, probably, when you were in the bathroom. Do you really think I’d let someone do that to me and get away with it?”

He said this as calmly, as unemotionally as he might have said, “Vinnie’s has the best pizza in town.”

“I don’t know,” she answered stiffly. “I don’t know you well enough to guess what you would or wouldn’t do.” But she did. That was the problem. She
did.

“Well, you will. You will.” He glanced down at her as they crossed the highway. “I mean, you wouldn’t want to end up in a ravine, would you?”

If they talked about Polk and Nancy another second, Echo was going to scream. Instead, she said boldly, “That was a really rotten thing to say about Lily. Aren’t you afraid people will guess how hardhearted you really are?”

He shrugged. “It’s true, isn’t it? She tried to outrun the bike and didn’t make it. What’s so bad about saying that?”

Echo was so sure she could never make him understand, she didn’t even try. All she wanted to do now was get rid of him and begin her search for the motorcycle.

Getting rid of him wasn’t that easy. He insisted on coming up to her room and then wanted to come in. Echo opened the door just a crack, peeked inside, then shook her head. “You can’t come in. Trixie’s asleep.” Actually, Trixie wasn’t even there but Pruitt didn’t know that.

Clearly disappointed and annoyed, he finally agreed to leave. He didn’t try to kiss her. If he had, Echo was positive she would have lost it altogether and smashed in his face. As he turned away, he said cheerfully, “See you tomorrow. And don’t go riding in any red Miatas, okay? I wouldn’t like that.”

How could he be so casual? He had murdered two people that day, coldly and deliberately, and yet there he was telling her good-bye the way almost anyone would tell someone goodbye. Except for the threat about the red Miata.

She had to stop him. Somehow, she had to stop Pruitt.

She waited a safe fifteen minutes to make sure he was gone, armed herself with a flashlight, and slipped out of the empty room to begin her hunt.

T
HE LIBRARY BOOK IN
Pruitt’s room that had caught Echo’s attention was a volume titled
The Caves of Twin Falls.
Everyone knew the hill on the far side of the old railroad bridge crossing the Salem River behind campus was dotted with caves, large and small. The bridge was supposedly off limits to all students because of its state of disrepair, a rule generally ignored by all but the most timid souls. The rickety old bridge was the fastest, easiest way to get to the woods and caves on the other side, and almost no one had the patience to take the long way around via the river road. Echo had crossed the bridge more than once, but she had never explored the caves.

She was about to remedy that situation now, late on this cool, moonless, Sunday night.

Maybe Pruitt
was
just writing a report on those old caves, Echo told herself as, flashlight off, she hurried across campus toward the river. But if he wasn’t, then he had to have another reason for having that book in his room. Wouldn’t one of the larger caves be a great place to hide something as big as that motorcycle? Getting it across the bridge without falling through one of the holes in the flooring could be a problem, and hauling it up the hill through the woods to the caves wouldn’t be a picnic, either. But if you were determined …

Pruitt certainly seemed determined. Not to mention heartless. Poor Polk and Nancy! And Lily was going to be paralyzed if she lived. Pruitt hadn’t blinked an eye when he heard that. No sudden flush of guilt had crossed his pale features. He hadn’t even stammered when he’d made that crude, unnecessary remark.

Echo’s blood chilled anew, thinking of the total lack of emotion Pruitt had displayed upon hearing the news about those two kids on the cliff, too. They were
dead.
Didn’t he feel
anything?
Had he hated Nancy that much for dumping him?

Then what would he do to someone who turned him in to the police?

Echo Glenn’s life wouldn’t be worth two cents.

Cursing the day she had gone to Pruitt and asked for that bike ride, Echo flicked on the flashlight as she neared the bridge. The sudden, yellowish beam made her uneasy. It wasn’t likely that anyone would be on the riverbank this late on a Sunday night, but you never knew. If someone saw her light and came out to check, how would she ever come up with an explanation for being there herself?

Hastily concocting a story about “research for a paper,” Echo kept going.

The bridge was in worse shape than she’d remembered. Every step she took brought a screech of protest from the rotting wood beneath her feet. She only weighed a hundred and ten pounds. What kind of noises must the bridge make when Pruitt pushed the heavy motorcycle across it?
If
he had.

She could hear the rushing river far below, and wondered if the water was icy-cold. The nights were still a little cool. Maybe the river hadn’t warmed up yet. Not that it made any difference. If the ramshackle wooden walkway beneath her opened up suddenly and she plummeted to the river below, she’d drown no matter what the water temperature was. She wasn’t a good enough swimmer to fight that vicious current.

Clutching the decrepit wooden railing with one hand, the other hand forging a path through the darkness with the flashlight, Echo kept going, walking as lightly as possible.

The bridge seemed miles long.

Finally, she reached the end and rushed off the bridge to stand at the foot of a steep, wooded slope. Shivering in her denim jacket, she glanced around. The hill was a black mound rising up in front of her, covered with towering pine trees, smaller leaf-bearing trees, and thick underbrush. This was unfamiliar territory even in daylight. She felt as if she’d been set down in the middle of a strange planet. And she had no idea which direction to take. Left? Right? Straight up?

Deciding on straight up, she played the flashlight beam ahead of her as she climbed, pushing aside underbrush, her feet sliding occasionally in soft, pine-needled earth. The first cave was much too small to hide anything as huge as the motorcycle. The second was larger, but dark and empty.

When she became tired and discouraged, she focused her thoughts on the two innocent students in the red Miata, and kept going. She imagined the raw terror they must have felt when that car sailed off the edge of the cliff, and that thought forced her feet onward and upward. Someone had to stop Pruitt!

Hating him with a raw, blistering passion, she slipped and slid and climbed some more and slid again, scraping one hand on a sharp rock, slicing a finger on a thorny bush, and losing several strands of her hair to a prickly pine bough. Still she kept going. When she lost her balance and tumbled sideways, landing at the mouth of another cave, it took her several moments to get her bearings and pull herself upright to wave the flashlight around her.

And there it was.

Black as night, black as death, the motorcycle stood smack in the middle of the low-ceilinged, stone-walled cave.

The motorcycle wasn’t the only thing in the cave.

Echo glanced around her at what appeared to be a mini-garage. The motorcycle was surrounded by a large collection of tools, neatly arranged on makeshift “shelves” of flat rocks piled on top of one another. Besides the tools, there were cans of gasoline, piles of jeans and sweatshirts carefully folded and lying on the rock, plus objects that Echo assumed were motorcycle spare parts, and, atop a pile of books in the corner, a handful of newspaper clippings, no doubt Pruitt’s press notices about the biker attacks. What an ego!

There were other books, a portable tape player, bags of snack food, and cans of soda. But it was the motorcycle Echo was most interested in.

She had found it. Here it was, standing right in front of her. Now all she had to do was figure out how to identify it as Pruitt’s, and then she could leave, call the police, and direct them to the cave. She wouldn’t even have to give her name, wouldn’t have to be connected with the discovery at all.

If Pruitt gave
her
name to the police, she’d stonewall it. Lie. He had no proof that she was the one who had joined him on that devastating ride to Johnny’s Place. She
hadn’t
known what he was going to do, so she wasn’t guilty of anything except stupidity. If you went to jail for stupidity, there’d be no room in the prisons for real criminals.

Worst case scenario … she’d admit the truth, if she had to. And beg for mercy.

The important thing was, Pruitt would be put away where he couldn’t hurt anyone else. Including her.

Before she began looking for something to link Pruitt to the bike, Echo grabbed a large knife with a wickedly sharp blade from the makeshift shelves. He probably used it to open cans.
She
was going to use it to open tires.

Echo attacked the tires with the knife until both tires were in shreds and the air had hissed out angrily. Echo dropped the knife and began hunting for something that would absolutely link Pruitt to the bike. The license plates wouldn’t help, she thought, since he had said the bike wasn’t registered in his name. They would prove that the bike had been stolen, but not who had stolen it. There had to be something in all this junk, something that would hang him.

What? She didn’t even know what to look for.

She was leafing through the textbooks on the shelves, looking for Pruitt’s name or student I.D. number, when she heard a sound outside the cave.

Echo’s head flew up. Bats? Oh, God, they didn’t live in
here,
did they? They weren’t about to return to their home for the night, were they?

The sound came again. Too heavy to be the fluttering of a bat’s wings. It sounded far more human than that. Footsteps, plodding up the steep, slippery slope. Human footsteps.

Someone was coming. Walking with purpose, toward the cave.

Only one person would be coming to this cave so late at night.

Pruitt.

Pruitt was coming to the cave to check on his motorcycle, the way some farmers checked on their livestock one last time before going to bed.

Echo glanced around frantically. She couldn’t let him find her here, especially now that she’d savaged his beloved bike.

But there was nowhere to hide.

Whistling … he was whistling. As if he hadn’t a worry in the world.

Unlike her.

Eyes wide with terror, Echo scuttled backward, into the darkest depths of the cave, looking for a way out.

There was none. The cave had no rear exit. It narrowed gradually and then became solid rock wall.

Although she needed the flashlight, she had no choice. He was getting too close. She flicked off the beam.

Crablike, she slid sideways in her desperation, hoping to find some small cubbyhole, even the narrowest of openings to disappear into. When Pruitt saw that bike, realized that someone had been here, he would explode in rage. If he found her, she would become the target of that rage.

There! A tiny, narrow crevasse in the wall, behind her. Even as the heavy footsteps arrived at the mouth of the cave, Echo held her breath and squeezed her long, thin form in between the two walls of the opening. Icy, spring-fed water trickled down from the ceiling, dripping slowly onto her scalp. She had scraped the skin on both arms squeezing her way in, and now, wedged against the stone as if they’d been nailed there, they burned painfully.

Her breath came with difficulty. Her teeth bit into the soft flesh of her lower lip to keep from screaming as she visualized Pruitt standing in the mouth of the cave looking at the ruin of his most prized possession.

The sound she had so dreaded came no more than a second or two later. It was a shout so filled with rage and fury it stopped her heart.

At that very second, trapped in her narrow, stone-cold hideaway, her arms squeezed against her sides, her legs aching with the painful confinement, icy water dripping onto her scalp, Echo Glenn knew as surely as she knew her own name that she would never leave the cave alive.

E
CHO KNEW SHE SHOULD
stay completely hidden, knew that her very life depended on remaining totally invisible. But she couldn’t help it. When the first bellow of wild rage was followed immediately by a second and then a third, and she could hear stomping sounds and banging sounds and crashing sounds, she had to look. Not knowing what was happening was unbearable.

Her head with its thick hair was solidly wedged in between the two slabs of rock that made up her prison. She had to push with her back and shoulders to slip free just enough to make peering around the edge of her stone wall possible. She was careful to keep the rest of herself hidden.

A lantern with a garish yellow glow had been set against one wall, bathing the interior of the cave with light. What Echo saw in that light was terrifying.

The leather-clad figure in the shiny black helmet and plastic face shield had gone mad with rage over the damage done to the motorcycle. The screaming and shouting of foul obscenities wasn’t enough to placate him. To better demonstrate his fury, he was snatching up one tool after another from the stone shelves and heaving them at the walls. Some broke upon impact and fell to the ground like broken toys. Others remained intact, bouncing away from the wall to litter the floor of the cave. His rage kept him from standing still. He was jumping up and down in a mad dance like a marionette on strings. Spinning around, arms waving, feet kicking out. He shouted, he screamed, he threw things against the wall.

At one point in his terrifying demonstration of unbridled fury, he danced precariously close to Echo’s hideaway.

She froze, whisked her head back in, scraping the side of one cheek, and remained there, shaking with fear, until, still screaming and shouting, he had danced away again.